chapter
stringlengths 277
60.2k
| text
stringlengths 47
20.9k
| type
stringclasses 2
values |
|---|---|---|
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.
| During a storm, Mr. and Mrs. Bumble travel to a sordid section of town near a swollen river to meet Monks in a decaying building. While Mr. Bumble shivers in fear, Mrs. Bumble coolly bargains with Monks. They settle on a price of twenty-five pounds for her information. Mrs. Bumble relates how Old Sally robbed Oliver's mother. Mrs. Bumble says she discovered a ragged pawnbroker's receipt in Old Sally's dead hands and that she redeemed it for the gold locket, which she then hands to Monks. Inside, he finds a wedding ring and two locks of hair. The name "Agnes" is engraved on the ring, along with a blank for the surname. Monks ties the locket to a weight and drops it into the river | summary |
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.
| The title of Oliver Twist is deceptively simple. Although it does nothing more than state the protagonist's name, the central mystery of the novel is, in fact, the protagonist's true identity. Oliver's misfortunes have had much to do with the false or mistaken identities others have thrust upon him. Dickens conceals the solution to the mystery of his true identity, leaving just a clue here and there in order to move the plot forward. Various people seek to conceal Oliver's identity for their own personal gain. Oliver's identity is intertwined with Monks's identity, and the connection between the two of them has shrouded both their identities in mystery. Once it becomes clear that Oliver and Monks are brothers, the novel enters its final stage. We begin to have some idea of who Oliver might be, but the story continues since Oliver himself has yet to find out. The meeting of Nancy and Rose represents the clash of two very different worlds. Rose has been raised amid love and plenty, and, as a result, her virtue and kindness are almost unreal. On the other hand, Nancy has struggled for survival in the streets, and instead of conventional virtue, her life is full of crime and violence. Yet both were once penniless, nameless orphans. Rose simply had the good luck to be taken in by Mrs. Maylie, who offered her a road of escape from her unfortunate position. Now, Rose offers Nancy a similar road of escape, but it is already too late for Nancy. Their characters can be seen as part of Dickens's argument that the environment in which people are raised and the company that they keep have a greater influence on their quality of character than any inborn traits. Rose and Nancy were born in similar circumstances: only the environment in which each was raised has made them so different. Nancy's decision to confront Rose with information about Oliver stands in opposition to her earlier decision to drag Oliver back to Fagin. Just as Nancy causes Oliver to become a thief earlier in the novel by sending him to Fagin, her decision to reveal the information she holds regarding his inheritance may cause him to become wealthy. Furthermore, Nancy's honorable act directly contradicts Victorian stereotypes of the poor as fundamentally immoral and ignoble. It demonstrates that there are different levels of vice and that an individual who partakes of one level does not necessarily partake of the others. Nancy has been a thief since childhood, she drinks to excess, and she is a prostitute. Despite these tainting circumstances, however, she is incredibly virtuous where the most important matters, those of life and death, are concerned. With her character, Dickens suggests that the violation of property laws and sexual mores is not incompatible with deep generosity and morality. In many ways, Nancy, the paragon of vice, appears here as more virtuous than Rose, the paragon of virtue. Rose stands to lose nothing by helping Oliver, but Nancy could lose her life. Fagin's central threat to keep his associates from acting against his interests is the threat of legal "justice." He knows in intimate detail the criminal activities of everyone in his social circle. Fagin can send Nancy to the gallows for talking to anyone outside his circle of criminal associates. Nancy regrets her life of vice, but she refuses Rose's offer to help her change it. Nancy sees herself, as Rose puts it, as "a woman lost almost beyond redemption." It seems as if she herself assimilates to the judgments that intolerant characters like Mr. Bumble have passed upon her. Yet Nancy's love for Sikes is more crucial to her decision to return to her old life than any belief that she has strayed too far from the path of moral goodness. The different light in which society treats Nancy's and Rose's romantic attachments reveals the extent of its prejudices against the poor. It is considered a virtue when a woman like Rose is unconditionally faithful to a respectable young man like Harry Maylie. Yet when a woman like Nancy displays the same fidelity to a dreadful fellow like Sikes, it becomes "a new means of violence and suffering." This contrast demonstrates that socioeconomic status has the power to color all aspects of an individual's life, even the private emotions of love and sentiment. | analysis |
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.
| Bill Sikes is ill with a fever. Nancy nurses him anxiously, despite his surly attitude. Fagin and his friends drop in to deliver wine and food. Sikes demands that Fagin give him money. Nancy and Fagin travel to Fagin's haunt. He is about to delve into his store of cash when Monks arrives and asks to speak to Fagin alone. The two men leave for a secluded room, but Nancy follows them and eavesdrops. The narrator does not reveal the content of the conversation. After Monks departs, Fagin gives Nancy the money. Perturbed by what she has heard, she dashes into the streets and away from Sikes's residence before returning to deliver the money. Sikes does not notice her nervousness until a few days later. Sensing something, he demands that she sit by him. After he falls asleep, she hurries to a hotel in a wealthy area. She begs the servants to allow her to speak to Miss Maylie, who is staying there. Disapprovingly, they conduct her upstairs | summary |
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.
| The title of Oliver Twist is deceptively simple. Although it does nothing more than state the protagonist's name, the central mystery of the novel is, in fact, the protagonist's true identity. Oliver's misfortunes have had much to do with the false or mistaken identities others have thrust upon him. Dickens conceals the solution to the mystery of his true identity, leaving just a clue here and there in order to move the plot forward. Various people seek to conceal Oliver's identity for their own personal gain. Oliver's identity is intertwined with Monks's identity, and the connection between the two of them has shrouded both their identities in mystery. Once it becomes clear that Oliver and Monks are brothers, the novel enters its final stage. We begin to have some idea of who Oliver might be, but the story continues since Oliver himself has yet to find out. The meeting of Nancy and Rose represents the clash of two very different worlds. Rose has been raised amid love and plenty, and, as a result, her virtue and kindness are almost unreal. On the other hand, Nancy has struggled for survival in the streets, and instead of conventional virtue, her life is full of crime and violence. Yet both were once penniless, nameless orphans. Rose simply had the good luck to be taken in by Mrs. Maylie, who offered her a road of escape from her unfortunate position. Now, Rose offers Nancy a similar road of escape, but it is already too late for Nancy. Their characters can be seen as part of Dickens's argument that the environment in which people are raised and the company that they keep have a greater influence on their quality of character than any inborn traits. Rose and Nancy were born in similar circumstances: only the environment in which each was raised has made them so different. Nancy's decision to confront Rose with information about Oliver stands in opposition to her earlier decision to drag Oliver back to Fagin. Just as Nancy causes Oliver to become a thief earlier in the novel by sending him to Fagin, her decision to reveal the information she holds regarding his inheritance may cause him to become wealthy. Furthermore, Nancy's honorable act directly contradicts Victorian stereotypes of the poor as fundamentally immoral and ignoble. It demonstrates that there are different levels of vice and that an individual who partakes of one level does not necessarily partake of the others. Nancy has been a thief since childhood, she drinks to excess, and she is a prostitute. Despite these tainting circumstances, however, she is incredibly virtuous where the most important matters, those of life and death, are concerned. With her character, Dickens suggests that the violation of property laws and sexual mores is not incompatible with deep generosity and morality. In many ways, Nancy, the paragon of vice, appears here as more virtuous than Rose, the paragon of virtue. Rose stands to lose nothing by helping Oliver, but Nancy could lose her life. Fagin's central threat to keep his associates from acting against his interests is the threat of legal "justice." He knows in intimate detail the criminal activities of everyone in his social circle. Fagin can send Nancy to the gallows for talking to anyone outside his circle of criminal associates. Nancy regrets her life of vice, but she refuses Rose's offer to help her change it. Nancy sees herself, as Rose puts it, as "a woman lost almost beyond redemption." It seems as if she herself assimilates to the judgments that intolerant characters like Mr. Bumble have passed upon her. Yet Nancy's love for Sikes is more crucial to her decision to return to her old life than any belief that she has strayed too far from the path of moral goodness. The different light in which society treats Nancy's and Rose's romantic attachments reveals the extent of its prejudices against the poor. It is considered a virtue when a woman like Rose is unconditionally faithful to a respectable young man like Harry Maylie. Yet when a woman like Nancy displays the same fidelity to a dreadful fellow like Sikes, it becomes "a new means of violence and suffering." This contrast demonstrates that socioeconomic status has the power to color all aspects of an individual's life, even the private emotions of love and sentiment. | analysis |
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.
| Pity us, lady--pity us for having only one feeling of the woman left and for having that turned. from a comfort and a pride into a new means of violence and suffering. Nancy confesses to Rose that she is the one who kidnapped Oliver on his errand for Mr. Brownlow. She relates that she overheard Monks tell Fagin that he is Oliver's brother. Monks wants Oliver's identity to remain unknown so that Monks himself can claim their family's full inheritance. Monks would kill Oliver if he could do so without endangering himself. He has also promised to pay Fagin if Oliver is recaptured. Rose offers to help Nancy leave her life of crime. Nancy replies that she cannot, because she is attached to Sikes despite his abusive ways. She refuses Rose's money. Before leaving, Nancy informs Rose that she can be found on London Bridge between eleven and twelve every Sunday night in case further testimony is needed | summary |
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.
| The title of Oliver Twist is deceptively simple. Although it does nothing more than state the protagonist's name, the central mystery of the novel is, in fact, the protagonist's true identity. Oliver's misfortunes have had much to do with the false or mistaken identities others have thrust upon him. Dickens conceals the solution to the mystery of his true identity, leaving just a clue here and there in order to move the plot forward. Various people seek to conceal Oliver's identity for their own personal gain. Oliver's identity is intertwined with Monks's identity, and the connection between the two of them has shrouded both their identities in mystery. Once it becomes clear that Oliver and Monks are brothers, the novel enters its final stage. We begin to have some idea of who Oliver might be, but the story continues since Oliver himself has yet to find out. The meeting of Nancy and Rose represents the clash of two very different worlds. Rose has been raised amid love and plenty, and, as a result, her virtue and kindness are almost unreal. On the other hand, Nancy has struggled for survival in the streets, and instead of conventional virtue, her life is full of crime and violence. Yet both were once penniless, nameless orphans. Rose simply had the good luck to be taken in by Mrs. Maylie, who offered her a road of escape from her unfortunate position. Now, Rose offers Nancy a similar road of escape, but it is already too late for Nancy. Their characters can be seen as part of Dickens's argument that the environment in which people are raised and the company that they keep have a greater influence on their quality of character than any inborn traits. Rose and Nancy were born in similar circumstances: only the environment in which each was raised has made them so different. Nancy's decision to confront Rose with information about Oliver stands in opposition to her earlier decision to drag Oliver back to Fagin. Just as Nancy causes Oliver to become a thief earlier in the novel by sending him to Fagin, her decision to reveal the information she holds regarding his inheritance may cause him to become wealthy. Furthermore, Nancy's honorable act directly contradicts Victorian stereotypes of the poor as fundamentally immoral and ignoble. It demonstrates that there are different levels of vice and that an individual who partakes of one level does not necessarily partake of the others. Nancy has been a thief since childhood, she drinks to excess, and she is a prostitute. Despite these tainting circumstances, however, she is incredibly virtuous where the most important matters, those of life and death, are concerned. With her character, Dickens suggests that the violation of property laws and sexual mores is not incompatible with deep generosity and morality. In many ways, Nancy, the paragon of vice, appears here as more virtuous than Rose, the paragon of virtue. Rose stands to lose nothing by helping Oliver, but Nancy could lose her life. Fagin's central threat to keep his associates from acting against his interests is the threat of legal "justice." He knows in intimate detail the criminal activities of everyone in his social circle. Fagin can send Nancy to the gallows for talking to anyone outside his circle of criminal associates. Nancy regrets her life of vice, but she refuses Rose's offer to help her change it. Nancy sees herself, as Rose puts it, as "a woman lost almost beyond redemption." It seems as if she herself assimilates to the judgments that intolerant characters like Mr. Bumble have passed upon her. Yet Nancy's love for Sikes is more crucial to her decision to return to her old life than any belief that she has strayed too far from the path of moral goodness. The different light in which society treats Nancy's and Rose's romantic attachments reveals the extent of its prejudices against the poor. It is considered a virtue when a woman like Rose is unconditionally faithful to a respectable young man like Harry Maylie. Yet when a woman like Nancy displays the same fidelity to a dreadful fellow like Sikes, it becomes "a new means of violence and suffering." This contrast demonstrates that socioeconomic status has the power to color all aspects of an individual's life, even the private emotions of love and sentiment. | analysis |
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.
| Not long after Nancy and Rose's meeting, Oliver tells Rose that he saw Mr. Brownlow on the street. Oliver and Mr. Giles have ascertained Brownlow's address, so Rose immediately takes Oliver there. Mr. Grimwig is visiting when they arrive. Rose tells Brownlow that Oliver wants to thank him. Once Rose and Brownlow are alone, she relates Nancy's story. Oliver is brought in to see Brownlow and Mrs. Bedwin. After their happy reunion, Brownlow and Rose relay Nancy's information to Mrs. Maylie and Losberne. Brownlow asks if he can include Grimwig in the matter, and Losberne insists that they include Harry. They agree to keep everything a secret from Oliver and decide to contact Nancy the following Sunday on London Bridge | summary |
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.
| The title of Oliver Twist is deceptively simple. Although it does nothing more than state the protagonist's name, the central mystery of the novel is, in fact, the protagonist's true identity. Oliver's misfortunes have had much to do with the false or mistaken identities others have thrust upon him. Dickens conceals the solution to the mystery of his true identity, leaving just a clue here and there in order to move the plot forward. Various people seek to conceal Oliver's identity for their own personal gain. Oliver's identity is intertwined with Monks's identity, and the connection between the two of them has shrouded both their identities in mystery. Once it becomes clear that Oliver and Monks are brothers, the novel enters its final stage. We begin to have some idea of who Oliver might be, but the story continues since Oliver himself has yet to find out. The meeting of Nancy and Rose represents the clash of two very different worlds. Rose has been raised amid love and plenty, and, as a result, her virtue and kindness are almost unreal. On the other hand, Nancy has struggled for survival in the streets, and instead of conventional virtue, her life is full of crime and violence. Yet both were once penniless, nameless orphans. Rose simply had the good luck to be taken in by Mrs. Maylie, who offered her a road of escape from her unfortunate position. Now, Rose offers Nancy a similar road of escape, but it is already too late for Nancy. Their characters can be seen as part of Dickens's argument that the environment in which people are raised and the company that they keep have a greater influence on their quality of character than any inborn traits. Rose and Nancy were born in similar circumstances: only the environment in which each was raised has made them so different. Nancy's decision to confront Rose with information about Oliver stands in opposition to her earlier decision to drag Oliver back to Fagin. Just as Nancy causes Oliver to become a thief earlier in the novel by sending him to Fagin, her decision to reveal the information she holds regarding his inheritance may cause him to become wealthy. Furthermore, Nancy's honorable act directly contradicts Victorian stereotypes of the poor as fundamentally immoral and ignoble. It demonstrates that there are different levels of vice and that an individual who partakes of one level does not necessarily partake of the others. Nancy has been a thief since childhood, she drinks to excess, and she is a prostitute. Despite these tainting circumstances, however, she is incredibly virtuous where the most important matters, those of life and death, are concerned. With her character, Dickens suggests that the violation of property laws and sexual mores is not incompatible with deep generosity and morality. In many ways, Nancy, the paragon of vice, appears here as more virtuous than Rose, the paragon of virtue. Rose stands to lose nothing by helping Oliver, but Nancy could lose her life. Fagin's central threat to keep his associates from acting against his interests is the threat of legal "justice." He knows in intimate detail the criminal activities of everyone in his social circle. Fagin can send Nancy to the gallows for talking to anyone outside his circle of criminal associates. Nancy regrets her life of vice, but she refuses Rose's offer to help her change it. Nancy sees herself, as Rose puts it, as "a woman lost almost beyond redemption." It seems as if she herself assimilates to the judgments that intolerant characters like Mr. Bumble have passed upon her. Yet Nancy's love for Sikes is more crucial to her decision to return to her old life than any belief that she has strayed too far from the path of moral goodness. The different light in which society treats Nancy's and Rose's romantic attachments reveals the extent of its prejudices against the poor. It is considered a virtue when a woman like Rose is unconditionally faithful to a respectable young man like Harry Maylie. Yet when a woman like Nancy displays the same fidelity to a dreadful fellow like Sikes, it becomes "a new means of violence and suffering." This contrast demonstrates that socioeconomic status has the power to color all aspects of an individual's life, even the private emotions of love and sentiment. | analysis |
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.
| Noah Claypole and Charlotte flee to London after robbing Mr. Sowerberry. They stop at the Three Cripples inn, where they meet Fagin and Barney. Fagin invites Noah to join his gang, assigning him to rob children | summary |
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.
| Although Fagin claims to be in partnership with his associates, protecting them in exchange for their loyalty, in the end, he manipulates them so that his own self-interest is better served. He watches the people around him with special care and translates his knowledge about them into power. A prime example of this strategy is his hope to use Nancy's possible lover to control her through blackmail. Even worse, he reveals Nancy's betrayal of the band's code of silence to Sikes in the worst, most treacherous light possible. He describes her actions in such a way as to inspire Sikes's murderous rage. Having Nancy killed is at least as beneficial to Fagin as to Sikes, but Fagin is unwilling to risk doing the deed himself. Instead, he uses his knowledge about Nancy and about Sikes's character to manipulate Sikes into committing the horrible crime. Oliver Twist explores different varieties of justice--that served by the English court system; spiritual or godly justice; and, with Sikes's crime, personal justice, or the torments of conscience. Justice for Sikes's "foulest and most cruel" of crimes is served almost instantly, as Sikes's guilt immediately subjects him to horrific mental torture. The passages exploring his mental state are among the most psychologically intricate in the novel. Sikes cannot cleanse himself of Nancy's blood, either figuratively or literally. Visions of Nancy's dead eyes disturb him greatly, and he fears being seen. During his desperate flight from London, he feels as though everyone is watching suspiciously. Sikes's remorse and paranoia shape and twist the world around him. The traveling salesman who claims to offer "the infallible and invaluable composition for removing all sorts of stain," including bloodstains, is so canny in his offer to help Sikes remove his stains that the salesman could almost be a figment of Sikes's haunted imagination. Likewise, the burning barn, which essentially serves no purpose in the plot, seems to be a herald of the fires of hell Sikes sees in his future. Unlike Oliver, who spends much of the novel trying to discover his identity, Sikes desperately wishes to hide his identity. However, his dog, Bull's-eye, acts as a kind of walking name tag. The animal follows him everywhere. Indeed, Sikes's animal even leaves his mark at the scene of the crime--his bloodstained footprints cover the room where Nancy is killed. Bull's-eye often functions as an alter ego for Sikes: the animal is vicious and brutal, just like its owner. Sikes's desire to kill the dog symbolically and psychologically represents a desire to kill himself, the murderer he has become. | analysis |
'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.
| Noah meets Fagin at his home. The Artful Dodger has been arrested for attempting to pick a pocket. Noah's first job is to go to the police station to watch the Dodger's trial. The Dodger, joking all the while, is convicted and sentenced to transportation. Noah hurries back to tell Fagin | summary |
'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.
| Although Fagin claims to be in partnership with his associates, protecting them in exchange for their loyalty, in the end, he manipulates them so that his own self-interest is better served. He watches the people around him with special care and translates his knowledge about them into power. A prime example of this strategy is his hope to use Nancy's possible lover to control her through blackmail. Even worse, he reveals Nancy's betrayal of the band's code of silence to Sikes in the worst, most treacherous light possible. He describes her actions in such a way as to inspire Sikes's murderous rage. Having Nancy killed is at least as beneficial to Fagin as to Sikes, but Fagin is unwilling to risk doing the deed himself. Instead, he uses his knowledge about Nancy and about Sikes's character to manipulate Sikes into committing the horrible crime. Oliver Twist explores different varieties of justice--that served by the English court system; spiritual or godly justice; and, with Sikes's crime, personal justice, or the torments of conscience. Justice for Sikes's "foulest and most cruel" of crimes is served almost instantly, as Sikes's guilt immediately subjects him to horrific mental torture. The passages exploring his mental state are among the most psychologically intricate in the novel. Sikes cannot cleanse himself of Nancy's blood, either figuratively or literally. Visions of Nancy's dead eyes disturb him greatly, and he fears being seen. During his desperate flight from London, he feels as though everyone is watching suspiciously. Sikes's remorse and paranoia shape and twist the world around him. The traveling salesman who claims to offer "the infallible and invaluable composition for removing all sorts of stain," including bloodstains, is so canny in his offer to help Sikes remove his stains that the salesman could almost be a figment of Sikes's haunted imagination. Likewise, the burning barn, which essentially serves no purpose in the plot, seems to be a herald of the fires of hell Sikes sees in his future. Unlike Oliver, who spends much of the novel trying to discover his identity, Sikes desperately wishes to hide his identity. However, his dog, Bull's-eye, acts as a kind of walking name tag. The animal follows him everywhere. Indeed, Sikes's animal even leaves his mark at the scene of the crime--his bloodstained footprints cover the room where Nancy is killed. Bull's-eye often functions as an alter ego for Sikes: the animal is vicious and brutal, just like its owner. Sikes's desire to kill the dog symbolically and psychologically represents a desire to kill himself, the murderer he has become. | analysis |
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.
| Fagin is visiting Sikes when Nancy tries to leave for London Bridge at eleven on Sunday. Sikes drags her into another room and restrains her for an hour. When he departs, Fagin asks that Nancy conduct him downstairs. He whispers to her that he will help her leave the brute Sikes if she wants. Fagin imagines that Nancy has wanted to meet a new lover that night. He hopes to persuade her to murder Sikes and bring her new love into his gang, so he can solidify his control over her. He plans to watch her in order to discover the identity of her new love, hoping to blackmail her with this information | summary |
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.
| Although Fagin claims to be in partnership with his associates, protecting them in exchange for their loyalty, in the end, he manipulates them so that his own self-interest is better served. He watches the people around him with special care and translates his knowledge about them into power. A prime example of this strategy is his hope to use Nancy's possible lover to control her through blackmail. Even worse, he reveals Nancy's betrayal of the band's code of silence to Sikes in the worst, most treacherous light possible. He describes her actions in such a way as to inspire Sikes's murderous rage. Having Nancy killed is at least as beneficial to Fagin as to Sikes, but Fagin is unwilling to risk doing the deed himself. Instead, he uses his knowledge about Nancy and about Sikes's character to manipulate Sikes into committing the horrible crime. Oliver Twist explores different varieties of justice--that served by the English court system; spiritual or godly justice; and, with Sikes's crime, personal justice, or the torments of conscience. Justice for Sikes's "foulest and most cruel" of crimes is served almost instantly, as Sikes's guilt immediately subjects him to horrific mental torture. The passages exploring his mental state are among the most psychologically intricate in the novel. Sikes cannot cleanse himself of Nancy's blood, either figuratively or literally. Visions of Nancy's dead eyes disturb him greatly, and he fears being seen. During his desperate flight from London, he feels as though everyone is watching suspiciously. Sikes's remorse and paranoia shape and twist the world around him. The traveling salesman who claims to offer "the infallible and invaluable composition for removing all sorts of stain," including bloodstains, is so canny in his offer to help Sikes remove his stains that the salesman could almost be a figment of Sikes's haunted imagination. Likewise, the burning barn, which essentially serves no purpose in the plot, seems to be a herald of the fires of hell Sikes sees in his future. Unlike Oliver, who spends much of the novel trying to discover his identity, Sikes desperately wishes to hide his identity. However, his dog, Bull's-eye, acts as a kind of walking name tag. The animal follows him everywhere. Indeed, Sikes's animal even leaves his mark at the scene of the crime--his bloodstained footprints cover the room where Nancy is killed. Bull's-eye often functions as an alter ego for Sikes: the animal is vicious and brutal, just like its owner. Sikes's desire to kill the dog symbolically and psychologically represents a desire to kill himself, the murderer he has become. | analysis |
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.
| Fagin tells Noah that he will pay him a pound to follow Nancy. The following Sunday, when Sikes is away, he takes Noah to Sikes's residence. At eleven, Nancy leaves the apartment. Noah follows at a discreet distance | summary |
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.
| Although Fagin claims to be in partnership with his associates, protecting them in exchange for their loyalty, in the end, he manipulates them so that his own self-interest is better served. He watches the people around him with special care and translates his knowledge about them into power. A prime example of this strategy is his hope to use Nancy's possible lover to control her through blackmail. Even worse, he reveals Nancy's betrayal of the band's code of silence to Sikes in the worst, most treacherous light possible. He describes her actions in such a way as to inspire Sikes's murderous rage. Having Nancy killed is at least as beneficial to Fagin as to Sikes, but Fagin is unwilling to risk doing the deed himself. Instead, he uses his knowledge about Nancy and about Sikes's character to manipulate Sikes into committing the horrible crime. Oliver Twist explores different varieties of justice--that served by the English court system; spiritual or godly justice; and, with Sikes's crime, personal justice, or the torments of conscience. Justice for Sikes's "foulest and most cruel" of crimes is served almost instantly, as Sikes's guilt immediately subjects him to horrific mental torture. The passages exploring his mental state are among the most psychologically intricate in the novel. Sikes cannot cleanse himself of Nancy's blood, either figuratively or literally. Visions of Nancy's dead eyes disturb him greatly, and he fears being seen. During his desperate flight from London, he feels as though everyone is watching suspiciously. Sikes's remorse and paranoia shape and twist the world around him. The traveling salesman who claims to offer "the infallible and invaluable composition for removing all sorts of stain," including bloodstains, is so canny in his offer to help Sikes remove his stains that the salesman could almost be a figment of Sikes's haunted imagination. Likewise, the burning barn, which essentially serves no purpose in the plot, seems to be a herald of the fires of hell Sikes sees in his future. Unlike Oliver, who spends much of the novel trying to discover his identity, Sikes desperately wishes to hide his identity. However, his dog, Bull's-eye, acts as a kind of walking name tag. The animal follows him everywhere. Indeed, Sikes's animal even leaves his mark at the scene of the crime--his bloodstained footprints cover the room where Nancy is killed. Bull's-eye often functions as an alter ego for Sikes: the animal is vicious and brutal, just like its owner. Sikes's desire to kill the dog symbolically and psychologically represents a desire to kill himself, the murderer he has become. | analysis |
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.
| Nancy meets Mr. Brownlow and Rose on London Bridge and leads them to a secluded spot. Noah hears Nancy beg them to ensure that none of her associates get into trouble because of her choice to help Oliver. They agree, and Nancy tells them when they will most likely see Monks visiting the public house. They hope to catch Monks and force the truth about Oliver from him. Nancy's description of Monks startles Mr. Brownlow, who appears to know him. Brownlow begs Nancy to accept their help, but she says that she is chained to her life. He and Rose depart. Nancy cries violently and then heads for home. Noah hurries to Fagin's house | summary |
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.
| Although Fagin claims to be in partnership with his associates, protecting them in exchange for their loyalty, in the end, he manipulates them so that his own self-interest is better served. He watches the people around him with special care and translates his knowledge about them into power. A prime example of this strategy is his hope to use Nancy's possible lover to control her through blackmail. Even worse, he reveals Nancy's betrayal of the band's code of silence to Sikes in the worst, most treacherous light possible. He describes her actions in such a way as to inspire Sikes's murderous rage. Having Nancy killed is at least as beneficial to Fagin as to Sikes, but Fagin is unwilling to risk doing the deed himself. Instead, he uses his knowledge about Nancy and about Sikes's character to manipulate Sikes into committing the horrible crime. Oliver Twist explores different varieties of justice--that served by the English court system; spiritual or godly justice; and, with Sikes's crime, personal justice, or the torments of conscience. Justice for Sikes's "foulest and most cruel" of crimes is served almost instantly, as Sikes's guilt immediately subjects him to horrific mental torture. The passages exploring his mental state are among the most psychologically intricate in the novel. Sikes cannot cleanse himself of Nancy's blood, either figuratively or literally. Visions of Nancy's dead eyes disturb him greatly, and he fears being seen. During his desperate flight from London, he feels as though everyone is watching suspiciously. Sikes's remorse and paranoia shape and twist the world around him. The traveling salesman who claims to offer "the infallible and invaluable composition for removing all sorts of stain," including bloodstains, is so canny in his offer to help Sikes remove his stains that the salesman could almost be a figment of Sikes's haunted imagination. Likewise, the burning barn, which essentially serves no purpose in the plot, seems to be a herald of the fires of hell Sikes sees in his future. Unlike Oliver, who spends much of the novel trying to discover his identity, Sikes desperately wishes to hide his identity. However, his dog, Bull's-eye, acts as a kind of walking name tag. The animal follows him everywhere. Indeed, Sikes's animal even leaves his mark at the scene of the crime--his bloodstained footprints cover the room where Nancy is killed. Bull's-eye often functions as an alter ego for Sikes: the animal is vicious and brutal, just like its owner. Sikes's desire to kill the dog symbolically and psychologically represents a desire to kill himself, the murderer he has become. | analysis |
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.
| When Sikes delivers stolen goods to Fagin that night, Fagin and Noah relate the details of Nancy's trip. Fagin does not tell Sikes that Nancy insisted that her associates not get into trouble. In a rage, Sikes rushes home and beats Nancy to death while she begs for mercy | summary |
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.
| Although Fagin claims to be in partnership with his associates, protecting them in exchange for their loyalty, in the end, he manipulates them so that his own self-interest is better served. He watches the people around him with special care and translates his knowledge about them into power. A prime example of this strategy is his hope to use Nancy's possible lover to control her through blackmail. Even worse, he reveals Nancy's betrayal of the band's code of silence to Sikes in the worst, most treacherous light possible. He describes her actions in such a way as to inspire Sikes's murderous rage. Having Nancy killed is at least as beneficial to Fagin as to Sikes, but Fagin is unwilling to risk doing the deed himself. Instead, he uses his knowledge about Nancy and about Sikes's character to manipulate Sikes into committing the horrible crime. Oliver Twist explores different varieties of justice--that served by the English court system; spiritual or godly justice; and, with Sikes's crime, personal justice, or the torments of conscience. Justice for Sikes's "foulest and most cruel" of crimes is served almost instantly, as Sikes's guilt immediately subjects him to horrific mental torture. The passages exploring his mental state are among the most psychologically intricate in the novel. Sikes cannot cleanse himself of Nancy's blood, either figuratively or literally. Visions of Nancy's dead eyes disturb him greatly, and he fears being seen. During his desperate flight from London, he feels as though everyone is watching suspiciously. Sikes's remorse and paranoia shape and twist the world around him. The traveling salesman who claims to offer "the infallible and invaluable composition for removing all sorts of stain," including bloodstains, is so canny in his offer to help Sikes remove his stains that the salesman could almost be a figment of Sikes's haunted imagination. Likewise, the burning barn, which essentially serves no purpose in the plot, seems to be a herald of the fires of hell Sikes sees in his future. Unlike Oliver, who spends much of the novel trying to discover his identity, Sikes desperately wishes to hide his identity. However, his dog, Bull's-eye, acts as a kind of walking name tag. The animal follows him everywhere. Indeed, Sikes's animal even leaves his mark at the scene of the crime--his bloodstained footprints cover the room where Nancy is killed. Bull's-eye often functions as an alter ego for Sikes: the animal is vicious and brutal, just like its owner. Sikes's desire to kill the dog symbolically and psychologically represents a desire to kill himself, the murderer he has become. | analysis |
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.
| 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. In the morning, Sikes flees London, seeing suspicious looks everywhere. He stops at a country inn to eat. Seeing a bloodstain on Sikes's hat, a salesman grabs it to demonstrate the quality of his stain remover. Sikes flees the inn. He overhears some men talking about the murder at the post office. He wanders the road, haunted by the image of Nancy's dead eyes. A local barn catches fire, and Sikes helps put out the fire. Sikes decides to return to London and hide. Afraid that his dog, Bull's-eye, will give him away, he tries to drown the animal, but it escapes | summary |
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.
| Although Fagin claims to be in partnership with his associates, protecting them in exchange for their loyalty, in the end, he manipulates them so that his own self-interest is better served. He watches the people around him with special care and translates his knowledge about them into power. A prime example of this strategy is his hope to use Nancy's possible lover to control her through blackmail. Even worse, he reveals Nancy's betrayal of the band's code of silence to Sikes in the worst, most treacherous light possible. He describes her actions in such a way as to inspire Sikes's murderous rage. Having Nancy killed is at least as beneficial to Fagin as to Sikes, but Fagin is unwilling to risk doing the deed himself. Instead, he uses his knowledge about Nancy and about Sikes's character to manipulate Sikes into committing the horrible crime. Oliver Twist explores different varieties of justice--that served by the English court system; spiritual or godly justice; and, with Sikes's crime, personal justice, or the torments of conscience. Justice for Sikes's "foulest and most cruel" of crimes is served almost instantly, as Sikes's guilt immediately subjects him to horrific mental torture. The passages exploring his mental state are among the most psychologically intricate in the novel. Sikes cannot cleanse himself of Nancy's blood, either figuratively or literally. Visions of Nancy's dead eyes disturb him greatly, and he fears being seen. During his desperate flight from London, he feels as though everyone is watching suspiciously. Sikes's remorse and paranoia shape and twist the world around him. The traveling salesman who claims to offer "the infallible and invaluable composition for removing all sorts of stain," including bloodstains, is so canny in his offer to help Sikes remove his stains that the salesman could almost be a figment of Sikes's haunted imagination. Likewise, the burning barn, which essentially serves no purpose in the plot, seems to be a herald of the fires of hell Sikes sees in his future. Unlike Oliver, who spends much of the novel trying to discover his identity, Sikes desperately wishes to hide his identity. However, his dog, Bull's-eye, acts as a kind of walking name tag. The animal follows him everywhere. Indeed, Sikes's animal even leaves his mark at the scene of the crime--his bloodstained footprints cover the room where Nancy is killed. Bull's-eye often functions as an alter ego for Sikes: the animal is vicious and brutal, just like its owner. Sikes's desire to kill the dog symbolically and psychologically represents a desire to kill himself, the murderer he has become. | analysis |
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.
| Mr. Brownlow has captured Monks and brought him to the Brownlow home. Monks's real name is Edward Leeford. Brownlow was a good friend of Monks's father, Mr. Leeford. Mr. Leeford was a young man when his family forced him to marry a wealthy older woman. The couple eventually separated but did not divorce, and Edward and his mother went to Paris. Meanwhile, Mr. Leeford fell in love with Agnes Fleming, a retired naval officer's daughter, who became pregnant with Oliver. The relative who had benefited most from Mr. Leeford's forced marriage repented and left Mr. Leeford a fortune. Mr. Leeford left a portrait of his beloved Agnes in Brownlow's care while he went to Rome to claim his inheritance. Mr. Leeford's wife, hearing of his good fortune, traveled with Edward to meet him there. However, in Rome, Mr. Leeford took ill and died. Brownlow reports that he knows that Monks's mother burned Mr. Leeford's will, so Mr. Leeford's newfound fortune fell to his wife and son. After his mother died, Monks lived in the West Indies on their ill-gotten fortune. Brownlow, remembering Oliver's resemblance to the woman in the portrait, had gone there to find Monks after Oliver was kidnapped. Meanwhile, the search for Sikes continues | summary |
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.
| Toby Crackit and Tom Chitling flee to a squalid island after Fagin and Noah are captured by the authorities. Sikes's dog shows up at the house that serves as their hiding place. Sikes arrives soon after. Charley Bates arrives and attacks the murderer, calling for the others to help him. The search party and an angry mob arrive demanding justice. Sikes climbs onto the roof with a rope, intending to lower himself to escape in the midst of the confusion. However, he loses his balance when he imagines that he sees Nancy's eyes before him. The rope catches around his neck, and he falls to his death with his head in an accidental noose | summary |
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!
| Oliver and his friends travel to the town of his birth, with Monks in tow, to meet Mr. Grimwig. There, Monks reveals that he and his mother found a letter and a will after his father's death, both of which they destroyed. The letter was addressed to Agnes Fleming's mother, and it contained a confession from Leeford about their affair. The will stated that, if his illegitimate child were a girl, she should inherit the estate unconditionally. If it were a boy, he would inherit the estate only if he committed no illegal or guilty act. Otherwise, Monks and his mother would receive the fortune. Upon learning of his daughter's shameful involvement with a married man, Agnes's father fled his hometown and changed his family's name. Agnes ran away to save her family the shame of her condition, and her father died soon thereafter of a broken heart. His other small daughter was taken in by a poor couple who died soon after. Mrs. Maylie took pity on the little girl and raised her as her niece. That child is Rose. Mr. Bumble and Mrs. Bumble confess to their part in concealing Oliver's history, and Mr. Brownlow ensures that they never hold public office again. Harry has given up his political ambitions and vowed to live as a poor clergyman. Knowing that she no longer stands in the way of Harry's ambitions, Rose agrees to marry him | summary |
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.
| Fagin is sentenced to death for his many crimes. On his miserable last night alive, Brownlow and Oliver visit him in his jail cell to find out the location of papers verifying Oliver's identity, which Monks had entrusted to Fagin | summary |
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.
| Chapter 53 ithout strong affection and humanity of heart, and gratitude to that Being whose code is Mercy and whose great attribute is Benevolence. happiness can never be attained. Noah is pardoned because he testifies against Fagin. Charley turns to an honest life and becomes a successful grazier, a person who feeds cattle before they are taken to market. Brownlow arranges for Monks's property to be divided between Monks and Oliver. Monks travels to the New World, where he squanders his share of the inheritance and lives a sordid life that lands him in prison, where he dies. Brownlow adopts Oliver as his son. He, Losberne, and Grimwig take up residence near the rural church over which Harry presides. | summary |
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.
| The long story surrounding Mr. Leeford's marriage is told to demonstrate the disastrous consequences of economically motivated marriages. Dickens's romanticism manifests itself in the difference between Oliver and his half-brother. Oliver, the child of Leeford's love affair, is virtuous and innocent. Monks, the result of an economic marriage, is morally twisted by his obsession with wealth. This obsession with money leads him down a long, dark path of nefarious crimes and conspiracies. Throughout Oliver Twist, Dickens criticizes the Victorian stereotype of the poor as criminals from birth. However, after a strident critique of the representation of the poor as hereditary criminals, he portrays Monks as a criminal whose nature has been determined since birth. Brownlow tells Monks, "You. from your cradle were gall and bitterness to your own father's heart, and. all evil passions, vice, and profligacy, festered. Monks's evil character seems less the product of his own decisions than of his birth. Oliver Twist is full of mistaken, assumed, and changed identities. Oliver joins his final domestic scene by assuming yet another identity. Once the mystery of his real identity is revealed, he quickly exchanges it for another, becoming Brownlow's adopted son. After all the fuss and the labyrinthine conspiracies to conceal Oliver's identity, it is ironic that he gives it up almost as soon as he discovers it. The final chapters quickly deliver the justice that has been delayed throughout the novel. Fagin dies on the gallows. Sikes hangs himself by accident--it is as though the hand of fate or a higher authority reaches out to execute him. Mr. and Mrs. Bumble are deprived of the right to ever hold public office again. They descend into poverty and suffer the same privations they had forced on paupers in the past. Monks never reforms, nor does life show him any mercy. True to Brownlow's characterization of him as bad from birth, he continues his idle, evil ways and dies in an American prison. For him, there is no redemption. Like Noah, he serves as a foil--a character whose attributes contrast with, and thereby accentuate, those of another--to Oliver's character. He is as evil, twisted, and mean while Oliver is good, virtuous, and kind. Oliver and all of his friends, of course, enjoy a blissful, fairy-tale ending. Everyone takes up residence in the same neighborhood and lives together like one big, happy family. Perhaps the strangest part of the concluding section of Oliver Twist is Leeford's condition for Oliver's inheritance. Leeford states in his will that, if his child were a son, he would inherit his estate "only on the stipulation that in his minority he should never have stained his name with any public act of dishonor, meanness, cowardice, or wrong. It seems strange that a father would consign his child to lifelong poverty as well as the stigma of illegitimacy if the son ever committed a single wrong in childhood. In the same way that the court is willing to punish Oliver for crimes committed by another, Leeford is ready to punish Oliver for any small misdeed merely because he hated his first son, Monks, so much. One contradiction that critics of Oliver Twist have pointed out is that although Dickens spends much of the novel openly attacking retributive justice, the conclusion of the novel is quick to deliver such justice. At the story's end, crimes are punished harshly, and devilish characters are still hereditary devils to the very end. The only real change is that Oliver is now acknowledged as a hereditary angel rather than a hereditary devil. No one, it seems, can escape the identity dealt to him or her at birth. The real crime of characters like Mr. Bumble and Fagin may not have been mistreating a defenseless child--it may have been mistreating a child who was born for a better life. Yet Dickens's crusade for forgiveness and tolerance is upheld by his treatment of more minor characters, like Nancy, whose memory is sanctified, and Charley Bates, who redeems himself and enters honest society. These characters' fates demonstrate that the individual can indeed rise above his or her circumstances, and that an unfortunate birth does not have to guarantee an unfortunate life and legacy. | analysis |
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.
| The board decides that the best thing to do with Oliver is send him out to sea as a cabin boy. They figure that the sailors will take the best care of him, by which they mean treat him the worst and probably kill him. As Mr. Bumble is looking into this new arrangement, he runs into Mr. Sowerberry, the undertaker. Mr. Bumble tells him of young Oliver stating that anyone who takes him off the states hands will receive five pounds. Mr. Bumble asks if he knows of anyone who needs a boy, and Mr. Sowerberry offers to take him. The board agrees upon the plan, and Mr. Bumble takes Oliver, weeping from loneliness, to the Sowerberry house. He meets both Mr. and Mrs. Sowerberry, the serving girl Charlotte. Mr. Sowerberry gives him a little meat, which he devours and takes him to his bed that is located under the coffin counter | summary |
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.
| A pounding on the door the following morning woke Oliver from his sleep in the coffin room. The person outside was yelling and kicking the door to be let in. Oliver opened the door and was introduced to Noah Claypole who also worked for Mr. Sowerberry and who was a higher rank than Oliver was. He pointed this out to Oliver very quickly and was very mean to him. Noah and Oliver went down to get breakfast with Charlotte. Mr. and Mrs. Sowerberry during their own breakfast decide that because Oliver was such a nice looking, though melancholy, boy, he should be a made a mute. Later in the morning, Mr. Bumble comes with news of a woman who has died and needs a coffin. Mr. Sowerberry takes Oliver to the home of the dead woman, and Oliver sees what the profession that Mr. Sowerberry and the state chose for him was. He attends his first funeral and burial and decides that he does not like it, but Mr. Sowerberry tells him that he will get used to it in time | summary |
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.
| Noah took a joy in making Oliver cry, and one day in attempt to do so, asked Oliver about his mother. Since his mother was a very sensitive subject to him, Oliver became upset. Noah continued to taunt him and insult his mother until Oliver snapped and attacked Noah. Noah surprised screamed and called out to Charlotte and Mrs. Sowerberry. They pulled Oliver off Noah, and sent Noah to find Mr. Bumble at the workhouse because Mr. Sowerberry was not around | summary |
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.
| Noah found Mr. Bumble and told him that Oliver had tried to murder him, Charlotte, and Mrs. Sowerberry. Mr. Bumble and the man in white waistcoat were horrified, and Noah exclaimed that Oliver had intended to murder Mr. Sowerberry also. Mr. Bumble went with Noah to thrash Oliver and when they arrived, Mrs. Sowerberry had locked Oliver in the cellar. Mr. Bumble spoke sharply to Oliver and told Mrs. Sowerberry that she had been feeding the boy to liberally and that he should be kept on gruel for the rest of his apprenticeship. Mr. Bumble then stated that Oliver had come from a bad family, which angered Oliver again. Mr. Sowerberry arrives home asks Oliver what happened. Oliver tells him that Noah said bad things about his mother, and Mrs. Sowerberry began insulting her again. She then burst into tears because Oliver was talking back to her, and this forced Mr. Sowerberry to punish Oliver severely. They then sent him to bed, and early the next morning he rose and left the house. On his way towards London he stopped by the house of Mrs. Mann and saw his friend Dick, who appeared to be dying, out in the garden. The boys embrace, talk, and say their farewells to each other, and Oliver heads towards the city intent on running away from the Sowerberrys | summary |
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 8: liver began his walk to London. He had very little food and had to beg for it on his way. He walked for seven days and had very little luck getting food or shelter from people in the towns he went through. He sat with bleeding feet on a doorstep one morning when a curious looking young gentleman around his age began talking to him. His name was Jack Dawkins He befriended Oliver and asked if he was going to London. Oliver told him he was and explained that he did not know where he would be staying. Mr. Dawkins told Oliver he could come with him and with his patronage stay with a gentleman he knew. So Oliver went with Jack and saw the filth of London for the first time in the middle of the night. Jack took Oliver into the house of the gentleman and he met the old Jew, Fagin. Fagin fed him and introduced him to the other boys sitting him in the room who, like Mr. Dawkins, were dressed like little adults. They were drinking spirits and smoking pipes and Oliver joined them. Fagin gave him a bed to sleep in and he went to sleep | summary |
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.
| Oliver awoke the next morning to see Fagin examining several watches and rings in a wooden box. When he discovered Oliver was awake he questioned him on what he had seen, and admired him for his bravery. Jack, or Dodger, then came in with another boy from the previous evening, Charles Bates, and they showed the old Jew the things they collected from the execution they attended that morning. They then began playing a game where they would practice picking Fagin's pockets. Two girls with painted faces, Nancy and Bet came to visit the young men, and after drinking spirits, they went out with the young man. The Jew pointed out to Oliver what a nice life the young men led, and Oliver asked if they were done working for the day. Fagin said they were and told Oliver to try to lift the handkerchief from his pocket. Oliver succeeded, and began to learn how to 'unmark' them | summary |
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.
| Oliver spent more time with the Jew, and the other boys each day learning more and more of how to unmark handkerchiefs, and playing the game of picking Fagin's pockets. After a while, Oliver wanted to go out with the boys and do the work they do, and finally Fagin allowed it. On their first day out, Oliver began to get annoyed because the boys weren't doing anything constructive. Then they spotted a gentleman leaning over a bookstall and Oliver watched as they went up to him. They took a handkerchief out of his pocket and Oliver was horrified that they were stealing from him. The man realized that it was missing and turned to see Oliver running away. The other boys screamed 'stop thief' as the gentleman did and watched as he chased Oliver through the streets. Eventually a man knocked Oliver down and the gentleman whose pocket had been picked accosted him. Oliver swore to his innocence but was not believe and a police officer came and dragged Oliver away | summary |
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.
| The policeman searched Oliver, locked him up, and then dragged him before the local drunken magistrate. The gentlemen, Mr. Brownlow, began an argument with the magistrate and tried to explain that he was not sure if Oliver committed the crime. He also thought that Oliver's face looked familiar to him but he couldn't place it. The magistrate tried to question Oliver but he couldn't speak, and finally fainted. The magistrate began to sentence him to three months of heavy labor, when a winded man ran into the office and demanded to speak. He was the bookseller that Mr. Brownlow had been shopping with when the robbery had occurred. The bookseller had seen the whole robbery and testified that Oliver had not committed the crime. The magistrate releases Oliver and Mr. Brownlow takes him, unconscious, with him in his coach along with the savior bookseller | summary |
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.
| Mr. Brownlow took Oliver to his house, where he was unconscious for days. Oliver awakes from his illness to find a sweet old woman, Mrs. Bedwin, taking care of him. She nurses him back to health and Mr. Brownlow comes to visit him to inquire after his health. Oliver begins to get his strength back and is very grateful to both Brownlow and Bedwin for taking care of him. Once he is healthy enough to sit in a chair, he sees a portrait of a woman. The picture fascinates him, and Mrs. Bedwin believes that he is upset by it and tries to take it away. Mr. Brownlow comes to see him and notices that the woman in the picture looks exactly like him. He points this out to Mrs. Bedwin, but decides not to tell Oliver of it yet. Oliver, at their looks of exclamation, faints again. After he had been kidnapped, the Dodger and Charlie Bates went back to the Jew's house, and because Oliver knew their secrets, he became very upset with the boys when he realized Oliver was no longer with them | summary |
'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.'
| Fagin yells at the boys until they tell him the tail of Oliver being caught. This upsets Fagin even more and makes him start to beat on the boys. They in turn retaliate and just as a full on fight is starting, in walks Mr. Sikes with his big white dog. The Jew then stops beating on the children, and tries to accommodate him. They sit down with a drink and discuss the Oliver situation. They decide that someone must go to the prison and find out what happened to him. Nancy and Betty came over again, and they finally threaten and bribe Nancy into going down to the police station to find out Oliver's fate. When she arrives she finds out that they released Oliver and she rushes back to tell Fagin and Mr. Sikes and they decide that they have to find him as soon as possible and kidnap him so he does not spill their secrets | summary |
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.
| When Oliver awakened from his fainting spell, he found that they had removed the painting of the mysterious woman. Oliver then expressed his like for it and Mrs. Bedwin said she would put it back up. Once Oliver was well enough to put on his clothing, Mr. Brownlow bought him a new suit, cap, and shoes. Oliver had never owned new clothes before and he was ecstatic. Oliver went to have a meeting and talk to Mr. Brownlow about his future. They talked about books and how someday Oliver could read and write them if he wanted to. Oliver is afraid that he is going to be sent away and begs to stay. Mr. Brownlow says that he can, and Mr. Grimwig comes for a visit. Mr. Brownlow invites Oliver to stay and talk with them. Mr. Grimwig is a cynic and expounds on the bad qualities of Oliver that he expects are there. Oliver decides that he wants to help and offers to return the books that Mr. Brownlow borrowed. Mr. Brownlow agrees and Mr. Grimwig, keeping with his personality, made a prediction that the boy would never come back once set free. Mr. Brownlow and Mr. Grimwig sat for a long time waiting for Oliver by the tick of the watch that sat on the table | summary |
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.
| Nancy reports that where Oliver had been taken and tells them of his illness. They go out to search for him, and as he is returning the books, he runs into Nancy. She made a loud ruckus and explained to everyone that he was her runaway little brother. He protested but she and the others dragged him out of the street with them with the support of the crowd who did not believe Oliver's side of the tale. As nighttime fell, Mr. Brownlow and Mr. Grimwig still sat waiting for Oliver to come home | summary |
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.
| Nancy and Mr. Sikes drag Oliver to another of the thieves' hideouts. When they entered, Fagin, Dodger, and Charlie Bates were there. They were happy to see Oliver and astonished at his clothing. Once they figured out he had five pounds on him and valuable books under his arms, Fagin and Mr. Sikes began fighting over who got to keep the books and the money. Oliver begins to protest, saying that they should return the books to Mr. Brownlow because he does not want him to think that he stole them. Then he calls for the police, and Fagin begins to beat him. Nancy then jumps into the way and threatens Fagin. She throws so much of a fit that she passes out. They took Oliver's clothes, locking him in a little room, and because of his illness and the day's adventures, he went straight to sleep | summary |
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.
| Meanwhile, the beadle, Mr. Bumble, visits Mrs. Mann on his way to London to pay her the stipend for her care of the orphans. While he is there, Mrs. Mann tells him that a few more of the children in her care have passed away, and Mr. Bumble seems unconcerned but asks after little Dick who has been sickly. Mrs. Mann brings Dick into see Mr. Bumble, and asks a request after he dies. He wants them to write a note for Oliver Twist giving him his love because he feels bad that Oliver is completely alone. Both Mr. Bumble and Mrs. Mann are shocked, and after the beadle leaves for London, Mrs. Mann locks Dick in the closet. When Mr. Bumble gets to London, he sees a flyer asking for any information past or present on Oliver Twist. He answers the ad, and tells Mr. Brownlow terrible things about Oliver and his childhood. Mr. Bumble is disappointed, pays the beadle, and says that he never wants to here anyone mention the name Oliver Twist again | summary |
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.
| Fagin chastised Oliver the next day and locked him back in his room for a few more days. After that period of time passed, he was allowed to wander around the house by himself when no one was home all day with nothing to do but think. One night, Dodger asked Oliver to shine his shoes for him, and happy to have company, he consented. While doing so, Oliver listened as they tried to convince him to learn all he could from Fagin about theft, because it was a good profession for him. Fagin heard them speaking thus, and gave his own speech to them all including a new thief that had come in, Tom Chitling. From that day forward, Oliver was not left alone and was thankful for it. Instead, Fagin was slowly teaching him the ways of thievery by training him that their black company was still better than being completely alone | summary |
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.'
| Fagin left the house where the boys slept and went to visit Mr. Sikes. Upon arrival, he found Nancy along with the other thief. He was not happy she was there just because he was afraid she would go nuts on him again. Sikes and he discussed a job they had been planning, and Sikes said it was doomed to fail because their "flash" man, Toby Crackit, could get no one to open the door for them. They then decided that they would use a small boy to enter the house and open the door for them. Nancy guesses that Fagin means to use Oliver for the job. Fagin tells her she's correct, and says Oliver will eventually make them a fortune because of his innocent looking face. They decide to do the job the night after the next day, and Fagin agrees that Oliver will be ready to deliver. The Jew returns home to prepare Oliver for the task, but instead of waking him, he lets him sleep | summary |
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.
| Oliver awoke to find a new pair of shoes at his bedside for which he is thankful. Then he sat down to breakfast and Fagin told him he is going to go work for Mr. Sikes for a time, but will come back to them soon. Oliver is apprehensive but does not press to know why he is going to Mr. Sikes. Fagin leaves him with a candle and a book to read, and tells him to wait until someone comes to pick him up. He sits down to read the book only to find out it is about great murderers and thieves and the evil things they did. The book scares him, and he quits reading it. After hours of waiting, Nancy comes to pick him up and take him to Sikes. She tries to comfort him and warns him at the same time. She tells him to behave when they go into the street, saying she will get in trouble if he does not. He goes with her quietly and when he arrives Mr. Sikes threatens him to behave with a gun. They ate dinner and went to bed. The next morning, they had an early breakfast and with more threats Oliver and Mr. Sikes left | summary |
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.
| Mr. Sikes drags Oliver across London on foot going at a relentless pace. They catch a ride with a man in a cart and they travel with him as far as he will take them. They stop at a tavern where they get some food and Oliver quickly falls asleep from exhaustion. Another man in the tavern agrees to give them a ride as far as he is going, and Mr. Sikes agrees. They are dropped off in the town they indicated and walk towards an ugly unoccupied looking building. Mr. Sikes opened the door, and they walked inside | summary |
'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.
| Two of Mr. Sikes cohorts are waiting inside, Toby Crackit and Barney. They eat dinner and go to sleep for a time. At one they wake up and set out to rob the house they planned. Mr. Sikes threatens Oliver more and they explain to him his job of going through the small window and opening the door. Once Oliver realizes that he is going to be stealing, he begs and pleads to be set free to die in the fields. Sikes puts a gun to his head and is ready to pull the trigger when Toby grabs Oliver and says it would be quieter to break his neck. Sikes instructs the boy to do his job, pushes him through the cellar window, and hands him a lantern. Just as Oliver is about to run through the house and wake the family, two men burst in on him and fire a gun. Sikes warns him off, but when Oliver does not move, Sikes grabs him by the collar and drags him out through the window, which he came. Sikes realizes that Oliver has been shot in the arm, and carries him away exclaiming at the loss of blood. Oliver passes out | summary |
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.
| Mr. Bumble stopped by to see Mrs. Corney, the matron of the workhouse where Oliver Twist was born. He brought her a bottle of wine, and accepted a cup of tea from her. As they were sitting around the round table, Mr. Bumble kept scooting his chair closer to the old woman. Finally, he grabbed and kissed her. Then came a knock at the door, and the beadle pretended to be doing something away from the matron, while the visitor entered. An old woman from the workhouse came in to tell Mrs. Corney that another woman was dying and was requesting her presence. Mrs. Corney left with the woman, and the beadle waited by looking at her silverware and china | summary |
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.
| The matron went down to the room of the sick old woman. The apocrathy's apprentice was there but there was nothing he could do for the old woman and soon left. The two crones who were the woman's best friends hovered around her, and the matron decided that she would leave before the woman awoke again. As Mrs. Corney was leaving, the dying woman sat up in bed and called to her. Mrs. Corney went to her and the woman began telling her the tale of a young woman she nursed a long time ago. The woman was Oliver's mother, and the old nurse kept saying that she stole the gold from the young woman soon after she died. Before she could reveal the identity of the dead young mother, or the secrets that only the nurse knew, she herself died. Mrs. Corney was disappointed she did not find out more information and left the room | summary |
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.
| Fagin, Charlie Bates, the Dodger, and Tom were all sitting in the hideout late one evening. The boys began teasing Tom about his affection for Betsy, and Fagin began discussing it as well. They heard that someone was at the front door, and were very careful in answering it. When they discovered that the visitor was Toby Crackit they brought him inside startled that he was alone without Bill and Oliver. Toby asked for food and drink before he would tell his tale, and so Fagin supplied him with the requested provisions. Finally, Toby asked them where Sikes was and Fagin became upset. Toby then told the tale of the robbery and how Oliver had been shot. He said that he and Bill separated and left Oliver in the ditch because they were trying to save themselves. At this Fagin screamed and left the building terribly angry and upset that he lost Oliver | summary |
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.
| Fagin wandered the streets and went to the market place where the thieves sell their wares. He asked for information on Sikes and not finding any, went to a place called The Cripples. Again he asked for information of Sikes and found none. Finally, he went to Sikes house and found it occupied by only Nancy. He expressed to her is concern about Oliver and Nancy told him that Oliver was better off dead than with them. Fagin did not agree with her, and convinced that Sikes was not there, finally went back to his own residence. There, lurking in the shadows, he found a mysterious acquaintance of his. He told the man about wanting to find Oliver and the man said that he thought it better for himself at least, that he didn't. The only name the mysterious man had was Monks. As they were finishing their conversation, Monks swore that he saw a woman lurking about, but when they searched for her, nothing could be found | summary |
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.
| While Mrs. Corney was out, the beadle stood waiting in her residence examining it. When she returned, flustered from her visit to the dying woman, the beadle took care of her. After she settled down, he proposed marriage to her. She accepted, and said that after she was married to him, she would tell him what happened that night. She told him then to make funeral arrangements, so when he left her house; he went straight to the Sowerberry's home. There he found Noah Clayborn and the maid Charlotte talking of kissing. He chastises them, appalled that they would discuss or do such things, and satisfied that he completed his task, left | summary |
'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.
| As they ran through the fields, Sikes had tried to bring Oliver with him. After Toby abandoned them however, it became impossible and stays alive at the same time, so he wrapped his shawl around Oliver's wound and left him in the field. Then, diverting the attention of the pursuers to him and not Oliver, he fired his pistol and ran. The butler of the house, Mr. Giles, a houseboy who was around the age of thirty, Brittles, and a tinker who was sleeping in the shed were the ones pursuing. But hearing the gunshot, they soon gave up on their chase and went back to the house. The next morning the three sat telling the tale of the robbery to the cook and the maid. While this was going on, Oliver woke up alone in the field, with his hurt throbbing. He realized that he had to get help or he would die alone in the field. He wandered to the house they had tried to rob, and knocked on the door. He collapsed, and the men telling the story, along with the women listening answered the door to find him there. They called one of the mistresses of the house and she decided to take care of him, after speaking with her aunt | summary |
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!'
| Giles, dressed in his butler attire, was serving breakfast to the two ladies of the house. The elder, Mrs. Maylie was the aunt of the beautiful young girl, Rose. He tells them a bit about shooting Oliver, for which he was praised, but waits to tell the whole tale until after Dr. Losberne could attend. When the doctor arrived he looked to Oliver and after a time reported to the ladies. He invited them up to see the thief and they accepted; not knowing that Oliver was so young | summary |
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.
| The doctor brought them into the room, and when Rose saw Oliver she sat at his side and wept on his face lamenting that one so young and innocent looking could not be evil. She pleaded with the doctor and her aunt to not do harm to Oliver, or put him in prison. They agreed that nothing would be decided about what to do with him, until he woke up and they could judge if he had an evil character. Hours later, Oliver woke and grateful that he was being taken care of, told them the story of his upbringing. The listeners of the tale were in tears, and when he was finished, he quickly fell back to sleep. They left the room and went down to the kitchen to question Mr. Giles to make certain that Oliver was the boy he shot that night in the cellar. Both Giles and Brittles could not give their oaths that Oliver was the boy they saw, and as they were concluding the interview, someone came to the door. They were horrified to find out it was the Bow Street Runners there to investigate the break in | summary |
'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.
| Blathers and Duff, the Bow Street Runners, come into the house and ask questions about the crime to Mrs. Maylie and Dr. Losberne. Losberne recounts the circumstances to them, and they ask about the injured boy they heard the servants speaking of. Losberne tells them that Oliver had nothing to do with the crime and that in all the excitement someone mistaken him for one of the thieves. Blathers and Duff inspect the premises and demise that the robbers were professionals, probably from London. Dr. Losberne, Mrs. Maylie, and Rose debate on whether or not Oliver should tell his story to the men, and they decide that though they believed him, it was rather farfetched. In Oliver's interest, they decided to make up a fake one for the boy so they could keep him safe. Stalling the officers, they took them down to the kitchen, gave them food, drink, and listened to their tale of another robbery. Finally, they want to go see Oliver. When they get to his room, he looks even worse and they question Mr. Giles on why he assaulted the boy when he came in the house. Giles swore that he made a mistake and that Oliver was not the boy he shot the night before. Blathers and Duff then heard a rumor about two men and a boy in another town that had been found, and they went off to inspect to see if they had committed the crime. When their findings came up negative, Mrs. Maylie thanked them and sent them away. Oliver continued to thrive under their care | summary |
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.
| Oliver caught a fever, but under the good care of his new friends, he recovered. He offered to work for the family if they would let him stay and they assented easily. When Oliver was recovered, Dr. Losberne took him to the residence of Mr. Brownlow who Oliver wanted to see so he could tell them what happened. On the way, Oliver spotted the house that Sikes had taken him to the night of the robbery, and they stopped so that Dr. Losberne could question the owner. This questioning proved inconclusive. When they arrived at the Brownlow residence however, they found that Mr. Brownlow, Mrs. Bedwin, and Mr. Grimwig had all moved to the West Indies. Oliver, saddened by the news, went back to stay with Mrs. Maylie. Soon the whole family moved out to the cottage in the country and Oliver was extremely happy there. He learned all he could from the village vicar, and would take daily walks with Mrs. Maylie and Rose whom he adored | summary |
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.
| One evening as they were taking a particularly long walk, Rose sat down to play the piano as usual. That night however, she began crying during her playing, and Mrs. Maylie and Oliver were very distressed. Rose ended up falling very ill, and they feared she was going to die. Mrs. Maylie gave Oliver a letter to deliver into the nearest town that would bring Dr. Losberne to them. Oliver was exceptionally saddened that he might lose Rose, and was grateful he could do something to help. He delivered the letter to the innkeeper who dispatched a man with it right away. On Oliver's way back to the house, he ran into a strange man that began shouting at him. The man said that Oliver was haunting him, and Oliver left as quickly as possible. He prayed earnestly for Rose, and the next night Losberne came to help them. After he examined her, he told them there was little hope for her survival. Oliver prayed harder and spent time in the cemetery watching a funeral. When he returned, he was told that if Rose woke up from the sleep she had gone into, then she would experience a full recovery. Otherwise she would die. The next morning, Dr. Losberne came downstairs with the news that Rose had awakened, and everyone rejoiced the news | summary |
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.
| Oliver was overjoyed at the news that she would recover, and was gathering flowers along the road for her sickroom when a post chaise came upon him. The voice of Giles called out to him and asked him of news, and he told him that she would live. A young gentleman then exited the coach and further questioned Oliver. He instructed Giles to take the coach back to his mothers, because he felt like walking the rest of the way. Harry Maylie had an affectionate meeting with his mother in which he expressed his desire to see Rose and give her his love. The old woman tried to warn him against this talking vaguely about Rose's unbecoming past, but Harry did not care. The evening was spent in joy, and the next day dawned as usual for Oliver except that Harry began going with him every morning to gather flowers. Rose continued to recover, and Oliver continued hard at his studies. One night while studying, Oliver fell asleep and had a bad dream about being back with the Jew. He awoke startled to find that the very man of his dream was standing outside the window looking in on him with the man who had accosted him in the yard of the inn. They recognized each other, and the Jew and his companion left, and Oliver screamed for help | summary |
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.
| Oliver's cries brought Harry and Giles to him, and after he told them what happened, they set off to pursue the Jew and his companion. Dr. Losberne joined them in the chase, but to no avail. The next day they searched more but found nothing to indicate their presence. They gave up the search and one afternoon Harry went to see Rose and profess his love to her. Rose expressed to him that she did love him also but that she could not accept his offer because her name was stained and she would not bring that stain upon him. Harry was devastated but said he would come to her again in a year to see if the circumstances then could changer her mind and if they did not, he promised to leave the situation alone forever | summary |
'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.
| Harry, Losberne, and Oliver sat at breakfast discussing the departure of the former two. Losberne was headed to London, and Harry asked to escort him there. Harry asked Oliver to write him every other Monday so that he could know what was happening with Rose and his mother. Oliver was delighted that he could do something of importance and promises to keep the letters a secret. Harry leaves and Rose watches him through the upstairs window, pretending to be happy, but very sad he is going | summary |
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.
| Upon marrying the workhouse matron, the beadle became master of the workhouse. Two months had gone by and Mr. Bumble already did not like his newly acquired matrimonial state. He and Mrs. Bumble argued and she bested him, forcing him to wander the streets for a time. Deciding he was thirsty, he stopped into an almost empty tavern and kept looking curiously at the man who sat in their also. Finally they began talking and the man told Mr. Bumble that he had been searching him out. He asked Mr. Bumble questions about the night Oliver Twist was born, and Bumble answered him as best as he could. The strange man wanted to find the nurse that delivered Oliver, and Bumble told him that she had died the previous winter. He also informed the strange man that the nurse had told his wife a secret about that night to his wife before she died, and Bumble agreed to bring his wife to see the man the next night. They exchanged the address, and Mr. Bumble found out the man's name was Monks | summary |
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.
| The Bumbles walked to the address that Monks gave the night before and let them in out of the rain. They were in a bad part of town in a worn down building next to the river. Mrs. Bumble negotiated with Monks and got him to give her twenty-five pounds for the information she was about to tell him. When he agreed to the sum, Mrs. Bumble told him the story of the night Sally died. In Sally's hand when she died was a pawnbroker's slip of an item she had pawned soon after she had taken it off Oliver Twist's mother's body. Mrs. Bumble had redeemed the pawned item and gave it to Monks. It was a gold locket, engraved with the name Agnes and contained a small gold band. Monks was pleased and beckoned his visitors to stand away from the table. He moved it to reveal a trap door in the floor that showed rushing water below. To the evidence Mrs. Bumble had given him, he tied a weight, and explained that once thrown into the current, it could never again be used against him. The Bumbles agreed to keep quiet with the matter and left the Monks establishment | summary |
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.
| Sikes was ill and confined to his apartment where Nancy was nursing him. Fagin, Dodger, and Charlie Bates came to see him, and Sikes wanted some money from Fagin. They agreed that Nancy was to go get the money and bring it back. They left, and Monks showed up at Fagin's house saying that every thing was done. Nancy, looking ill, walked back to Sikes with the money, and he expressed that she looked ill also. Sikes made her rest and she gave him laudanum to put him to sleep. After he slept, Nancy left and went to a hotel near Hyde Park. At the front door she asked to see Mrs. Maylie, and after some arguing, was admitted | summary |
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.
| Nancy told Rose what she had had learned about Oliver from eavesdropping on Fagin. The proof of Oliver's parentage had been destroyed, and Monks referred to the boy as his brother and wanted Oliver's identity to forever remain a secret. Nancy revealed that she was the woman who had stolen Oliver out of the street long ago, and Rose tried to convince her to stay and be protected. Nancy declined, saying that she must get back so she could take care of Sikes who she hinted at being in love with. She said that she could be found walking the London Bridge Sunday at midnight if she is ever needed | summary |
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.
| Rose pondered what to do with the information when Oliver came in and happily informed her that they had spotted Mr. Brownlow in the street, and now knew where he lived. Rose decided that the best thing to do was to talk to Mr. Brownlow so she and Oliver went there directly. Rose was received well, and when she told them her business and the story of what happened to Oliver, they were delighted. Oliver came in then, and was happy to see his old friends and they him. Mr. Brownlow, Rose, and Losberne then decided that it would be best if they trapped Monks and figured out what he knew. They agreed to bring the help of Mr. Grimwig and Harry Maylie into it, and get Nancy to identify the man for them | summary |
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.
| Noah Claypole and Charlotte left the Sowerberry's, stole money, and were on their way to London. They stop at the Three Cripples for the night. One of the thieves, Barney was at the bar, and showed the strangers to Fagin when he wandered in. Fagin decided that he liked the look of Noah, and Noah told Charlotte that he would be a gentleman and her, a lady by becoming a thief. Fagin over heard this and approached Noah on the subject. They arranged a deal that Noah and Charlotte would begin working for the Jew for a sum of twenty pounds. They arranged to meet the following morning | summary |
'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.
| Fagin got the news that the Artful Dodger, Jack Dawkins, had been arrested and taken to Newgate. Noah Claypole, renamed by Fagin as Morris Bolter, was sent on his first assignment to find out what was going on with the boy there. The evidence was strong against him, and though he tried to fight it, the Dodger would be locked up for life for his crimes | summary |
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.
| Fagin was visiting Sikes when the clock struck eleven on Sunday evening. Nancy put on her bonnet and prepared to go out, but Sikes stopped her. They began fighting, and finally Sikes won and she did not go out. Fagin thought it peculiar that she would throw such a fit about taking a walk so he assumed that she had another lover, or was sick of Sikes brutality. Fagin decides that he needs Nancy to become more closely allied with himself, and wants to ask her to poison Sikes | summary |
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.
| Fagin informs Noah that he wants him to spy on Nancy for him. He wants to know everywhere she goes, and whom she is with. Noah agrees and waits for the time when Fagin wants him to go. The time is the next Sunday evening, and Fagin takes him and shows him Nancy. She leaves and Noah begins to follow her | summary |
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.
| Nancy met Rose and Mr. Brownlow on the bridge. They went down the steps at the side so they could talk without being seen, and Noah went down the other side to listen to their conversation. Nancy told them the appearance of Monks and the others, and where to find them. Rose stated that she recognized the Monks as the one seen with Fagin at the window by Oliver. Nancy makes them swear that no harm will come to her friends, and they say that they only want to get their hands on Monks. Mr. Brownlow offers again to help Rose but she declines. They leave, and soon after, Noah leaves to go report his story to Fagin | summary |
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.
| Bill Sikes entered Fagin's residence early that morning only to be told of what had transpired between Nancy, Rose, and Mr. Brownlow. She had revealed where they were located and what they looked like and Fagin made Noah tell the story to Bill. He was furious, and left intending to kill her as he would any other person whom would have done such a thing. He went to his house and roused Nancy, and told her how she had been followed. She begged and pleaded but Sikes killed her as she was on her knees clutching Rose's handkerchief | summary |
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.
| Sikes flees London but everywhere he goes he is reminded of the murder of Nancy. Sikes imagines that she is haunting him and that everyone around knows his crime. Finally, he decides to go back to London, thinking that no one will think to look for him there. He realizes then that his white dog is a signature of him and decides it would be best to drown the dog. They come upon a pond and Sikes finds a rock to tie to the dogs collar. The dog does not allow him to do that, and runs away. Sikes waits for him to come back, and when he does not, he heads towards London again | summary |
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.
| Mr. Brownlow apprehends Monks and threatens him with persecution if he does not cooperate. Monks real name is Edward Leeford and Mr. Brownlow was a close friend of his father, Mr. Leeford. As a child, Mr. Leeford was forced to marry a woman who he despised and she was the mother of Edward. Due to the hatred between them, Edward and his mother went to France. After they had gone, Leeford met a military man who moved to his district and fell in love with his daughter. She was the mother of Oliver, and Leeford painted a portrait of her and gave it to Brownlow. Leeford ended up receiving a large inheritance, and his wife and son Edward came back to Paris to help him claim it. Unfortunately, he died suddenly seemingly without a will. The truth, Mr. Brownlow said however, was that Edward and his mother had burned the will and moved with the money to the West Indies. This was why Brownlow, after losing Oliver went to the West Indies. Mr. Brownlow threatened Monks and told him he would be released with no penalties from the murder of Nancy, which he knew of, if he gave Oliver the portion of the inheritance that he deserved. Monks agrees, and waits while Mr. Brownlow goes to investigate the spotting of Sikes dog | summary |
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.
| At the third of the thieves hideouts, Toby Crackit, Tom Chitling, and another thief Kags waited in the dark. The police had taken Fagin, and the thieves had narrowly escaped. Much to their surprise, Sikes white dog came to the hideout. They wondered where Sikes was but did not want to see him because of the murder. Three hours after the dog showed up, the ghostly looking murderer himself found his way there. Soon after him, Charley Bates showed up but became very upset when he realized that Sikes was there. He started to scream, and got in a fight with the man who was much bigger than he was. As they were fighting, they realized that a mob was outside with police. They panicked and Charley began screaming that Sikes was there. As the people below tried to break into the building, Sikes decided to clime on the roof and try to lower himself with a rope to the ditch behind because the tide was out. The mob realized what he was doing, and as he was preparing himself, he slipped off the shingles of the roof. As he was falling the loop he made in the rope wrapped around his neck like a noose and hung him. The dog, on the roof also, seeing his owner fall and hang, jumped for the body but missed and cracked his head on the rocks below | summary |
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!
| Everyone went to the town of Oliver's birth, and that night Mr. Brownlow explained, with Monks help the rest of the tale. After finding out he was ill, Oliver's father wrote a letter to Agnes that told her of his marriage. It also stated his intentions for the inheritance. If the child were a girl, the money would go to her unconditionally, and if it were a boy, it would receive it as long as it did not commit an illegal act. Monks and his mother burned the letter along with the will. After hearing about his daughter's shame, the military man changed his name and took the girls to Wales. Agnes however, fled her father and walked to London. The military man soon died leaving the other girl child to a poor family there. This child was Rose. Monks and his mother tried to find Agnes but only found Rose in the hands of sick paupers. They gave them a little money to keep the child safe, but soon Mrs. Maylie came along and feeling sorry for her, adopted her. When Oliver realized that Rose was his aunt, he happily threw himself into her arms. Harry entered, having overheard the story, and again posed his suit to Rose. She, still feeling that her name had a bad stigma, declined until Harry told her he had given up everything so they could go live quietly in the country together. At this proposal, she accepted. Everyone waited for dinner that night, but the affianced couple and Mrs. Maylie came in they realize that Oliver is crying because his friend young Dick had died | summary |
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.
| Fagin was condemned to hang in court and was taken to a cell where he was confined until the day he died. On the last day, Oliver and Mr. Brownlow came to visit to find out the location of papers they needed from him. Oliver says goodbye to Fagin | summary |
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.
| Harry and Rose were married and moved to their happy home. Oliver and Monks split the inheritance and Monks takes his share to the New World where he squanders it and eventually dies in prison. Mr. Brownlow adopts Oliver and imparts much knowledge on him. Noah is pardoned for his help in catching the murderers, and Charley Bates turns his back on the life of crime and grows up an honest man. All of them are happy and the past is finally put to rest | summary |
HALFWAY down a by-street of one of our New England towns stands a rusty
wooden house, with seven acutely peaked gables, facing towards various
points of the compass, and a huge, clustered chimney in the midst. The
street is Pyncheon Street; the house is the old Pyncheon House; and an
elm-tree, of wide circumference, rooted before the door, is familiar to
every town-born child by the title of the Pyncheon Elm. On my
occasional visits to the town aforesaid, I seldom failed to turn down
Pyncheon Street, for the sake of passing through the shadow of these
two antiquities,--the great elm-tree and the weather-beaten edifice.
The aspect of the venerable mansion has always affected me like a human
countenance, bearing the traces not merely of outward storm and
sunshine, but expressive also, of the long lapse of mortal life, and
accompanying vicissitudes that have passed within. Were these to be
worthily recounted, they would form a narrative of no small interest
and instruction, and possessing, moreover, a certain remarkable unity,
which might almost seem the result of artistic arrangement. But the
story would include a chain of events extending over the better part of
two centuries, and, written out with reasonable amplitude, would fill a
bigger folio volume, or a longer series of duodecimos, than could
prudently be appropriated to the annals of all New England during a
similar period. It consequently becomes imperative to make short work
with most of the traditionary lore of which the old Pyncheon House,
otherwise known as the House of the Seven Gables, has been the theme.
With a brief sketch, therefore, of the circumstances amid which the
foundation of the house was laid, and a rapid glimpse at its quaint
exterior, as it grew black in the prevalent east wind,--pointing, too,
here and there, at some spot of more verdant mossiness on its roof and
walls,--we shall commence the real action of our tale at an epoch not
very remote from the present day. Still, there will be a connection
with the long past--a reference to forgotten events and personages, and
to manners, feelings, and opinions, almost or wholly obsolete--which,
if adequately translated to the reader, would serve to illustrate how
much of old material goes to make up the freshest novelty of human
life. Hence, too, might be drawn a weighty lesson from the
little-regarded truth, that the act of the passing generation is the
germ which may and must produce good or evil fruit in a far-distant
time; that, together with the seed of the merely temporary crop, which
mortals term expediency, they inevitably sow the acorns of a more
enduring growth, which may darkly overshadow their posterity.
The House of the Seven Gables, antique as it now looks, was not the
first habitation erected by civilized man on precisely the same spot of
ground. Pyncheon Street formerly bore the humbler appellation of
Maule's Lane, from the name of the original occupant of the soil,
before whose cottage-door it was a cow-path. A natural spring of soft
and pleasant water--a rare treasure on the sea-girt peninsula where the
Puritan settlement was made--had early induced Matthew Maule to build a
hut, shaggy with thatch, at this point, although somewhat too remote
from what was then the centre of the village. In the growth of the
town, however, after some thirty or forty years, the site covered by
this rude hovel had become exceedingly desirable in the eyes of a
prominent and powerful personage, who asserted plausible claims to the
proprietorship of this and a large adjacent tract of land, on the
strength of a grant from the legislature. Colonel Pyncheon, the
claimant, as we gather from whatever traits of him are preserved, was
characterized by an iron energy of purpose. Matthew Maule, on the
other hand, though an obscure man, was stubborn in the defence of what
he considered his right; and, for several years, he succeeded in
protecting the acre or two of earth which, with his own toil, he had
hewn out of the primeval forest, to be his garden ground and homestead.
No written record of this dispute is known to be in existence. Our
acquaintance with the whole subject is derived chiefly from tradition.
It would be bold, therefore, and possibly unjust, to venture a decisive
opinion as to its merits; although it appears to have been at least a
matter of doubt, whether Colonel Pyncheon's claim were not unduly
stretched, in order to make it cover the small metes and bounds of
Matthew Maule. What greatly strengthens such a suspicion is the fact
that this controversy between two ill-matched antagonists--at a period,
moreover, laud it as we may, when personal influence had far more
weight than now--remained for years undecided, and came to a close only
with the death of the party occupying the disputed soil. The mode of
his death, too, affects the mind differently, in our day, from what it
did a century and a half ago. It was a death that blasted with strange
horror the humble name of the dweller in the cottage, and made it seem
almost a religious act to drive the plough over the little area of his
habitation, and obliterate his place and memory from among men.
Old Matthew Maule, in a word, was executed for the crime of witchcraft.
He was one of the martyrs to that terrible delusion, which should teach
us, among its other morals, that the influential classes, and those who
take upon themselves to be leaders of the people, are fully liable to
all the passionate error that has ever characterized the maddest mob.
Clergymen, judges, statesmen,--the wisest, calmest, holiest persons of
their day stood in the inner circle round about the gallows, loudest to
applaud the work of blood, latest to confess themselves miserably
deceived. If any one part of their proceedings can be said to deserve
less blame than another, it was the singular indiscrimination with
which they persecuted, not merely the poor and aged, as in former
judicial massacres, but people of all ranks; their own equals,
brethren, and wives. Amid the disorder of such various ruin, it is not
strange that a man of inconsiderable note, like Maule, should have
trodden the martyr's path to the hill of execution almost unremarked in
the throng of his fellow sufferers. But, in after days, when the
frenzy of that hideous epoch had subsided, it was remembered how loudly
Colonel Pyncheon had joined in the general cry, to purge the land from
witchcraft; nor did it fail to be whispered, that there was an
invidious acrimony in the zeal with which he had sought the
condemnation of Matthew Maule. It was well known that the victim had
recognized the bitterness of personal enmity in his persecutor's
conduct towards him, and that he declared himself hunted to death for
his spoil. At the moment of execution--with the halter about his neck,
and while Colonel Pyncheon sat on horseback, grimly gazing at the scene
Maule had addressed him from the scaffold, and uttered a prophecy, of
which history, as well as fireside tradition, has preserved the very
words. "God," said the dying man, pointing his finger, with a ghastly
look, at the undismayed countenance of his enemy,--"God will give him
blood to drink!" After the reputed wizard's death, his humble
homestead had fallen an easy spoil into Colonel Pyncheon's grasp. When
it was understood, however, that the Colonel intended to erect a family
mansion-spacious, ponderously framed of oaken timber, and calculated to
endure for many generations of his posterity over the spot first
covered by the log-built hut of Matthew Maule, there was much shaking
of the head among the village gossips. Without absolutely expressing a
doubt whether the stalwart Puritan had acted as a man of conscience and
integrity throughout the proceedings which have been sketched, they,
nevertheless, hinted that he was about to build his house over an
unquiet grave. His home would include the home of the dead and buried
wizard, and would thus afford the ghost of the latter a kind of
privilege to haunt its new apartments, and the chambers into which
future bridegrooms were to lead their brides, and where children of the
Pyncheon blood were to be born. The terror and ugliness of Maule's
crime, and the wretchedness of his punishment, would darken the freshly
plastered walls, and infect them early with the scent of an old and
melancholy house. Why, then,--while so much of the soil around him was
bestrewn with the virgin forest leaves,--why should Colonel Pyncheon
prefer a site that had already been accurst?
But the Puritan soldier and magistrate was not a man to be turned aside
from his well-considered scheme, either by dread of the wizard's ghost,
or by flimsy sentimentalities of any kind, however specious. Had he
been told of a bad air, it might have moved him somewhat; but he was
ready to encounter an evil spirit on his own ground. Endowed with
commonsense, as massive and hard as blocks of granite, fastened
together by stern rigidity of purpose, as with iron clamps, he followed
out his original design, probably without so much as imagining an
objection to it. On the score of delicacy, or any scrupulousness which
a finer sensibility might have taught him, the Colonel, like most of
his breed and generation, was impenetrable. He therefore dug his
cellar, and laid the deep foundations of his mansion, on the square of
earth whence Matthew Maule, forty years before, had first swept away
the fallen leaves. It was a curious, and, as some people thought, an
ominous fact, that, very soon after the workmen began their operations,
the spring of water, above mentioned, entirely lost the deliciousness
of its pristine quality. Whether its sources were disturbed by the
depth of the new cellar, or whatever subtler cause might lurk at the
bottom, it is certain that the water of Maule's Well, as it continued
to be called, grew hard and brackish. Even such we find it now; and
any old woman of the neighborhood will certify that it is productive of
intestinal mischief to those who quench their thirst there.
The reader may deem it singular that the head carpenter of the new
edifice was no other than the son of the very man from whose dead gripe
the property of the soil had been wrested. Not improbably he was the
best workman of his time; or, perhaps, the Colonel thought it
expedient, or was impelled by some better feeling, thus openly to cast
aside all animosity against the race of his fallen antagonist. Nor was
it out of keeping with the general coarseness and matter-of-fact
character of the age, that the son should be willing to earn an honest
penny, or, rather, a weighty amount of sterling pounds, from the purse
of his father's deadly enemy. At all events, Thomas Maule became the
architect of the House of the Seven Gables, and performed his duty so
faithfully that the timber framework fastened by his hands still holds
together.
Thus the great house was built. Familiar as it stands in the writer's
recollection,--for it has been an object of curiosity with him from
boyhood, both as a specimen of the best and stateliest architecture of
a longpast epoch, and as the scene of events more full of human
interest, perhaps, than those of a gray feudal castle,--familiar as it
stands, in its rusty old age, it is therefore only the more difficult
to imagine the bright novelty with which it first caught the sunshine.
The impression of its actual state, at this distance of a hundred and
sixty years, darkens inevitably through the picture which we would fain
give of its appearance on the morning when the Puritan magnate bade all
the town to be his guests. A ceremony of consecration, festive as well
as religious, was now to be performed. A prayer and discourse from the
Rev. Mr. Higginson, and the outpouring of a psalm from the general
throat of the community, was to be made acceptable to the grosser sense
by ale, cider, wine, and brandy, in copious effusion, and, as some
authorities aver, by an ox, roasted whole, or at least, by the weight
and substance of an ox, in more manageable joints and sirloins. The
carcass of a deer, shot within twenty miles, had supplied material for
the vast circumference of a pasty. A codfish of sixty pounds, caught
in the bay, had been dissolved into the rich liquid of a chowder. The
chimney of the new house, in short, belching forth its kitchen smoke,
impregnated the whole air with the scent of meats, fowls, and fishes,
spicily concocted with odoriferous herbs, and onions in abundance. The
mere smell of such festivity, making its way to everybody's nostrils,
was at once an invitation and an appetite.
Maule's Lane, or Pyncheon Street, as it were now more decorous to call
it, was thronged, at the appointed hour, as with a congregation on its
way to church. All, as they approached, looked upward at the imposing
edifice, which was henceforth to assume its rank among the habitations
of mankind. There it rose, a little withdrawn from the line of the
street, but in pride, not modesty. Its whole visible exterior was
ornamented with quaint figures, conceived in the grotesqueness of a
Gothic fancy, and drawn or stamped in the glittering plaster, composed
of lime, pebbles, and bits of glass, with which the woodwork of the
walls was overspread. On every side the seven gables pointed sharply
towards the sky, and presented the aspect of a whole sisterhood of
edifices, breathing through the spiracles of one great chimney. The
many lattices, with their small, diamond-shaped panes, admitted the
sunlight into hall and chamber, while, nevertheless, the second story,
projecting far over the base, and itself retiring beneath the third,
threw a shadowy and thoughtful gloom into the lower rooms. Carved
globes of wood were affixed under the jutting stories. Little spiral
rods of iron beautified each of the seven peaks. On the triangular
portion of the gable, that fronted next the street, was a dial, put up
that very morning, and on which the sun was still marking the passage
of the first bright hour in a history that was not destined to be all
so bright. All around were scattered shavings, chips, shingles, and
broken halves of bricks; these, together with the lately turned earth,
on which the grass had not begun to grow, contributed to the impression
of strangeness and novelty proper to a house that had yet its place to
make among men's daily interests.
The principal entrance, which had almost the breadth of a church-door,
was in the angle between the two front gables, and was covered by an
open porch, with benches beneath its shelter. Under this arched
doorway, scraping their feet on the unworn threshold, now trod the
clergymen, the elders, the magistrates, the deacons, and whatever of
aristocracy there was in town or county. Thither, too, thronged the
plebeian classes as freely as their betters, and in larger number.
Just within the entrance, however, stood two serving-men, pointing some
of the guests to the neighborhood of the kitchen and ushering others
into the statelier rooms,--hospitable alike to all, but still with a
scrutinizing regard to the high or low degree of each. Velvet garments
sombre but rich, stiffly plaited ruffs and bands, embroidered gloves,
venerable beards, the mien and countenance of authority, made it easy
to distinguish the gentleman of worship, at that period, from the
tradesman, with his plodding air, or the laborer, in his leathern
jerkin, stealing awe-stricken into the house which he had perhaps
helped to build.
One inauspicious circumstance there was, which awakened a hardly
concealed displeasure in the breasts of a few of the more punctilious
visitors. The founder of this stately mansion--a gentleman noted for
the square and ponderous courtesy of his demeanor, ought surely to have
stood in his own hall, and to have offered the first welcome to so many
eminent personages as here presented themselves in honor of his solemn
festival. He was as yet invisible; the most favored of the guests had
not beheld him. This sluggishness on Colonel Pyncheon's part became
still more unaccountable, when the second dignitary of the province
made his appearance, and found no more ceremonious a reception. The
lieutenant-governor, although his visit was one of the anticipated
glories of the day, had alighted from his horse, and assisted his lady
from her side-saddle, and crossed the Colonel's threshold, without
other greeting than that of the principal domestic.
This person--a gray-headed man, of quiet and most respectful
deportment--found it necessary to explain that his master still
remained in his study, or private apartment; on entering which, an hour
before, he had expressed a wish on no account to be disturbed.
"Do not you see, fellow," said the high-sheriff of the county, taking
the servant aside, "that this is no less a man than the
lieutenant-governor? Summon Colonel Pyncheon at once! I know that he
received letters from England this morning; and, in the perusal and
consideration of them, an hour may have passed away without his
noticing it. But he will be ill-pleased, I judge, if you suffer him to
neglect the courtesy due to one of our chief rulers, and who may be
said to represent King William, in the absence of the governor himself.
Call your master instantly."
"Nay, please your worship," answered the man, in much perplexity, but
with a backwardness that strikingly indicated the hard and severe
character of Colonel Pyncheon's domestic rule; "my master's orders were
exceeding strict; and, as your worship knows, he permits of no
discretion in the obedience of those who owe him service. Let who list
open yonder door; I dare not, though the governor's own voice should
bid me do it!"
"Pooh, pooh, master high sheriff!" cried the lieutenant-governor, who
had overheard the foregoing discussion, and felt himself high enough in
station to play a little with his dignity. "I will take the matter
into my own hands. It is time that the good Colonel came forth to
greet his friends; else we shall be apt to suspect that he has taken a
sip too much of his Canary wine, in his extreme deliberation which cask
it were best to broach in honor of the day! But since he is so much
behindhand, I will give him a remembrancer myself!"
Accordingly, with such a tramp of his ponderous riding-boots as might
of itself have been audible in the remotest of the seven gables, he
advanced to the door, which the servant pointed out, and made its new
panels reecho with a loud, free knock. Then, looking round, with a
smile, to the spectators, he awaited a response. As none came,
however, he knocked again, but with the same unsatisfactory result as
at first. And now, being a trifle choleric in his temperament, the
lieutenant-governor uplifted the heavy hilt of his sword, wherewith he
so beat and banged upon the door, that, as some of the bystanders
whispered, the racket might have disturbed the dead. Be that as it
might, it seemed to produce no awakening effect on Colonel Pyncheon.
When the sound subsided, the silence through the house was deep,
dreary, and oppressive, notwithstanding that the tongues of many of the
guests had already been loosened by a surreptitious cup or two of wine
or spirits.
"Strange, forsooth!--very strange!" cried the lieutenant-governor,
whose smile was changed to a frown. "But seeing that our host sets us
the good example of forgetting ceremony, I shall likewise throw it
aside, and make free to intrude on his privacy."
He tried the door, which yielded to his hand, and was flung wide open
by a sudden gust of wind that passed, as with a loud sigh, from the
outermost portal through all the passages and apartments of the new
house. It rustled the silken garments of the ladies, and waved the
long curls of the gentlemen's wigs, and shook the window-hangings and
the curtains of the bedchambers; causing everywhere a singular stir,
which yet was more like a hush. A shadow of awe and half-fearful
anticipation--nobody knew wherefore, nor of what--had all at once
fallen over the company.
They thronged, however, to the now open door, pressing the
lieutenant-governor, in the eagerness of their curiosity, into the room
in advance of them. At the first glimpse they beheld nothing
extraordinary: a handsomely furnished room, of moderate size, somewhat
darkened by curtains; books arranged on shelves; a large map on the
wall, and likewise a portrait of Colonel Pyncheon, beneath which sat
the original Colonel himself, in an oaken elbow-chair, with a pen in
his hand. Letters, parchments, and blank sheets of paper were on the
table before him. He appeared to gaze at the curious crowd, in front
of which stood the lieutenant-governor; and there was a frown on his
dark and massive countenance, as if sternly resentful of the boldness
that had impelled them into his private retirement.
A little boy--the Colonel's grandchild, and the only human being that
ever dared to be familiar with him--now made his way among the guests,
and ran towards the seated figure; then pausing halfway, he began to
shriek with terror. The company, tremulous as the leaves of a tree,
when all are shaking together, drew nearer, and perceived that there
was an unnatural distortion in the fixedness of Colonel Pyncheon's
stare; that there was blood on his ruff, and that his hoary beard was
saturated with it. It was too late to give assistance. The
iron-hearted Puritan, the relentless persecutor, the grasping and
strong-willed man was dead! Dead, in his new house! There is a
tradition, only worth alluding to as lending a tinge of superstitious
awe to a scene perhaps gloomy enough without it, that a voice spoke
loudly among the guests, the tones of which were like those of old
Matthew Maule, the executed wizard,--"God hath given him blood to
drink!"
Thus early had that one guest,--the only guest who is certain, at one
time or another, to find his way into every human dwelling,--thus early
had Death stepped across the threshold of the House of the Seven Gables!
Colonel Pyncheon's sudden and mysterious end made a vast deal of noise
in its day. There were many rumors, some of which have vaguely drifted
down to the present time, how that appearances indicated violence; that
there were the marks of fingers on his throat, and the print of a
bloody hand on his plaited ruff; and that his peaked beard was
dishevelled, as if it had been fiercely clutched and pulled. It was
averred, likewise, that the lattice window, near the Colonel's chair,
was open; and that, only a few minutes before the fatal occurrence, the
figure of a man had been seen clambering over the garden fence, in the
rear of the house. But it were folly to lay any stress on stories of
this kind, which are sure to spring up around such an event as that now
related, and which, as in the present case, sometimes prolong
themselves for ages afterwards, like the toadstools that indicate where
the fallen and buried trunk of a tree has long since mouldered into the
earth. For our own part, we allow them just as little credence as to
that other fable of the skeleton hand which the lieutenant-governor was
said to have seen at the Colonel's throat, but which vanished away, as
he advanced farther into the room. Certain it is, however, that there
was a great consultation and dispute of doctors over the dead body.
One,--John Swinnerton by name,--who appears to have been a man of
eminence, upheld it, if we have rightly understood his terms of art, to
be a case of apoplexy. His professional brethren, each for himself,
adopted various hypotheses, more or less plausible, but all dressed out
in a perplexing mystery of phrase, which, if it do not show a
bewilderment of mind in these erudite physicians, certainly causes it
in the unlearned peruser of their opinions. The coroner's jury sat
upon the corpse, and, like sensible men, returned an unassailable
verdict of "Sudden Death!"
It is indeed difficult to imagine that there could have been a serious
suspicion of murder, or the slightest grounds for implicating any
particular individual as the perpetrator. The rank, wealth, and
eminent character of the deceased must have insured the strictest
scrutiny into every ambiguous circumstance. As none such is on record,
it is safe to assume that none existed. Tradition,--which sometimes
brings down truth that history has let slip, but is oftener the wild
babble of the time, such as was formerly spoken at the fireside and now
congeals in newspapers,--tradition is responsible for all contrary
averments. In Colonel Pyncheon's funeral sermon, which was printed,
and is still extant, the Rev. Mr. Higginson enumerates, among the many
felicities of his distinguished parishioner's earthly career, the happy
seasonableness of his death. His duties all performed,--the highest
prosperity attained,--his race and future generations fixed on a stable
basis, and with a stately roof to shelter them for centuries to
come,--what other upward step remained for this good man to take, save
the final step from earth to the golden gate of heaven! The pious
clergyman surely would not have uttered words like these had he in the
least suspected that the Colonel had been thrust into the other world
with the clutch of violence upon his throat.
The family of Colonel Pyncheon, at the epoch of his death, seemed
destined to as fortunate a permanence as can anywise consist with the
inherent instability of human affairs. It might fairly be anticipated
that the progress of time would rather increase and ripen their
prosperity, than wear away and destroy it. For, not only had his son
and heir come into immediate enjoyment of a rich estate, but there was
a claim through an Indian deed, confirmed by a subsequent grant of the
General Court, to a vast and as yet unexplored and unmeasured tract of
Eastern lands. These possessions--for as such they might almost
certainly be reckoned--comprised the greater part of what is now known
as Waldo County, in the state of Maine, and were more extensive than
many a dukedom, or even a reigning prince's territory, on European
soil. When the pathless forest that still covered this wild
principality should give place--as it inevitably must, though perhaps
not till ages hence--to the golden fertility of human culture, it would
be the source of incalculable wealth to the Pyncheon blood. Had the
Colonel survived only a few weeks longer, it is probable that his great
political influence, and powerful connections at home and abroad, would
have consummated all that was necessary to render the claim available.
But, in spite of good Mr. Higginson's congratulatory eloquence, this
appeared to be the one thing which Colonel Pyncheon, provident and
sagacious as he was, had allowed to go at loose ends. So far as the
prospective territory was concerned, he unquestionably died too soon.
His son lacked not merely the father's eminent position, but the talent
and force of character to achieve it: he could, therefore, effect
nothing by dint of political interest; and the bare justice or legality
of the claim was not so apparent, after the Colonel's decease, as it
had been pronounced in his lifetime. Some connecting link had slipped
out of the evidence, and could not anywhere be found.
Efforts, it is true, were made by the Pyncheons, not only then, but at
various periods for nearly a hundred years afterwards, to obtain what
they stubbornly persisted in deeming their right. But, in course of
time, the territory was partly regranted to more favored individuals,
and partly cleared and occupied by actual settlers. These last, if
they ever heard of the Pyncheon title, would have laughed at the idea
of any man's asserting a right--on the strength of mouldy parchments,
signed with the faded autographs of governors and legislators long dead
and forgotten--to the lands which they or their fathers had wrested
from the wild hand of nature by their own sturdy toil. This impalpable
claim, therefore, resulted in nothing more solid than to cherish, from
generation to generation, an absurd delusion of family importance,
which all along characterized the Pyncheons. It caused the poorest
member of the race to feel as if he inherited a kind of nobility, and
might yet come into the possession of princely wealth to support it.
In the better specimens of the breed, this peculiarity threw an ideal
grace over the hard material of human life, without stealing away any
truly valuable quality. In the baser sort, its effect was to increase
the liability to sluggishness and dependence, and induce the victim of
a shadowy hope to remit all self-effort, while awaiting the realization
of his dreams. Years and years after their claim had passed out of the
public memory, the Pyncheons were accustomed to consult the Colonel's
ancient map, which had been projected while Waldo County was still an
unbroken wilderness. Where the old land surveyor had put down woods,
lakes, and rivers, they marked out the cleared spaces, and dotted the
villages and towns, and calculated the progressively increasing value
of the territory, as if there were yet a prospect of its ultimately
forming a princedom for themselves.
In almost every generation, nevertheless, there happened to be some one
descendant of the family gifted with a portion of the hard, keen sense,
and practical energy, that had so remarkably distinguished the original
founder. His character, indeed, might be traced all the way down, as
distinctly as if the Colonel himself, a little diluted, had been gifted
with a sort of intermittent immortality on earth. At two or three
epochs, when the fortunes of the family were low, this representative
of hereditary qualities had made his appearance, and caused the
traditionary gossips of the town to whisper among themselves, "Here is
the old Pyncheon come again! Now the Seven Gables will be
new-shingled!" From father to son, they clung to the ancestral house
with singular tenacity of home attachment. For various reasons,
however, and from impressions often too vaguely founded to be put on
paper, the writer cherishes the belief that many, if not most, of the
successive proprietors of this estate were troubled with doubts as to
their moral right to hold it. Of their legal tenure there could be no
question; but old Matthew Maule, it is to be feared, trode downward
from his own age to a far later one, planting a heavy footstep, all the
way, on the conscience of a Pyncheon. If so, we are left to dispose of
the awful query, whether each inheritor of the property--conscious of
wrong, and failing to rectify it--did not commit anew the great guilt
of his ancestor, and incur all its original responsibilities. And
supposing such to be the case, would it not be a far truer mode of
expression to say of the Pyncheon family, that they inherited a great
misfortune, than the reverse?
We have already hinted that it is not our purpose to trace down the
history of the Pyncheon family, in its unbroken connection with the
House of the Seven Gables; nor to show, as in a magic picture, how the
rustiness and infirmity of age gathered over the venerable house
itself. As regards its interior life, a large, dim looking-glass used
to hang in one of the rooms, and was fabled to contain within its
depths all the shapes that had ever been reflected there,--the old
Colonel himself, and his many descendants, some in the garb of antique
babyhood, and others in the bloom of feminine beauty or manly prime, or
saddened with the wrinkles of frosty age. Had we the secret of that
mirror, we would gladly sit down before it, and transfer its
revelations to our page. But there was a story, for which it is
difficult to conceive any foundation, that the posterity of Matthew
Maule had some connection with the mystery of the looking-glass, and
that, by what appears to have been a sort of mesmeric process, they
could make its inner region all alive with the departed Pyncheons; not
as they had shown themselves to the world, nor in their better and
happier hours, but as doing over again some deed of sin, or in the
crisis of life's bitterest sorrow. The popular imagination, indeed,
long kept itself busy with the affair of the old Puritan Pyncheon and
the wizard Maule; the curse which the latter flung from his scaffold
was remembered, with the very important addition, that it had become a
part of the Pyncheon inheritance. If one of the family did but gurgle
in his throat, a bystander would be likely enough to whisper, between
jest and earnest, "He has Maule's blood to drink!" The sudden death of
a Pyncheon, about a hundred years ago, with circumstances very similar
to what have been related of the Colonel's exit, was held as giving
additional probability to the received opinion on this topic. It was
considered, moreover, an ugly and ominous circumstance, that Colonel
Pyncheon's picture--in obedience, it was said, to a provision of his
will--remained affixed to the wall of the room in which he died. Those
stern, immitigable features seemed to symbolize an evil influence, and
so darkly to mingle the shadow of their presence with the sunshine of
the passing hour, that no good thoughts or purposes could ever spring
up and blossom there. To the thoughtful mind there will be no tinge of
superstition in what we figuratively express, by affirming that the
ghost of a dead progenitor--perhaps as a portion of his own
punishment--is often doomed to become the Evil Genius of his family.
The Pyncheons, in brief, lived along, for the better part of two
centuries, with perhaps less of outward vicissitude than has attended
most other New England families during the same period of time.
Possessing very distinctive traits of their own, they nevertheless took
the general characteristics of the little community in which they
dwelt; a town noted for its frugal, discreet, well-ordered, and
home-loving inhabitants, as well as for the somewhat confined scope of
its sympathies; but in which, be it said, there are odder individuals,
and, now and then, stranger occurrences, than one meets with almost
anywhere else. During the Revolution, the Pyncheon of that epoch,
adopting the royal side, became a refugee; but repented, and made his
reappearance, just at the point of time to preserve the House of the
Seven Gables from confiscation. For the last seventy years the most
noted event in the Pyncheon annals had been likewise the heaviest
calamity that ever befell the race; no less than the violent death--for
so it was adjudged--of one member of the family by the criminal act of
another. Certain circumstances attending this fatal occurrence had
brought the deed irresistibly home to a nephew of the deceased
Pyncheon. The young man was tried and convicted of the crime; but
either the circumstantial nature of the evidence, and possibly some
lurking doubts in the breast of the executive, or, lastly--an argument
of greater weight in a republic than it could have been under a
monarchy,--the high respectability and political influence of the
criminal's connections, had availed to mitigate his doom from death to
perpetual imprisonment. This sad affair had chanced about thirty years
before the action of our story commences. Latterly, there were rumors
(which few believed, and only one or two felt greatly interested in)
that this long-buried man was likely, for some reason or other, to be
summoned forth from his living tomb.
It is essential to say a few words respecting the victim of this now
almost forgotten murder. He was an old bachelor, and possessed of
great wealth, in addition to the house and real estate which
constituted what remained of the ancient Pyncheon property. Being of
an eccentric and melancholy turn of mind, and greatly given to
rummaging old records and hearkening to old traditions, he had brought
himself, it is averred, to the conclusion that Matthew Maule, the
wizard, had been foully wronged out of his homestead, if not out of his
life. Such being the case, and he, the old bachelor, in possession of
the ill-gotten spoil,--with the black stain of blood sunken deep into
it, and still to be scented by conscientious nostrils,--the question
occurred, whether it were not imperative upon him, even at this late
hour, to make restitution to Maule's posterity. To a man living so
much in the past, and so little in the present, as the secluded and
antiquarian old bachelor, a century and a half seemed not so vast a
period as to obviate the propriety of substituting right for wrong. It
was the belief of those who knew him best, that he would positively
have taken the very singular step of giving up the House of the Seven
Gables to the representative of Matthew Maule, but for the unspeakable
tumult which a suspicion of the old gentleman's project awakened among
his Pyncheon relatives. Their exertions had the effect of suspending
his purpose; but it was feared that he would perform, after death, by
the operation of his last will, what he had so hardly been prevented
from doing in his proper lifetime. But there is no one thing which men
so rarely do, whatever the provocation or inducement, as to bequeath
patrimonial property away from their own blood. They may love other
individuals far better than their relatives,--they may even cherish
dislike, or positive hatred, to the latter; but yet, in view of death,
the strong prejudice of propinquity revives, and impels the testator to
send down his estate in the line marked out by custom so immemorial
that it looks like nature. In all the Pyncheons, this feeling had the
energy of disease. It was too powerful for the conscientious scruples
of the old bachelor; at whose death, accordingly, the mansion-house,
together with most of his other riches, passed into the possession of
his next legal representative.
This was a nephew, the cousin of the miserable young man who had been
convicted of the uncle's murder. The new heir, up to the period of his
accession, was reckoned rather a dissipated youth, but had at once
reformed, and made himself an exceedingly respectable member of
society. In fact, he showed more of the Pyncheon quality, and had won
higher eminence in the world, than any of his race since the time of
the original Puritan. Applying himself in earlier manhood to the study
of the law, and having a natural tendency towards office, he had
attained, many years ago, to a judicial situation in some inferior
court, which gave him for life the very desirable and imposing title of
judge. Later, he had engaged in politics, and served a part of two
terms in Congress, besides making a considerable figure in both
branches of the State legislature. Judge Pyncheon was unquestionably
an honor to his race. He had built himself a country-seat within a few
miles of his native town, and there spent such portions of his time as
could be spared from public service in the display of every grace and
virtue--as a newspaper phrased it, on the eve of an election--befitting
the Christian, the good citizen, the horticulturist, and the gentleman.
There were few of the Pyncheons left to sun themselves in the glow of
the Judge's prosperity. In respect to natural increase, the breed had
not thriven; it appeared rather to be dying out. The only members of
the family known to be extant were, first, the Judge himself, and a
single surviving son, who was now travelling in Europe; next, the
thirty years' prisoner, already alluded to, and a sister of the latter,
who occupied, in an extremely retired manner, the House of the Seven
Gables, in which she had a life-estate by the will of the old bachelor.
She was understood to be wretchedly poor, and seemed to make it her
choice to remain so; inasmuch as her affluent cousin, the Judge, had
repeatedly offered her all the comforts of life, either in the old
mansion or his own modern residence. The last and youngest Pyncheon
was a little country-girl of seventeen, the daughter of another of the
Judge's cousins, who had married a young woman of no family or
property, and died early and in poor circumstances. His widow had
recently taken another husband.
As for Matthew Maule's posterity, it was supposed now to be extinct.
For a very long period after the witchcraft delusion, however, the
Maules had continued to inhabit the town where their progenitor had
suffered so unjust a death. To all appearance, they were a quiet,
honest, well-meaning race of people, cherishing no malice against
individuals or the public for the wrong which had been done them; or
if, at their own fireside, they transmitted from father to child any
hostile recollection of the wizard's fate and their lost patrimony, it
was never acted upon, nor openly expressed. Nor would it have been
singular had they ceased to remember that the House of the Seven Gables
was resting its heavy framework on a foundation that was rightfully
their own. There is something so massive, stable, and almost
irresistibly imposing in the exterior presentment of established rank
and great possessions, that their very existence seems to give them a
right to exist; at least, so excellent a counterfeit of right, that few
poor and humble men have moral force enough to question it, even in
their secret minds. Such is the case now, after so many ancient
prejudices have been overthrown; and it was far more so in
ante-Revolutionary days, when the aristocracy could venture to be
proud, and the low were content to be abased. Thus the Maules, at all
events, kept their resentments within their own breasts. They were
generally poverty-stricken; always plebeian and obscure; working with
unsuccessful diligence at handicrafts; laboring on the wharves, or
following the sea, as sailors before the mast; living here and there
about the town, in hired tenements, and coming finally to the almshouse
as the natural home of their old age. At last, after creeping, as it
were, for such a length of time along the utmost verge of the opaque
puddle of obscurity, they had taken that downright plunge which, sooner
or later, is the destiny of all families, whether princely or plebeian.
For thirty years past, neither town-record, nor gravestone, nor the
directory, nor the knowledge or memory of man, bore any trace of
Matthew Maule's descendants. His blood might possibly exist elsewhere;
here, where its lowly current could be traced so far back, it had
ceased to keep an onward course.
So long as any of the race were to be found, they had been marked out
from other men--not strikingly, nor as with a sharp line, but with an
effect that was felt rather than spoken of--by an hereditary character
of reserve. Their companions, or those who endeavored to become such,
grew conscious of a circle round about the Maules, within the sanctity
or the spell of which, in spite of an exterior of sufficient frankness
and good-fellowship, it was impossible for any man to step. It was
this indefinable peculiarity, perhaps, that, by insulating them from
human aid, kept them always so unfortunate in life. It certainly
operated to prolong in their case, and to confirm to them as their only
inheritance, those feelings of repugnance and superstitious terror with
which the people of the town, even after awakening from their frenzy,
continued to regard the memory of the reputed witches. The mantle, or
rather the ragged cloak, of old Matthew Maule had fallen upon his
children. They were half believed to inherit mysterious attributes;
the family eye was said to possess strange power. Among other
good-for-nothing properties and privileges, one was especially assigned
them,--that of exercising an influence over people's dreams. The
Pyncheons, if all stories were true, haughtily as they bore themselves
in the noonday streets of their native town, were no better than
bond-servants to these plebeian Maules, on entering the topsy-turvy
commonwealth of sleep. Modern psychology, it may be, will endeavor to
reduce these alleged necromancies within a system, instead of rejecting
them as altogether fabulous.
A descriptive paragraph or two, treating of the seven-gabled mansion in
its more recent aspect, will bring this preliminary chapter to a close.
The street in which it upreared its venerable peaks has long ceased to
be a fashionable quarter of the town; so that, though the old edifice
was surrounded by habitations of modern date, they were mostly small,
built entirely of wood, and typical of the most plodding uniformity of
common life. Doubtless, however, the whole story of human existence
may be latent in each of them, but with no picturesqueness, externally,
that can attract the imagination or sympathy to seek it there. But as
for the old structure of our story, its white-oak frame, and its
boards, shingles, and crumbling plaster, and even the huge, clustered
chimney in the midst, seemed to constitute only the least and meanest
part of its reality. So much of mankind's varied experience had passed
there,--so much had been suffered, and something, too, enjoyed,--that
the very timbers were oozy, as with the moisture of a heart. It was
itself like a great human heart, with a life of its own, and full of
rich and sombre reminiscences.
The deep projection of the second story gave the house such a
meditative look, that you could not pass it without the idea that it
had secrets to keep, and an eventful history to moralize upon. In
front, just on the edge of the unpaved sidewalk, grew the Pyncheon Elm,
which, in reference to such trees as one usually meets with, might well
be termed gigantic. It had been planted by a great-grandson of the
first Pyncheon, and, though now four-score years of age, or perhaps
nearer a hundred, was still in its strong and broad maturity, throwing
its shadow from side to side of the street, overtopping the seven
gables, and sweeping the whole black roof with its pendant foliage. It
gave beauty to the old edifice, and seemed to make it a part of nature.
The street having been widened about forty years ago, the front gable
was now precisely on a line with it. On either side extended a ruinous
wooden fence of open lattice-work, through which could be seen a grassy
yard, and, especially in the angles of the building, an enormous
fertility of burdocks, with leaves, it is hardly an exaggeration to
say, two or three feet long. Behind the house there appeared to be a
garden, which undoubtedly had once been extensive, but was now
infringed upon by other enclosures, or shut in by habitations and
outbuildings that stood on another street. It would be an omission,
trifling, indeed, but unpardonable, were we to forget the green moss
that had long since gathered over the projections of the windows, and
on the slopes of the roof nor must we fail to direct the reader's eye
to a crop, not of weeds, but flower-shrubs, which were growing aloft in
the air, not a great way from the chimney, in the nook between two of
the gables. They were called Alice's Posies. The tradition was, that
a certain Alice Pyncheon had flung up the seeds, in sport, and that the
dust of the street and the decay of the roof gradually formed a kind of
soil for them, out of which they grew, when Alice had long been in her
grave. However the flowers might have come there, it was both sad and
sweet to observe how Nature adopted to herself this desolate, decaying,
gusty, rusty old house of the Pyncheon family; and how the
ever-returning Summer did her best to gladden it with tender beauty,
and grew melancholy in the effort.
There is one other feature, very essential to be noticed, but which, we
greatly fear, may damage any picturesque and romantic impression which
we have been willing to throw over our sketch of this respectable
edifice. In the front gable, under the impending brow of the second
story, and contiguous to the street, was a shop-door, divided
horizontally in the midst, and with a window for its upper segment,
such as is often seen in dwellings of a somewhat ancient date. This
same shop-door had been a subject of no slight mortification to the
present occupant of the august Pyncheon House, as well as to some of
her predecessors. The matter is disagreeably delicate to handle; but,
since the reader must needs be let into the secret, he will please to
understand, that, about a century ago, the head of the Pyncheons found
himself involved in serious financial difficulties. The fellow
(gentleman, as he styled himself) can hardly have been other than a
spurious interloper; for, instead of seeking office from the king or
the royal governor, or urging his hereditary claim to Eastern lands, he
bethought himself of no better avenue to wealth than by cutting a
shop-door through the side of his ancestral residence. It was the
custom of the time, indeed, for merchants to store their goods and
transact business in their own dwellings. But there was something
pitifully small in this old Pyncheon's mode of setting about his
commercial operations; it was whispered, that, with his own hands, all
beruffled as they were, he used to give change for a shilling, and
would turn a half-penny twice over, to make sure that it was a good
one. Beyond all question, he had the blood of a petty huckster in his
veins, through whatever channel it may have found its way there.
Immediately on his death, the shop-door had been locked, bolted, and
barred, and, down to the period of our story, had probably never once
been opened. The old counter, shelves, and other fixtures of the
little shop remained just as he had left them. It used to be affirmed,
that the dead shop-keeper, in a white wig, a faded velvet coat, an
apron at his waist, and his ruffles carefully turned back from his
wrists, might be seen through the chinks of the shutters, any night of
the year, ransacking his till, or poring over the dingy pages of his
day-book. From the look of unutterable woe upon his face, it appeared
to be his doom to spend eternity in a vain effort to make his accounts
balance.
And now--in a very humble way, as will be seen--we proceed to open our
narrative.
| The Old Pyncheon Family: The House of the Seven Gables is a rusty, wooden house halfway down Pyncheon Street in a New England town. The house, also known as Pyncheon House, has a long and weighty history. It was not the first house in its location; when Pyncheon Street was once Maule's Lane, there was a small hut built in that place because of its proximity to a natural spring. Colonel Pyncheon, however, a prominent person of the town, insisted on his claim to that property when it became more desirable, and engaged in a bitter dispute with the hut's owner, Matthew Maule, a relatively obscure man generally regarded as a wizard. Personal influence proved more important than right of ownership, and Matthew Maule was executed for the crime of witchcraft. One of the most vocal supporters of his witchcraft trial was none other than Colonel Pyncheon. Colonel Pyncheon built a family mansion there, and upon its construction the spring became polluted. The house was imposing, striking awe into anyone who saw it. Pyncheon retreated into the house, refusing visits from even the lieutenant-governor, who was forced to bang on the door with his sword to no effect. The lieutenant-governor and his entourage finally forced their way into the house, where they found Pyncheon dead. His appearance indicated violence: there were marks on his throat and the print of a bloody hand on his ruff. They concluded that a man had climbed through Pyncheon's lattice-window. The lieutenant-governor claimed to see a skeleton hand at the Colonel's throat that vanished away. John Swinnerton, a doctor, claimed that Pyncheon died of apoplexy. During his funeral, Reverend Higginson claimed that even without Colonel Pyncheon, his family seemed destined to a permanent high place in society. However, Pyncheon's son lacked his father's eminent position and force of character. The Pyncheons had an absurd delusion of family importance, but in almost every generation there happened to be one descendant that recalled Colonel Pyncheon, and this person invariably caused people to wonder whether the Pyncheon family would experience a renaissance. Most of these descendants were troubled by owning the House of the Seven Gables; they wondered whether, since they knew of the wrong by which it was obtained, they were committing the same sin anew. Since Colonel Pyncheon, the Pyncheons were notable in only one instance, when one member of the family was convicted for murdering another. This occurred thirty years before the action of the novel. The victim of the murder was an old bachelor who had concluded that Matthew Maule had been foully wronged out of his homestead and life. This bachelor wished to make restitution to Maule's posterity, and might have even given up the House of the Seven Gables to the representative of Matthew Maule. Upon his death, the house passed to his nephew, the cousin of the man convicted of murder. The new heir showed more of the Colonel Pyncheon quality than any of his family since the time of the Puritans. He was a politician and later a judge. There were few other Pyncheons left, including a seventeen year old girl, the convicted murderer and his sister, and the judge's son, who was traveling in Europe. Matthew Maule's posterity seemed to be extinct. They were poverty-stricken, and likely did not know the wrong that had been done so many years before. The House of the Seven Gables itself was like a great human heart with a life of its own, full of rich remembrances. A green moss of flower shrubs called Alice's Posies had grown upon one of the gables. In the front gable there was a shop door that had once contained a small store. | summary |
HALFWAY down a by-street of one of our New England towns stands a rusty
wooden house, with seven acutely peaked gables, facing towards various
points of the compass, and a huge, clustered chimney in the midst. The
street is Pyncheon Street; the house is the old Pyncheon House; and an
elm-tree, of wide circumference, rooted before the door, is familiar to
every town-born child by the title of the Pyncheon Elm. On my
occasional visits to the town aforesaid, I seldom failed to turn down
Pyncheon Street, for the sake of passing through the shadow of these
two antiquities,--the great elm-tree and the weather-beaten edifice.
The aspect of the venerable mansion has always affected me like a human
countenance, bearing the traces not merely of outward storm and
sunshine, but expressive also, of the long lapse of mortal life, and
accompanying vicissitudes that have passed within. Were these to be
worthily recounted, they would form a narrative of no small interest
and instruction, and possessing, moreover, a certain remarkable unity,
which might almost seem the result of artistic arrangement. But the
story would include a chain of events extending over the better part of
two centuries, and, written out with reasonable amplitude, would fill a
bigger folio volume, or a longer series of duodecimos, than could
prudently be appropriated to the annals of all New England during a
similar period. It consequently becomes imperative to make short work
with most of the traditionary lore of which the old Pyncheon House,
otherwise known as the House of the Seven Gables, has been the theme.
With a brief sketch, therefore, of the circumstances amid which the
foundation of the house was laid, and a rapid glimpse at its quaint
exterior, as it grew black in the prevalent east wind,--pointing, too,
here and there, at some spot of more verdant mossiness on its roof and
walls,--we shall commence the real action of our tale at an epoch not
very remote from the present day. Still, there will be a connection
with the long past--a reference to forgotten events and personages, and
to manners, feelings, and opinions, almost or wholly obsolete--which,
if adequately translated to the reader, would serve to illustrate how
much of old material goes to make up the freshest novelty of human
life. Hence, too, might be drawn a weighty lesson from the
little-regarded truth, that the act of the passing generation is the
germ which may and must produce good or evil fruit in a far-distant
time; that, together with the seed of the merely temporary crop, which
mortals term expediency, they inevitably sow the acorns of a more
enduring growth, which may darkly overshadow their posterity.
The House of the Seven Gables, antique as it now looks, was not the
first habitation erected by civilized man on precisely the same spot of
ground. Pyncheon Street formerly bore the humbler appellation of
Maule's Lane, from the name of the original occupant of the soil,
before whose cottage-door it was a cow-path. A natural spring of soft
and pleasant water--a rare treasure on the sea-girt peninsula where the
Puritan settlement was made--had early induced Matthew Maule to build a
hut, shaggy with thatch, at this point, although somewhat too remote
from what was then the centre of the village. In the growth of the
town, however, after some thirty or forty years, the site covered by
this rude hovel had become exceedingly desirable in the eyes of a
prominent and powerful personage, who asserted plausible claims to the
proprietorship of this and a large adjacent tract of land, on the
strength of a grant from the legislature. Colonel Pyncheon, the
claimant, as we gather from whatever traits of him are preserved, was
characterized by an iron energy of purpose. Matthew Maule, on the
other hand, though an obscure man, was stubborn in the defence of what
he considered his right; and, for several years, he succeeded in
protecting the acre or two of earth which, with his own toil, he had
hewn out of the primeval forest, to be his garden ground and homestead.
No written record of this dispute is known to be in existence. Our
acquaintance with the whole subject is derived chiefly from tradition.
It would be bold, therefore, and possibly unjust, to venture a decisive
opinion as to its merits; although it appears to have been at least a
matter of doubt, whether Colonel Pyncheon's claim were not unduly
stretched, in order to make it cover the small metes and bounds of
Matthew Maule. What greatly strengthens such a suspicion is the fact
that this controversy between two ill-matched antagonists--at a period,
moreover, laud it as we may, when personal influence had far more
weight than now--remained for years undecided, and came to a close only
with the death of the party occupying the disputed soil. The mode of
his death, too, affects the mind differently, in our day, from what it
did a century and a half ago. It was a death that blasted with strange
horror the humble name of the dweller in the cottage, and made it seem
almost a religious act to drive the plough over the little area of his
habitation, and obliterate his place and memory from among men.
Old Matthew Maule, in a word, was executed for the crime of witchcraft.
He was one of the martyrs to that terrible delusion, which should teach
us, among its other morals, that the influential classes, and those who
take upon themselves to be leaders of the people, are fully liable to
all the passionate error that has ever characterized the maddest mob.
Clergymen, judges, statesmen,--the wisest, calmest, holiest persons of
their day stood in the inner circle round about the gallows, loudest to
applaud the work of blood, latest to confess themselves miserably
deceived. If any one part of their proceedings can be said to deserve
less blame than another, it was the singular indiscrimination with
which they persecuted, not merely the poor and aged, as in former
judicial massacres, but people of all ranks; their own equals,
brethren, and wives. Amid the disorder of such various ruin, it is not
strange that a man of inconsiderable note, like Maule, should have
trodden the martyr's path to the hill of execution almost unremarked in
the throng of his fellow sufferers. But, in after days, when the
frenzy of that hideous epoch had subsided, it was remembered how loudly
Colonel Pyncheon had joined in the general cry, to purge the land from
witchcraft; nor did it fail to be whispered, that there was an
invidious acrimony in the zeal with which he had sought the
condemnation of Matthew Maule. It was well known that the victim had
recognized the bitterness of personal enmity in his persecutor's
conduct towards him, and that he declared himself hunted to death for
his spoil. At the moment of execution--with the halter about his neck,
and while Colonel Pyncheon sat on horseback, grimly gazing at the scene
Maule had addressed him from the scaffold, and uttered a prophecy, of
which history, as well as fireside tradition, has preserved the very
words. "God," said the dying man, pointing his finger, with a ghastly
look, at the undismayed countenance of his enemy,--"God will give him
blood to drink!" After the reputed wizard's death, his humble
homestead had fallen an easy spoil into Colonel Pyncheon's grasp. When
it was understood, however, that the Colonel intended to erect a family
mansion-spacious, ponderously framed of oaken timber, and calculated to
endure for many generations of his posterity over the spot first
covered by the log-built hut of Matthew Maule, there was much shaking
of the head among the village gossips. Without absolutely expressing a
doubt whether the stalwart Puritan had acted as a man of conscience and
integrity throughout the proceedings which have been sketched, they,
nevertheless, hinted that he was about to build his house over an
unquiet grave. His home would include the home of the dead and buried
wizard, and would thus afford the ghost of the latter a kind of
privilege to haunt its new apartments, and the chambers into which
future bridegrooms were to lead their brides, and where children of the
Pyncheon blood were to be born. The terror and ugliness of Maule's
crime, and the wretchedness of his punishment, would darken the freshly
plastered walls, and infect them early with the scent of an old and
melancholy house. Why, then,--while so much of the soil around him was
bestrewn with the virgin forest leaves,--why should Colonel Pyncheon
prefer a site that had already been accurst?
But the Puritan soldier and magistrate was not a man to be turned aside
from his well-considered scheme, either by dread of the wizard's ghost,
or by flimsy sentimentalities of any kind, however specious. Had he
been told of a bad air, it might have moved him somewhat; but he was
ready to encounter an evil spirit on his own ground. Endowed with
commonsense, as massive and hard as blocks of granite, fastened
together by stern rigidity of purpose, as with iron clamps, he followed
out his original design, probably without so much as imagining an
objection to it. On the score of delicacy, or any scrupulousness which
a finer sensibility might have taught him, the Colonel, like most of
his breed and generation, was impenetrable. He therefore dug his
cellar, and laid the deep foundations of his mansion, on the square of
earth whence Matthew Maule, forty years before, had first swept away
the fallen leaves. It was a curious, and, as some people thought, an
ominous fact, that, very soon after the workmen began their operations,
the spring of water, above mentioned, entirely lost the deliciousness
of its pristine quality. Whether its sources were disturbed by the
depth of the new cellar, or whatever subtler cause might lurk at the
bottom, it is certain that the water of Maule's Well, as it continued
to be called, grew hard and brackish. Even such we find it now; and
any old woman of the neighborhood will certify that it is productive of
intestinal mischief to those who quench their thirst there.
The reader may deem it singular that the head carpenter of the new
edifice was no other than the son of the very man from whose dead gripe
the property of the soil had been wrested. Not improbably he was the
best workman of his time; or, perhaps, the Colonel thought it
expedient, or was impelled by some better feeling, thus openly to cast
aside all animosity against the race of his fallen antagonist. Nor was
it out of keeping with the general coarseness and matter-of-fact
character of the age, that the son should be willing to earn an honest
penny, or, rather, a weighty amount of sterling pounds, from the purse
of his father's deadly enemy. At all events, Thomas Maule became the
architect of the House of the Seven Gables, and performed his duty so
faithfully that the timber framework fastened by his hands still holds
together.
Thus the great house was built. Familiar as it stands in the writer's
recollection,--for it has been an object of curiosity with him from
boyhood, both as a specimen of the best and stateliest architecture of
a longpast epoch, and as the scene of events more full of human
interest, perhaps, than those of a gray feudal castle,--familiar as it
stands, in its rusty old age, it is therefore only the more difficult
to imagine the bright novelty with which it first caught the sunshine.
The impression of its actual state, at this distance of a hundred and
sixty years, darkens inevitably through the picture which we would fain
give of its appearance on the morning when the Puritan magnate bade all
the town to be his guests. A ceremony of consecration, festive as well
as religious, was now to be performed. A prayer and discourse from the
Rev. Mr. Higginson, and the outpouring of a psalm from the general
throat of the community, was to be made acceptable to the grosser sense
by ale, cider, wine, and brandy, in copious effusion, and, as some
authorities aver, by an ox, roasted whole, or at least, by the weight
and substance of an ox, in more manageable joints and sirloins. The
carcass of a deer, shot within twenty miles, had supplied material for
the vast circumference of a pasty. A codfish of sixty pounds, caught
in the bay, had been dissolved into the rich liquid of a chowder. The
chimney of the new house, in short, belching forth its kitchen smoke,
impregnated the whole air with the scent of meats, fowls, and fishes,
spicily concocted with odoriferous herbs, and onions in abundance. The
mere smell of such festivity, making its way to everybody's nostrils,
was at once an invitation and an appetite.
Maule's Lane, or Pyncheon Street, as it were now more decorous to call
it, was thronged, at the appointed hour, as with a congregation on its
way to church. All, as they approached, looked upward at the imposing
edifice, which was henceforth to assume its rank among the habitations
of mankind. There it rose, a little withdrawn from the line of the
street, but in pride, not modesty. Its whole visible exterior was
ornamented with quaint figures, conceived in the grotesqueness of a
Gothic fancy, and drawn or stamped in the glittering plaster, composed
of lime, pebbles, and bits of glass, with which the woodwork of the
walls was overspread. On every side the seven gables pointed sharply
towards the sky, and presented the aspect of a whole sisterhood of
edifices, breathing through the spiracles of one great chimney. The
many lattices, with their small, diamond-shaped panes, admitted the
sunlight into hall and chamber, while, nevertheless, the second story,
projecting far over the base, and itself retiring beneath the third,
threw a shadowy and thoughtful gloom into the lower rooms. Carved
globes of wood were affixed under the jutting stories. Little spiral
rods of iron beautified each of the seven peaks. On the triangular
portion of the gable, that fronted next the street, was a dial, put up
that very morning, and on which the sun was still marking the passage
of the first bright hour in a history that was not destined to be all
so bright. All around were scattered shavings, chips, shingles, and
broken halves of bricks; these, together with the lately turned earth,
on which the grass had not begun to grow, contributed to the impression
of strangeness and novelty proper to a house that had yet its place to
make among men's daily interests.
The principal entrance, which had almost the breadth of a church-door,
was in the angle between the two front gables, and was covered by an
open porch, with benches beneath its shelter. Under this arched
doorway, scraping their feet on the unworn threshold, now trod the
clergymen, the elders, the magistrates, the deacons, and whatever of
aristocracy there was in town or county. Thither, too, thronged the
plebeian classes as freely as their betters, and in larger number.
Just within the entrance, however, stood two serving-men, pointing some
of the guests to the neighborhood of the kitchen and ushering others
into the statelier rooms,--hospitable alike to all, but still with a
scrutinizing regard to the high or low degree of each. Velvet garments
sombre but rich, stiffly plaited ruffs and bands, embroidered gloves,
venerable beards, the mien and countenance of authority, made it easy
to distinguish the gentleman of worship, at that period, from the
tradesman, with his plodding air, or the laborer, in his leathern
jerkin, stealing awe-stricken into the house which he had perhaps
helped to build.
One inauspicious circumstance there was, which awakened a hardly
concealed displeasure in the breasts of a few of the more punctilious
visitors. The founder of this stately mansion--a gentleman noted for
the square and ponderous courtesy of his demeanor, ought surely to have
stood in his own hall, and to have offered the first welcome to so many
eminent personages as here presented themselves in honor of his solemn
festival. He was as yet invisible; the most favored of the guests had
not beheld him. This sluggishness on Colonel Pyncheon's part became
still more unaccountable, when the second dignitary of the province
made his appearance, and found no more ceremonious a reception. The
lieutenant-governor, although his visit was one of the anticipated
glories of the day, had alighted from his horse, and assisted his lady
from her side-saddle, and crossed the Colonel's threshold, without
other greeting than that of the principal domestic.
This person--a gray-headed man, of quiet and most respectful
deportment--found it necessary to explain that his master still
remained in his study, or private apartment; on entering which, an hour
before, he had expressed a wish on no account to be disturbed.
"Do not you see, fellow," said the high-sheriff of the county, taking
the servant aside, "that this is no less a man than the
lieutenant-governor? Summon Colonel Pyncheon at once! I know that he
received letters from England this morning; and, in the perusal and
consideration of them, an hour may have passed away without his
noticing it. But he will be ill-pleased, I judge, if you suffer him to
neglect the courtesy due to one of our chief rulers, and who may be
said to represent King William, in the absence of the governor himself.
Call your master instantly."
"Nay, please your worship," answered the man, in much perplexity, but
with a backwardness that strikingly indicated the hard and severe
character of Colonel Pyncheon's domestic rule; "my master's orders were
exceeding strict; and, as your worship knows, he permits of no
discretion in the obedience of those who owe him service. Let who list
open yonder door; I dare not, though the governor's own voice should
bid me do it!"
"Pooh, pooh, master high sheriff!" cried the lieutenant-governor, who
had overheard the foregoing discussion, and felt himself high enough in
station to play a little with his dignity. "I will take the matter
into my own hands. It is time that the good Colonel came forth to
greet his friends; else we shall be apt to suspect that he has taken a
sip too much of his Canary wine, in his extreme deliberation which cask
it were best to broach in honor of the day! But since he is so much
behindhand, I will give him a remembrancer myself!"
Accordingly, with such a tramp of his ponderous riding-boots as might
of itself have been audible in the remotest of the seven gables, he
advanced to the door, which the servant pointed out, and made its new
panels reecho with a loud, free knock. Then, looking round, with a
smile, to the spectators, he awaited a response. As none came,
however, he knocked again, but with the same unsatisfactory result as
at first. And now, being a trifle choleric in his temperament, the
lieutenant-governor uplifted the heavy hilt of his sword, wherewith he
so beat and banged upon the door, that, as some of the bystanders
whispered, the racket might have disturbed the dead. Be that as it
might, it seemed to produce no awakening effect on Colonel Pyncheon.
When the sound subsided, the silence through the house was deep,
dreary, and oppressive, notwithstanding that the tongues of many of the
guests had already been loosened by a surreptitious cup or two of wine
or spirits.
"Strange, forsooth!--very strange!" cried the lieutenant-governor,
whose smile was changed to a frown. "But seeing that our host sets us
the good example of forgetting ceremony, I shall likewise throw it
aside, and make free to intrude on his privacy."
He tried the door, which yielded to his hand, and was flung wide open
by a sudden gust of wind that passed, as with a loud sigh, from the
outermost portal through all the passages and apartments of the new
house. It rustled the silken garments of the ladies, and waved the
long curls of the gentlemen's wigs, and shook the window-hangings and
the curtains of the bedchambers; causing everywhere a singular stir,
which yet was more like a hush. A shadow of awe and half-fearful
anticipation--nobody knew wherefore, nor of what--had all at once
fallen over the company.
They thronged, however, to the now open door, pressing the
lieutenant-governor, in the eagerness of their curiosity, into the room
in advance of them. At the first glimpse they beheld nothing
extraordinary: a handsomely furnished room, of moderate size, somewhat
darkened by curtains; books arranged on shelves; a large map on the
wall, and likewise a portrait of Colonel Pyncheon, beneath which sat
the original Colonel himself, in an oaken elbow-chair, with a pen in
his hand. Letters, parchments, and blank sheets of paper were on the
table before him. He appeared to gaze at the curious crowd, in front
of which stood the lieutenant-governor; and there was a frown on his
dark and massive countenance, as if sternly resentful of the boldness
that had impelled them into his private retirement.
A little boy--the Colonel's grandchild, and the only human being that
ever dared to be familiar with him--now made his way among the guests,
and ran towards the seated figure; then pausing halfway, he began to
shriek with terror. The company, tremulous as the leaves of a tree,
when all are shaking together, drew nearer, and perceived that there
was an unnatural distortion in the fixedness of Colonel Pyncheon's
stare; that there was blood on his ruff, and that his hoary beard was
saturated with it. It was too late to give assistance. The
iron-hearted Puritan, the relentless persecutor, the grasping and
strong-willed man was dead! Dead, in his new house! There is a
tradition, only worth alluding to as lending a tinge of superstitious
awe to a scene perhaps gloomy enough without it, that a voice spoke
loudly among the guests, the tones of which were like those of old
Matthew Maule, the executed wizard,--"God hath given him blood to
drink!"
Thus early had that one guest,--the only guest who is certain, at one
time or another, to find his way into every human dwelling,--thus early
had Death stepped across the threshold of the House of the Seven Gables!
Colonel Pyncheon's sudden and mysterious end made a vast deal of noise
in its day. There were many rumors, some of which have vaguely drifted
down to the present time, how that appearances indicated violence; that
there were the marks of fingers on his throat, and the print of a
bloody hand on his plaited ruff; and that his peaked beard was
dishevelled, as if it had been fiercely clutched and pulled. It was
averred, likewise, that the lattice window, near the Colonel's chair,
was open; and that, only a few minutes before the fatal occurrence, the
figure of a man had been seen clambering over the garden fence, in the
rear of the house. But it were folly to lay any stress on stories of
this kind, which are sure to spring up around such an event as that now
related, and which, as in the present case, sometimes prolong
themselves for ages afterwards, like the toadstools that indicate where
the fallen and buried trunk of a tree has long since mouldered into the
earth. For our own part, we allow them just as little credence as to
that other fable of the skeleton hand which the lieutenant-governor was
said to have seen at the Colonel's throat, but which vanished away, as
he advanced farther into the room. Certain it is, however, that there
was a great consultation and dispute of doctors over the dead body.
One,--John Swinnerton by name,--who appears to have been a man of
eminence, upheld it, if we have rightly understood his terms of art, to
be a case of apoplexy. His professional brethren, each for himself,
adopted various hypotheses, more or less plausible, but all dressed out
in a perplexing mystery of phrase, which, if it do not show a
bewilderment of mind in these erudite physicians, certainly causes it
in the unlearned peruser of their opinions. The coroner's jury sat
upon the corpse, and, like sensible men, returned an unassailable
verdict of "Sudden Death!"
It is indeed difficult to imagine that there could have been a serious
suspicion of murder, or the slightest grounds for implicating any
particular individual as the perpetrator. The rank, wealth, and
eminent character of the deceased must have insured the strictest
scrutiny into every ambiguous circumstance. As none such is on record,
it is safe to assume that none existed. Tradition,--which sometimes
brings down truth that history has let slip, but is oftener the wild
babble of the time, such as was formerly spoken at the fireside and now
congeals in newspapers,--tradition is responsible for all contrary
averments. In Colonel Pyncheon's funeral sermon, which was printed,
and is still extant, the Rev. Mr. Higginson enumerates, among the many
felicities of his distinguished parishioner's earthly career, the happy
seasonableness of his death. His duties all performed,--the highest
prosperity attained,--his race and future generations fixed on a stable
basis, and with a stately roof to shelter them for centuries to
come,--what other upward step remained for this good man to take, save
the final step from earth to the golden gate of heaven! The pious
clergyman surely would not have uttered words like these had he in the
least suspected that the Colonel had been thrust into the other world
with the clutch of violence upon his throat.
The family of Colonel Pyncheon, at the epoch of his death, seemed
destined to as fortunate a permanence as can anywise consist with the
inherent instability of human affairs. It might fairly be anticipated
that the progress of time would rather increase and ripen their
prosperity, than wear away and destroy it. For, not only had his son
and heir come into immediate enjoyment of a rich estate, but there was
a claim through an Indian deed, confirmed by a subsequent grant of the
General Court, to a vast and as yet unexplored and unmeasured tract of
Eastern lands. These possessions--for as such they might almost
certainly be reckoned--comprised the greater part of what is now known
as Waldo County, in the state of Maine, and were more extensive than
many a dukedom, or even a reigning prince's territory, on European
soil. When the pathless forest that still covered this wild
principality should give place--as it inevitably must, though perhaps
not till ages hence--to the golden fertility of human culture, it would
be the source of incalculable wealth to the Pyncheon blood. Had the
Colonel survived only a few weeks longer, it is probable that his great
political influence, and powerful connections at home and abroad, would
have consummated all that was necessary to render the claim available.
But, in spite of good Mr. Higginson's congratulatory eloquence, this
appeared to be the one thing which Colonel Pyncheon, provident and
sagacious as he was, had allowed to go at loose ends. So far as the
prospective territory was concerned, he unquestionably died too soon.
His son lacked not merely the father's eminent position, but the talent
and force of character to achieve it: he could, therefore, effect
nothing by dint of political interest; and the bare justice or legality
of the claim was not so apparent, after the Colonel's decease, as it
had been pronounced in his lifetime. Some connecting link had slipped
out of the evidence, and could not anywhere be found.
Efforts, it is true, were made by the Pyncheons, not only then, but at
various periods for nearly a hundred years afterwards, to obtain what
they stubbornly persisted in deeming their right. But, in course of
time, the territory was partly regranted to more favored individuals,
and partly cleared and occupied by actual settlers. These last, if
they ever heard of the Pyncheon title, would have laughed at the idea
of any man's asserting a right--on the strength of mouldy parchments,
signed with the faded autographs of governors and legislators long dead
and forgotten--to the lands which they or their fathers had wrested
from the wild hand of nature by their own sturdy toil. This impalpable
claim, therefore, resulted in nothing more solid than to cherish, from
generation to generation, an absurd delusion of family importance,
which all along characterized the Pyncheons. It caused the poorest
member of the race to feel as if he inherited a kind of nobility, and
might yet come into the possession of princely wealth to support it.
In the better specimens of the breed, this peculiarity threw an ideal
grace over the hard material of human life, without stealing away any
truly valuable quality. In the baser sort, its effect was to increase
the liability to sluggishness and dependence, and induce the victim of
a shadowy hope to remit all self-effort, while awaiting the realization
of his dreams. Years and years after their claim had passed out of the
public memory, the Pyncheons were accustomed to consult the Colonel's
ancient map, which had been projected while Waldo County was still an
unbroken wilderness. Where the old land surveyor had put down woods,
lakes, and rivers, they marked out the cleared spaces, and dotted the
villages and towns, and calculated the progressively increasing value
of the territory, as if there were yet a prospect of its ultimately
forming a princedom for themselves.
In almost every generation, nevertheless, there happened to be some one
descendant of the family gifted with a portion of the hard, keen sense,
and practical energy, that had so remarkably distinguished the original
founder. His character, indeed, might be traced all the way down, as
distinctly as if the Colonel himself, a little diluted, had been gifted
with a sort of intermittent immortality on earth. At two or three
epochs, when the fortunes of the family were low, this representative
of hereditary qualities had made his appearance, and caused the
traditionary gossips of the town to whisper among themselves, "Here is
the old Pyncheon come again! Now the Seven Gables will be
new-shingled!" From father to son, they clung to the ancestral house
with singular tenacity of home attachment. For various reasons,
however, and from impressions often too vaguely founded to be put on
paper, the writer cherishes the belief that many, if not most, of the
successive proprietors of this estate were troubled with doubts as to
their moral right to hold it. Of their legal tenure there could be no
question; but old Matthew Maule, it is to be feared, trode downward
from his own age to a far later one, planting a heavy footstep, all the
way, on the conscience of a Pyncheon. If so, we are left to dispose of
the awful query, whether each inheritor of the property--conscious of
wrong, and failing to rectify it--did not commit anew the great guilt
of his ancestor, and incur all its original responsibilities. And
supposing such to be the case, would it not be a far truer mode of
expression to say of the Pyncheon family, that they inherited a great
misfortune, than the reverse?
We have already hinted that it is not our purpose to trace down the
history of the Pyncheon family, in its unbroken connection with the
House of the Seven Gables; nor to show, as in a magic picture, how the
rustiness and infirmity of age gathered over the venerable house
itself. As regards its interior life, a large, dim looking-glass used
to hang in one of the rooms, and was fabled to contain within its
depths all the shapes that had ever been reflected there,--the old
Colonel himself, and his many descendants, some in the garb of antique
babyhood, and others in the bloom of feminine beauty or manly prime, or
saddened with the wrinkles of frosty age. Had we the secret of that
mirror, we would gladly sit down before it, and transfer its
revelations to our page. But there was a story, for which it is
difficult to conceive any foundation, that the posterity of Matthew
Maule had some connection with the mystery of the looking-glass, and
that, by what appears to have been a sort of mesmeric process, they
could make its inner region all alive with the departed Pyncheons; not
as they had shown themselves to the world, nor in their better and
happier hours, but as doing over again some deed of sin, or in the
crisis of life's bitterest sorrow. The popular imagination, indeed,
long kept itself busy with the affair of the old Puritan Pyncheon and
the wizard Maule; the curse which the latter flung from his scaffold
was remembered, with the very important addition, that it had become a
part of the Pyncheon inheritance. If one of the family did but gurgle
in his throat, a bystander would be likely enough to whisper, between
jest and earnest, "He has Maule's blood to drink!" The sudden death of
a Pyncheon, about a hundred years ago, with circumstances very similar
to what have been related of the Colonel's exit, was held as giving
additional probability to the received opinion on this topic. It was
considered, moreover, an ugly and ominous circumstance, that Colonel
Pyncheon's picture--in obedience, it was said, to a provision of his
will--remained affixed to the wall of the room in which he died. Those
stern, immitigable features seemed to symbolize an evil influence, and
so darkly to mingle the shadow of their presence with the sunshine of
the passing hour, that no good thoughts or purposes could ever spring
up and blossom there. To the thoughtful mind there will be no tinge of
superstition in what we figuratively express, by affirming that the
ghost of a dead progenitor--perhaps as a portion of his own
punishment--is often doomed to become the Evil Genius of his family.
The Pyncheons, in brief, lived along, for the better part of two
centuries, with perhaps less of outward vicissitude than has attended
most other New England families during the same period of time.
Possessing very distinctive traits of their own, they nevertheless took
the general characteristics of the little community in which they
dwelt; a town noted for its frugal, discreet, well-ordered, and
home-loving inhabitants, as well as for the somewhat confined scope of
its sympathies; but in which, be it said, there are odder individuals,
and, now and then, stranger occurrences, than one meets with almost
anywhere else. During the Revolution, the Pyncheon of that epoch,
adopting the royal side, became a refugee; but repented, and made his
reappearance, just at the point of time to preserve the House of the
Seven Gables from confiscation. For the last seventy years the most
noted event in the Pyncheon annals had been likewise the heaviest
calamity that ever befell the race; no less than the violent death--for
so it was adjudged--of one member of the family by the criminal act of
another. Certain circumstances attending this fatal occurrence had
brought the deed irresistibly home to a nephew of the deceased
Pyncheon. The young man was tried and convicted of the crime; but
either the circumstantial nature of the evidence, and possibly some
lurking doubts in the breast of the executive, or, lastly--an argument
of greater weight in a republic than it could have been under a
monarchy,--the high respectability and political influence of the
criminal's connections, had availed to mitigate his doom from death to
perpetual imprisonment. This sad affair had chanced about thirty years
before the action of our story commences. Latterly, there were rumors
(which few believed, and only one or two felt greatly interested in)
that this long-buried man was likely, for some reason or other, to be
summoned forth from his living tomb.
It is essential to say a few words respecting the victim of this now
almost forgotten murder. He was an old bachelor, and possessed of
great wealth, in addition to the house and real estate which
constituted what remained of the ancient Pyncheon property. Being of
an eccentric and melancholy turn of mind, and greatly given to
rummaging old records and hearkening to old traditions, he had brought
himself, it is averred, to the conclusion that Matthew Maule, the
wizard, had been foully wronged out of his homestead, if not out of his
life. Such being the case, and he, the old bachelor, in possession of
the ill-gotten spoil,--with the black stain of blood sunken deep into
it, and still to be scented by conscientious nostrils,--the question
occurred, whether it were not imperative upon him, even at this late
hour, to make restitution to Maule's posterity. To a man living so
much in the past, and so little in the present, as the secluded and
antiquarian old bachelor, a century and a half seemed not so vast a
period as to obviate the propriety of substituting right for wrong. It
was the belief of those who knew him best, that he would positively
have taken the very singular step of giving up the House of the Seven
Gables to the representative of Matthew Maule, but for the unspeakable
tumult which a suspicion of the old gentleman's project awakened among
his Pyncheon relatives. Their exertions had the effect of suspending
his purpose; but it was feared that he would perform, after death, by
the operation of his last will, what he had so hardly been prevented
from doing in his proper lifetime. But there is no one thing which men
so rarely do, whatever the provocation or inducement, as to bequeath
patrimonial property away from their own blood. They may love other
individuals far better than their relatives,--they may even cherish
dislike, or positive hatred, to the latter; but yet, in view of death,
the strong prejudice of propinquity revives, and impels the testator to
send down his estate in the line marked out by custom so immemorial
that it looks like nature. In all the Pyncheons, this feeling had the
energy of disease. It was too powerful for the conscientious scruples
of the old bachelor; at whose death, accordingly, the mansion-house,
together with most of his other riches, passed into the possession of
his next legal representative.
This was a nephew, the cousin of the miserable young man who had been
convicted of the uncle's murder. The new heir, up to the period of his
accession, was reckoned rather a dissipated youth, but had at once
reformed, and made himself an exceedingly respectable member of
society. In fact, he showed more of the Pyncheon quality, and had won
higher eminence in the world, than any of his race since the time of
the original Puritan. Applying himself in earlier manhood to the study
of the law, and having a natural tendency towards office, he had
attained, many years ago, to a judicial situation in some inferior
court, which gave him for life the very desirable and imposing title of
judge. Later, he had engaged in politics, and served a part of two
terms in Congress, besides making a considerable figure in both
branches of the State legislature. Judge Pyncheon was unquestionably
an honor to his race. He had built himself a country-seat within a few
miles of his native town, and there spent such portions of his time as
could be spared from public service in the display of every grace and
virtue--as a newspaper phrased it, on the eve of an election--befitting
the Christian, the good citizen, the horticulturist, and the gentleman.
There were few of the Pyncheons left to sun themselves in the glow of
the Judge's prosperity. In respect to natural increase, the breed had
not thriven; it appeared rather to be dying out. The only members of
the family known to be extant were, first, the Judge himself, and a
single surviving son, who was now travelling in Europe; next, the
thirty years' prisoner, already alluded to, and a sister of the latter,
who occupied, in an extremely retired manner, the House of the Seven
Gables, in which she had a life-estate by the will of the old bachelor.
She was understood to be wretchedly poor, and seemed to make it her
choice to remain so; inasmuch as her affluent cousin, the Judge, had
repeatedly offered her all the comforts of life, either in the old
mansion or his own modern residence. The last and youngest Pyncheon
was a little country-girl of seventeen, the daughter of another of the
Judge's cousins, who had married a young woman of no family or
property, and died early and in poor circumstances. His widow had
recently taken another husband.
As for Matthew Maule's posterity, it was supposed now to be extinct.
For a very long period after the witchcraft delusion, however, the
Maules had continued to inhabit the town where their progenitor had
suffered so unjust a death. To all appearance, they were a quiet,
honest, well-meaning race of people, cherishing no malice against
individuals or the public for the wrong which had been done them; or
if, at their own fireside, they transmitted from father to child any
hostile recollection of the wizard's fate and their lost patrimony, it
was never acted upon, nor openly expressed. Nor would it have been
singular had they ceased to remember that the House of the Seven Gables
was resting its heavy framework on a foundation that was rightfully
their own. There is something so massive, stable, and almost
irresistibly imposing in the exterior presentment of established rank
and great possessions, that their very existence seems to give them a
right to exist; at least, so excellent a counterfeit of right, that few
poor and humble men have moral force enough to question it, even in
their secret minds. Such is the case now, after so many ancient
prejudices have been overthrown; and it was far more so in
ante-Revolutionary days, when the aristocracy could venture to be
proud, and the low were content to be abased. Thus the Maules, at all
events, kept their resentments within their own breasts. They were
generally poverty-stricken; always plebeian and obscure; working with
unsuccessful diligence at handicrafts; laboring on the wharves, or
following the sea, as sailors before the mast; living here and there
about the town, in hired tenements, and coming finally to the almshouse
as the natural home of their old age. At last, after creeping, as it
were, for such a length of time along the utmost verge of the opaque
puddle of obscurity, they had taken that downright plunge which, sooner
or later, is the destiny of all families, whether princely or plebeian.
For thirty years past, neither town-record, nor gravestone, nor the
directory, nor the knowledge or memory of man, bore any trace of
Matthew Maule's descendants. His blood might possibly exist elsewhere;
here, where its lowly current could be traced so far back, it had
ceased to keep an onward course.
So long as any of the race were to be found, they had been marked out
from other men--not strikingly, nor as with a sharp line, but with an
effect that was felt rather than spoken of--by an hereditary character
of reserve. Their companions, or those who endeavored to become such,
grew conscious of a circle round about the Maules, within the sanctity
or the spell of which, in spite of an exterior of sufficient frankness
and good-fellowship, it was impossible for any man to step. It was
this indefinable peculiarity, perhaps, that, by insulating them from
human aid, kept them always so unfortunate in life. It certainly
operated to prolong in their case, and to confirm to them as their only
inheritance, those feelings of repugnance and superstitious terror with
which the people of the town, even after awakening from their frenzy,
continued to regard the memory of the reputed witches. The mantle, or
rather the ragged cloak, of old Matthew Maule had fallen upon his
children. They were half believed to inherit mysterious attributes;
the family eye was said to possess strange power. Among other
good-for-nothing properties and privileges, one was especially assigned
them,--that of exercising an influence over people's dreams. The
Pyncheons, if all stories were true, haughtily as they bore themselves
in the noonday streets of their native town, were no better than
bond-servants to these plebeian Maules, on entering the topsy-turvy
commonwealth of sleep. Modern psychology, it may be, will endeavor to
reduce these alleged necromancies within a system, instead of rejecting
them as altogether fabulous.
A descriptive paragraph or two, treating of the seven-gabled mansion in
its more recent aspect, will bring this preliminary chapter to a close.
The street in which it upreared its venerable peaks has long ceased to
be a fashionable quarter of the town; so that, though the old edifice
was surrounded by habitations of modern date, they were mostly small,
built entirely of wood, and typical of the most plodding uniformity of
common life. Doubtless, however, the whole story of human existence
may be latent in each of them, but with no picturesqueness, externally,
that can attract the imagination or sympathy to seek it there. But as
for the old structure of our story, its white-oak frame, and its
boards, shingles, and crumbling plaster, and even the huge, clustered
chimney in the midst, seemed to constitute only the least and meanest
part of its reality. So much of mankind's varied experience had passed
there,--so much had been suffered, and something, too, enjoyed,--that
the very timbers were oozy, as with the moisture of a heart. It was
itself like a great human heart, with a life of its own, and full of
rich and sombre reminiscences.
The deep projection of the second story gave the house such a
meditative look, that you could not pass it without the idea that it
had secrets to keep, and an eventful history to moralize upon. In
front, just on the edge of the unpaved sidewalk, grew the Pyncheon Elm,
which, in reference to such trees as one usually meets with, might well
be termed gigantic. It had been planted by a great-grandson of the
first Pyncheon, and, though now four-score years of age, or perhaps
nearer a hundred, was still in its strong and broad maturity, throwing
its shadow from side to side of the street, overtopping the seven
gables, and sweeping the whole black roof with its pendant foliage. It
gave beauty to the old edifice, and seemed to make it a part of nature.
The street having been widened about forty years ago, the front gable
was now precisely on a line with it. On either side extended a ruinous
wooden fence of open lattice-work, through which could be seen a grassy
yard, and, especially in the angles of the building, an enormous
fertility of burdocks, with leaves, it is hardly an exaggeration to
say, two or three feet long. Behind the house there appeared to be a
garden, which undoubtedly had once been extensive, but was now
infringed upon by other enclosures, or shut in by habitations and
outbuildings that stood on another street. It would be an omission,
trifling, indeed, but unpardonable, were we to forget the green moss
that had long since gathered over the projections of the windows, and
on the slopes of the roof nor must we fail to direct the reader's eye
to a crop, not of weeds, but flower-shrubs, which were growing aloft in
the air, not a great way from the chimney, in the nook between two of
the gables. They were called Alice's Posies. The tradition was, that
a certain Alice Pyncheon had flung up the seeds, in sport, and that the
dust of the street and the decay of the roof gradually formed a kind of
soil for them, out of which they grew, when Alice had long been in her
grave. However the flowers might have come there, it was both sad and
sweet to observe how Nature adopted to herself this desolate, decaying,
gusty, rusty old house of the Pyncheon family; and how the
ever-returning Summer did her best to gladden it with tender beauty,
and grew melancholy in the effort.
There is one other feature, very essential to be noticed, but which, we
greatly fear, may damage any picturesque and romantic impression which
we have been willing to throw over our sketch of this respectable
edifice. In the front gable, under the impending brow of the second
story, and contiguous to the street, was a shop-door, divided
horizontally in the midst, and with a window for its upper segment,
such as is often seen in dwellings of a somewhat ancient date. This
same shop-door had been a subject of no slight mortification to the
present occupant of the august Pyncheon House, as well as to some of
her predecessors. The matter is disagreeably delicate to handle; but,
since the reader must needs be let into the secret, he will please to
understand, that, about a century ago, the head of the Pyncheons found
himself involved in serious financial difficulties. The fellow
(gentleman, as he styled himself) can hardly have been other than a
spurious interloper; for, instead of seeking office from the king or
the royal governor, or urging his hereditary claim to Eastern lands, he
bethought himself of no better avenue to wealth than by cutting a
shop-door through the side of his ancestral residence. It was the
custom of the time, indeed, for merchants to store their goods and
transact business in their own dwellings. But there was something
pitifully small in this old Pyncheon's mode of setting about his
commercial operations; it was whispered, that, with his own hands, all
beruffled as they were, he used to give change for a shilling, and
would turn a half-penny twice over, to make sure that it was a good
one. Beyond all question, he had the blood of a petty huckster in his
veins, through whatever channel it may have found its way there.
Immediately on his death, the shop-door had been locked, bolted, and
barred, and, down to the period of our story, had probably never once
been opened. The old counter, shelves, and other fixtures of the
little shop remained just as he had left them. It used to be affirmed,
that the dead shop-keeper, in a white wig, a faded velvet coat, an
apron at his waist, and his ruffles carefully turned back from his
wrists, might be seen through the chinks of the shutters, any night of
the year, ransacking his till, or poring over the dingy pages of his
day-book. From the look of unutterable woe upon his face, it appeared
to be his doom to spend eternity in a vain effort to make his accounts
balance.
And now--in a very humble way, as will be seen--we proceed to open our
narrative.
| The House of the Seven Gables is, as Hawthorne explains in his preface, a romance, which he defines as "a legend prolonging itself" and connecting a bygone time with the present. Within this romantic sensibility there is the sense that events and personalities recur throughout time and even throughout the generations; the task of the first chapter is therefore to establish the origins of this legend. The tale of Colonel Pyncheon and Matthew Maule proves the central event of the novel, although it occurs more than a century before the majority of the novel takes place. The events leading to the origin of the House of the Seven Gables include a number of patterns and character traits that future characters will exhibit in very similar ways. This romantic sensibility that Hawthorne employs is therefore very deterministic; the sins of Colonel Pyncheon will be revisited upon his descendants, while Matthew Maule's progeny will bear similar burdens. The two major continuities in the novel are continuities of character and continuities of plot. Colonel Pyncheon establishes the model for future Pyncheons, who when placed in similar circumstances will demonstrate the same qualities as their ancestor. Hawthorne even explicitly states that in every generation there seems to be one Pyncheon who exhibits the same characteristics as the founder of the House of the Seven Gables. The Colonel is a man of "iron energy of purpose" whose desires outweigh any moral considerations. Colonel Pyncheon typifies an aristocratic sensibility that borders on monarchism. He builds the House of the Seven Gables as a means to ensure the continued domination of his descendants, and the house even becomes an enclosed kingdom for the Colonel. The house becomes a separate country in which Colonel Pyncheon has final and absolute authority, even above the representatives of the English king. This aristocratic character of the Colonel continues among his descendants; the family sides with the royalists during the American Revolution, and retains an "absurd delusion of family importance" even after the accolades of Colonel Pyncheon have long passed. This monarchical tendency within the Pyncheon family is most apparent in the Colonel's desire for the vast tract of Eastern lands. This land that he desired would have made him the equal of a European prince. With few exceptions, Hawthorne allows few extraneous details in describing the history of the Pyncheon family. Many of the events that Hawthorne tells in this history recur in the event of the story, including mysterious and unexpected deaths and a preoccupation with gaining title to the eastern lands. Even characters mentioned in passing during the description return at later points in the novel; both Alice Pyncheon, the woman for whom the posies in the nook between the gables are named, and the grandchild who discovered the dead Colonel will be featured as characters at a later point. That each detail has some relation to the novel's main story contributes to the novel's focus on recurring events; every event that occurs happens for a reason and relates to the Pyncheon family history. Eventually every major development that occurs among the Pyncheons finally traces its ancestry to the Colonel's avarice for both Matthew Maule's land and for the eastern settlement. The most recent of these major events is the murder of a Pyncheon who believed that Matthew Maule had been wronged. Both the convicted murderer and the man who inherited the victim's estate will play central roles in the story. The murder victim's attempts to make amends to the Maule family bring up a major theme of the novel. If characteristics and traits can be passed from generation to generation, sins may also be transmitted. The novel assumes that the sins of Colonel Pyncheon are found among his descendants and that the Pyncheons shall remain guilty of their ancestor's crime until reparations are made. The history of the Maule family is intimately connected to the history of the Pyncheons. The death of Matthew Maule is not an isolated event that connects the two families. The connection between the Maules and the Pyncheons will recur and become more clear as the novel progresses. The descendants of Matthew Maule also inherit the traits of their ancestor. Hawthorne indicates that the Maules possess strange powers passed down from the wizard Matthew Maule. Hawthorne leaves it unclear as to whether Matthew Maule himself possessed mystical powers, the reason for his execution, but does assume that the Maules have some strange power. The House of the Seven Gables itself is a physical representation of the Pyncheon and the Maule family history. The House essentially contains the old Maule hut, inextricably linking the two families together. When the house was built, it spoiled Maule's Well, a metaphor for the Pyncheon's destruction of the Maule family legacy as well as an indication that the Pyncheons have disrupted the natural order. As the story begins, the House, much like the Pyncheons themselves, has fallen into a state of decay | analysis |
IT still lacked half an hour of sunrise, when Miss Hepzibah
Pyncheon--we will not say awoke, it being doubtful whether the poor
lady had so much as closed her eyes during the brief night of
midsummer--but, at all events, arose from her solitary pillow, and
began what it would be mockery to term the adornment of her person.
Far from us be the indecorum of assisting, even in imagination, at a
maiden lady's toilet! Our story must therefore await Miss Hepzibah at
the threshold of her chamber; only presuming, meanwhile, to note some
of the heavy sighs that labored from her bosom, with little restraint
as to their lugubrious depth and volume of sound, inasmuch as they
could be audible to nobody save a disembodied listener like ourself.
The Old Maid was alone in the old house. Alone, except for a certain
respectable and orderly young man, an artist in the daguerreotype line,
who, for about three months back, had been a lodger in a remote
gable,--quite a house by itself, indeed,--with locks, bolts, and oaken
bars on all the intervening doors. Inaudible, consequently, were poor
Miss Hepzibah's gusty sighs. Inaudible the creaking joints of her
stiffened knees, as she knelt down by the bedside. And inaudible, too,
by mortal ear, but heard with all-comprehending love and pity in the
farthest heaven, that almost agony of prayer--now whispered, now a
groan, now a struggling silence--wherewith she besought the Divine
assistance through the day! Evidently, this is to be a day of more than
ordinary trial to Miss Hepzibah, who, for above a quarter of a century
gone by, has dwelt in strict seclusion, taking no part in the business
of life, and just as little in its intercourse and pleasures. Not with
such fervor prays the torpid recluse, looking forward to the cold,
sunless, stagnant calm of a day that is to be like innumerable
yesterdays.
The maiden lady's devotions are concluded. Will she now issue forth
over the threshold of our story? Not yet, by many moments. First,
every drawer in the tall, old-fashioned bureau is to be opened, with
difficulty, and with a succession of spasmodic jerks then, all must
close again, with the same fidgety reluctance. There is a rustling of
stiff silks; a tread of backward and forward footsteps to and fro
across the chamber. We suspect Miss Hepzibah, moreover, of taking a
step upward into a chair, in order to give heedful regard to her
appearance on all sides, and at full length, in the oval, dingy-framed
toilet-glass, that hangs above her table. Truly! well, indeed! who
would have thought it! Is all this precious time to be lavished on the
matutinal repair and beautifying of an elderly person, who never goes
abroad, whom nobody ever visits, and from whom, when she shall have
done her utmost, it were the best charity to turn one's eyes another
way?
Now she is almost ready. Let us pardon her one other pause; for it is
given to the sole sentiment, or, we might better say,--heightened and
rendered intense, as it has been, by sorrow and seclusion,--to the
strong passion of her life. We heard the turning of a key in a small
lock; she has opened a secret drawer of an escritoire, and is probably
looking at a certain miniature, done in Malbone's most perfect style,
and representing a face worthy of no less delicate a pencil. It was
once our good fortune to see this picture. It is a likeness of a young
man, in a silken dressing-gown of an old fashion, the soft richness of
which is well adapted to the countenance of reverie, with its full,
tender lips, and beautiful eyes, that seem to indicate not so much
capacity of thought, as gentle and voluptuous emotion. Of the
possessor of such features we shall have a right to ask nothing, except
that he would take the rude world easily, and make himself happy in it.
Can it have been an early lover of Miss Hepzibah? No; she never had a
lover--poor thing, how could she?--nor ever knew, by her own
experience, what love technically means. And yet, her undying faith
and trust, her fresh remembrance, and continual devotedness towards the
original of that miniature, have been the only substance for her heart
to feed upon.
She seems to have put aside the miniature, and is standing again before
the toilet-glass. There are tears to be wiped off. A few more
footsteps to and fro; and here, at last,--with another pitiful sigh,
like a gust of chill, damp wind out of a long-closed vault, the door of
which has accidentally been set, ajar--here comes Miss Hepzibah
Pyncheon! Forth she steps into the dusky, time-darkened passage; a tall
figure, clad in black silk, with a long and shrunken waist, feeling her
way towards the stairs like a near-sighted person, as in truth she is.
The sun, meanwhile, if not already above the horizon, was ascending
nearer and nearer to its verge. A few clouds, floating high upward,
caught some of the earliest light, and threw down its golden gleam on
the windows of all the houses in the street, not forgetting the House
of the Seven Gables, which--many such sunrises as it had
witnessed--looked cheerfully at the present one. The reflected
radiance served to show, pretty distinctly, the aspect and arrangement
of the room which Hepzibah entered, after descending the stairs. It
was a low-studded room, with a beam across the ceiling, panelled with
dark wood, and having a large chimney-piece, set round with pictured
tiles, but now closed by an iron fire-board, through which ran the
funnel of a modern stove. There was a carpet on the floor, originally
of rich texture, but so worn and faded in these latter years that its
once brilliant figure had quite vanished into one indistinguishable
hue. In the way of furniture, there were two tables: one, constructed
with perplexing intricacy and exhibiting as many feet as a centipede;
the other, most delicately wrought, with four long and slender legs, so
apparently frail that it was almost incredible what a length of time
the ancient tea-table had stood upon them. Half a dozen chairs stood
about the room, straight and stiff, and so ingeniously contrived for
the discomfort of the human person that they were irksome even to
sight, and conveyed the ugliest possible idea of the state of society
to which they could have been adapted. One exception there was,
however, in a very antique elbow-chair, with a high back, carved
elaborately in oak, and a roomy depth within its arms, that made up, by
its spacious comprehensiveness, for the lack of any of those artistic
curves which abound in a modern chair.
As for ornamental articles of furniture, we recollect but two, if such
they may be called. One was a map of the Pyncheon territory at the
eastward, not engraved, but the handiwork of some skilful old
draughtsman, and grotesquely illuminated with pictures of Indians and
wild beasts, among which was seen a lion; the natural history of the
region being as little known as its geography, which was put down most
fantastically awry. The other adornment was the portrait of old
Colonel Pyncheon, at two thirds length, representing the stern features
of a Puritanic-looking personage, in a skull-cap, with a laced band and
a grizzly beard; holding a Bible with one hand, and in the other
uplifting an iron sword-hilt. The latter object, being more
successfully depicted by the artist, stood out in far greater
prominence than the sacred volume. Face to face with this picture, on
entering the apartment, Miss Hepzibah Pyncheon came to a pause;
regarding it with a singular scowl, a strange contortion of the brow,
which, by people who did not know her, would probably have been
interpreted as an expression of bitter anger and ill-will. But it was
no such thing. She, in fact, felt a reverence for the pictured visage,
of which only a far-descended and time-stricken virgin could be
susceptible; and this forbidding scowl was the innocent result of her
near-sightedness, and an effort so to concentrate her powers of vision
as to substitute a firm outline of the object instead of a vague one.
We must linger a moment on this unfortunate expression of poor
Hepzibah's brow. Her scowl,--as the world, or such part of it as
sometimes caught a transitory glimpse of her at the window, wickedly
persisted in calling it,--her scowl had done Miss Hepzibah a very ill
office, in establishing her character as an ill-tempered old maid; nor
does it appear improbable that, by often gazing at herself in a dim
looking-glass, and perpetually encountering her own frown with its
ghostly sphere, she had been led to interpret the expression almost as
unjustly as the world did. "How miserably cross I look!" she must
often have whispered to herself; and ultimately have fancied herself
so, by a sense of inevitable doom. But her heart never frowned. It
was naturally tender, sensitive, and full of little tremors and
palpitations; all of which weaknesses it retained, while her visage was
growing so perversely stern, and even fierce. Nor had Hepzibah ever
any hardihood, except what came from the very warmest nook in her
affections.
All this time, however, we are loitering faintheartedly on the
threshold of our story. In very truth, we have an invincible
reluctance to disclose what Miss Hepzibah Pyncheon was about to do.
It has already been observed, that, in the basement story of the gable
fronting on the street, an unworthy ancestor, nearly a century ago, had
fitted up a shop. Ever since the old gentleman retired from trade, and
fell asleep under his coffin-lid, not only the shop-door, but the inner
arrangements, had been suffered to remain unchanged; while the dust of
ages gathered inch-deep over the shelves and counter, and partly filled
an old pair of scales, as if it were of value enough to be weighed. It
treasured itself up, too, in the half-open till, where there still
lingered a base sixpence, worth neither more nor less than the
hereditary pride which had here been put to shame. Such had been the
state and condition of the little shop in old Hepzibah's childhood,
when she and her brother used to play at hide-and-seek in its forsaken
precincts. So it had remained, until within a few days past.
But now, though the shop-window was still closely curtained from the
public gaze, a remarkable change had taken place in its interior. The
rich and heavy festoons of cobweb, which it had cost a long ancestral
succession of spiders their life's labor to spin and weave, had been
carefully brushed away from the ceiling. The counter, shelves, and
floor had all been scoured, and the latter was overstrewn with fresh
blue sand. The brown scales, too, had evidently undergone rigid
discipline, in an unavailing effort to rub off the rust, which, alas!
had eaten through and through their substance. Neither was the little
old shop any longer empty of merchantable goods. A curious eye,
privileged to take an account of stock and investigate behind the
counter, would have discovered a barrel, yea, two or three barrels and
half ditto,--one containing flour, another apples, and a third,
perhaps, Indian meal. There was likewise a square box of pine-wood,
full of soap in bars; also, another of the same size, in which were
tallow candles, ten to the pound. A small stock of brown sugar, some
white beans and split peas, and a few other commodities of low price,
and such as are constantly in demand, made up the bulkier portion of
the merchandise. It might have been taken for a ghostly or
phantasmagoric reflection of the old shop-keeper Pyncheon's shabbily
provided shelves, save that some of the articles were of a description
and outward form which could hardly have been known in his day. For
instance, there was a glass pickle-jar, filled with fragments of
Gibraltar rock; not, indeed, splinters of the veritable stone
foundation of the famous fortress, but bits of delectable candy, neatly
done up in white paper. Jim Crow, moreover, was seen executing his
world-renowned dance, in gingerbread. A party of leaden dragoons were
galloping along one of the shelves, in equipments and uniform of modern
cut; and there were some sugar figures, with no strong resemblance to
the humanity of any epoch, but less unsatisfactorily representing our
own fashions than those of a hundred years ago. Another phenomenon,
still more strikingly modern, was a package of lucifer matches, which,
in old times, would have been thought actually to borrow their
instantaneous flame from the nether fires of Tophet.
In short, to bring the matter at once to a point, it was
incontrovertibly evident that somebody had taken the shop and fixtures
of the long-retired and forgotten Mr. Pyncheon, and was about to renew
the enterprise of that departed worthy, with a different set of
customers. Who could this bold adventurer be? And, of all places in
the world, why had he chosen the House of the Seven Gables as the scene
of his commercial speculations?
We return to the elderly maiden. She at length withdrew her eyes from
the dark countenance of the Colonel's portrait, heaved a sigh,--indeed,
her breast was a very cave of Aolus that morning,--and stept across the
room on tiptoe, as is the customary gait of elderly women. Passing
through an intervening passage, she opened a door that communicated
with the shop, just now so elaborately described. Owing to the
projection of the upper story--and still more to the thick shadow of
the Pyncheon Elm, which stood almost directly in front of the
gable--the twilight, here, was still as much akin to night as morning.
Another heavy sigh from Miss Hepzibah! After a moment's pause on the
threshold, peering towards the window with her near-sighted scowl, as
if frowning down some bitter enemy, she suddenly projected herself into
the shop. The haste, and, as it were, the galvanic impulse of the
movement, were really quite startling.
Nervously--in a sort of frenzy, we might almost say--she began to busy
herself in arranging some children's playthings, and other little
wares, on the shelves and at the shop-window. In the aspect of this
dark-arrayed, pale-faced, ladylike old figure there was a deeply tragic
character that contrasted irreconcilably with the ludicrous pettiness
of her employment. It seemed a queer anomaly, that so gaunt and dismal
a personage should take a toy in hand; a miracle, that the toy did not
vanish in her grasp; a miserably absurd idea, that she should go on
perplexing her stiff and sombre intellect with the question how to
tempt little boys into her premises! Yet such is undoubtedly her
object. Now she places a gingerbread elephant against the window, but
with so tremulous a touch that it tumbles upon the floor, with the
dismemberment of three legs and its trunk; it has ceased to be an
elephant, and has become a few bits of musty gingerbread. There,
again, she has upset a tumbler of marbles, all of which roll different
ways, and each individual marble, devil-directed, into the most
difficult obscurity that it can find. Heaven help our poor old
Hepzibah, and forgive us for taking a ludicrous view of her position!
As her rigid and rusty frame goes down upon its hands and knees, in
quest of the absconding marbles, we positively feel so much the more
inclined to shed tears of sympathy, from the very fact that we must
needs turn aside and laugh at her. For here,--and if we fail to
impress it suitably upon the reader, it is our own fault, not that of
the theme, here is one of the truest points of melancholy interest that
occur in ordinary life. It was the final throe of what called itself
old gentility. A lady--who had fed herself from childhood with the
shadowy food of aristocratic reminiscences, and whose religion it was
that a lady's hand soils itself irremediably by doing aught for
bread,--this born lady, after sixty years of narrowing means, is fain
to step down from her pedestal of imaginary rank. Poverty, treading
closely at her heels for a lifetime, has come up with her at last. She
must earn her own food, or starve! And we have stolen upon Miss
Hepzibah Pyncheon, too irreverently, at the instant of time when the
patrician lady is to be transformed into the plebeian woman.
In this republican country, amid the fluctuating waves of our social
life, somebody is always at the drowning-point. The tragedy is enacted
with as continual a repetition as that of a popular drama on a holiday,
and, nevertheless, is felt as deeply, perhaps, as when an hereditary
noble sinks below his order. More deeply; since, with us, rank is the
grosser substance of wealth and a splendid establishment, and has no
spiritual existence after the death of these, but dies hopelessly along
with them. And, therefore, since we have been unfortunate enough to
introduce our heroine at so inauspicious a juncture, we would entreat
for a mood of due solemnity in the spectators of her fate. Let us
behold, in poor Hepzibah, the immemorial, lady--two hundred years old,
on this side of the water, and thrice as many on the other,--with her
antique portraits, pedigrees, coats of arms, records and traditions,
and her claim, as joint heiress, to that princely territory at the
eastward, no longer a wilderness, but a populous fertility,--born, too,
in Pyncheon Street, under the Pyncheon Elm, and in the Pyncheon House,
where she has spent all her days,--reduced. Now, in that very house,
to be the hucksteress of a cent-shop.
This business of setting up a petty shop is almost the only resource of
women, in circumstances at all similar to those of our unfortunate
recluse. With her near-sightedness, and those tremulous fingers of
hers, at once inflexible and delicate, she could not be a seamstress;
although her sampler, of fifty years gone by, exhibited some of the
most recondite specimens of ornamental needlework. A school for little
children had been often in her thoughts; and, at one time, she had
begun a review of her early studies in the New England Primer, with a
view to prepare herself for the office of instructress. But the love
of children had never been quickened in Hepzibah's heart, and was now
torpid, if not extinct; she watched the little people of the
neighborhood from her chamber-window, and doubted whether she could
tolerate a more intimate acquaintance with them. Besides, in our day,
the very ABC has become a science greatly too abstruse to be any longer
taught by pointing a pin from letter to letter. A modern child could
teach old Hepzibah more than old Hepzibah could teach the child.
So--with many a cold, deep heart-quake at the idea of at last coming
into sordid contact with the world, from which she had so long kept
aloof, while every added day of seclusion had rolled another stone
against the cavern door of her hermitage--the poor thing bethought
herself of the ancient shop-window, the rusty scales, and dusty till.
She might have held back a little longer; but another circumstance, not
yet hinted at, had somewhat hastened her decision. Her humble
preparations, therefore, were duly made, and the enterprise was now to
be commenced. Nor was she entitled to complain of any remarkable
singularity in her fate; for, in the town of her nativity, we might
point to several little shops of a similar description, some of them in
houses as ancient as that of the Seven Gables; and one or two, it may
be, where a decayed gentlewoman stands behind the counter, as grim an
image of family pride as Miss Hepzibah Pyncheon herself.
It was overpoweringly ridiculous,--we must honestly confess it,--the
deportment of the maiden lady while setting her shop in order for the
public eye. She stole on tiptoe to the window, as cautiously as if she
conceived some bloody-minded villain to be watching behind the
elm-tree, with intent to take her life. Stretching out her long, lank
arm, she put a paper of pearl-buttons, a jew's-harp, or whatever the
small article might be, in its destined place, and straightway vanished
back into the dusk, as if the world need never hope for another glimpse
of her. It might have been fancied, indeed, that she expected to
minister to the wants of the community unseen, like a disembodied
divinity or enchantress, holding forth her bargains to the reverential
and awe-stricken purchaser in an invisible hand. But Hepzibah had no
such flattering dream. She was well aware that she must ultimately come
forward, and stand revealed in her proper individuality; but, like
other sensitive persons, she could not bear to be observed in the
gradual process, and chose rather to flash forth on the world's
astonished gaze at once.
The inevitable moment was not much longer to be delayed. The sunshine
might now be seen stealing down the front of the opposite house, from
the windows of which came a reflected gleam, struggling through the
boughs of the elm-tree, and enlightening the interior of the shop more
distinctly than heretofore. The town appeared to be waking up. A
baker's cart had already rattled through the street, chasing away the
latest vestige of night's sanctity with the jingle-jangle of its
dissonant bells. A milkman was distributing the contents of his cans
from door to door; and the harsh peal of a fisherman's conch shell was
heard far off, around the corner. None of these tokens escaped
Hepzibah's notice. The moment had arrived. To delay longer would be
only to lengthen out her misery. Nothing remained, except to take down
the bar from the shop-door, leaving the entrance free--more than
free--welcome, as if all were household friends--to every passer-by,
whose eyes might be attracted by the commodities at the window. This
last act Hepzibah now performed, letting the bar fall with what smote
upon her excited nerves as a most astounding clatter. Then--as if the
only barrier betwixt herself and the world had been thrown down, and a
flood of evil consequences would come tumbling through the gap--she
fled into the inner parlor, threw herself into the ancestral
elbow-chair, and wept.
Our miserable old Hepzibah! It is a heavy annoyance to a writer, who
endeavors to represent nature, its various attitudes and circumstances,
in a reasonably correct outline and true coloring, that so much of the
mean and ludicrous should be hopelessly mixed up with the purest pathos
which life anywhere supplies to him. What tragic dignity, for example,
can be wrought into a scene like this! How can we elevate our history
of retribution for the sin of long ago, when, as one of our most
prominent figures, we are compelled to introduce--not a young and
lovely woman, nor even the stately remains of beauty, storm-shattered
by affliction--but a gaunt, sallow, rusty-jointed maiden, in a
long-waisted silk gown, and with the strange horror of a turban on her
head! Her visage is not even ugly. It is redeemed from insignificance
only by the contraction of her eyebrows into a near-sighted scowl.
And, finally, her great life-trial seems to be, that, after sixty years
of idleness, she finds it convenient to earn comfortable bread by
setting up a shop in a small way. Nevertheless, if we look through all
the heroic fortunes of mankind, we shall find this same entanglement of
something mean and trivial with whatever is noblest in joy or sorrow.
Life is made up of marble and mud. And, without all the deeper trust
in a comprehensive sympathy above us, we might hence be led to suspect
the insult of a sneer, as well as an immitigable frown, on the iron
countenance of fate. What is called poetic insight is the gift of
discerning, in this sphere of strangely mingled elements, the beauty
and the majesty which are compelled to assume a garb so sordid.
| The Little Shop-Window: Hepzibah Pyncheon was an old maid living alone in the old house, with the exception of a respectable and orderly young artist who had been a lodger in a remote gable. Miss Hepzibah had dwelt in strict seclusion for nearly twenty-five years. She opens a secret drawer, looking for a certain miniature that represents the face of a young man, and sheds tears at its sight, then goes into a room of the house with a map of the Pyncheon territory and a portrait of Colonel Pyncheon. Miss Hepzibah pauses at the picture, regarding it with a singular scowl; this scowl had established her as an ill-tempered old maid, contrary to her actual character: sensitive, tender and weak. Hepzibah then goes into the shop that had been closed off and was now adorned with cobwebs. She nervously busies herself with arranging some playthings and wares in the shop window, appearing alternately sympathetic and laughable. Poverty had forced her to open this shop up so that she may support herself. | summary |
IT still lacked half an hour of sunrise, when Miss Hepzibah
Pyncheon--we will not say awoke, it being doubtful whether the poor
lady had so much as closed her eyes during the brief night of
midsummer--but, at all events, arose from her solitary pillow, and
began what it would be mockery to term the adornment of her person.
Far from us be the indecorum of assisting, even in imagination, at a
maiden lady's toilet! Our story must therefore await Miss Hepzibah at
the threshold of her chamber; only presuming, meanwhile, to note some
of the heavy sighs that labored from her bosom, with little restraint
as to their lugubrious depth and volume of sound, inasmuch as they
could be audible to nobody save a disembodied listener like ourself.
The Old Maid was alone in the old house. Alone, except for a certain
respectable and orderly young man, an artist in the daguerreotype line,
who, for about three months back, had been a lodger in a remote
gable,--quite a house by itself, indeed,--with locks, bolts, and oaken
bars on all the intervening doors. Inaudible, consequently, were poor
Miss Hepzibah's gusty sighs. Inaudible the creaking joints of her
stiffened knees, as she knelt down by the bedside. And inaudible, too,
by mortal ear, but heard with all-comprehending love and pity in the
farthest heaven, that almost agony of prayer--now whispered, now a
groan, now a struggling silence--wherewith she besought the Divine
assistance through the day! Evidently, this is to be a day of more than
ordinary trial to Miss Hepzibah, who, for above a quarter of a century
gone by, has dwelt in strict seclusion, taking no part in the business
of life, and just as little in its intercourse and pleasures. Not with
such fervor prays the torpid recluse, looking forward to the cold,
sunless, stagnant calm of a day that is to be like innumerable
yesterdays.
The maiden lady's devotions are concluded. Will she now issue forth
over the threshold of our story? Not yet, by many moments. First,
every drawer in the tall, old-fashioned bureau is to be opened, with
difficulty, and with a succession of spasmodic jerks then, all must
close again, with the same fidgety reluctance. There is a rustling of
stiff silks; a tread of backward and forward footsteps to and fro
across the chamber. We suspect Miss Hepzibah, moreover, of taking a
step upward into a chair, in order to give heedful regard to her
appearance on all sides, and at full length, in the oval, dingy-framed
toilet-glass, that hangs above her table. Truly! well, indeed! who
would have thought it! Is all this precious time to be lavished on the
matutinal repair and beautifying of an elderly person, who never goes
abroad, whom nobody ever visits, and from whom, when she shall have
done her utmost, it were the best charity to turn one's eyes another
way?
Now she is almost ready. Let us pardon her one other pause; for it is
given to the sole sentiment, or, we might better say,--heightened and
rendered intense, as it has been, by sorrow and seclusion,--to the
strong passion of her life. We heard the turning of a key in a small
lock; she has opened a secret drawer of an escritoire, and is probably
looking at a certain miniature, done in Malbone's most perfect style,
and representing a face worthy of no less delicate a pencil. It was
once our good fortune to see this picture. It is a likeness of a young
man, in a silken dressing-gown of an old fashion, the soft richness of
which is well adapted to the countenance of reverie, with its full,
tender lips, and beautiful eyes, that seem to indicate not so much
capacity of thought, as gentle and voluptuous emotion. Of the
possessor of such features we shall have a right to ask nothing, except
that he would take the rude world easily, and make himself happy in it.
Can it have been an early lover of Miss Hepzibah? No; she never had a
lover--poor thing, how could she?--nor ever knew, by her own
experience, what love technically means. And yet, her undying faith
and trust, her fresh remembrance, and continual devotedness towards the
original of that miniature, have been the only substance for her heart
to feed upon.
She seems to have put aside the miniature, and is standing again before
the toilet-glass. There are tears to be wiped off. A few more
footsteps to and fro; and here, at last,--with another pitiful sigh,
like a gust of chill, damp wind out of a long-closed vault, the door of
which has accidentally been set, ajar--here comes Miss Hepzibah
Pyncheon! Forth she steps into the dusky, time-darkened passage; a tall
figure, clad in black silk, with a long and shrunken waist, feeling her
way towards the stairs like a near-sighted person, as in truth she is.
The sun, meanwhile, if not already above the horizon, was ascending
nearer and nearer to its verge. A few clouds, floating high upward,
caught some of the earliest light, and threw down its golden gleam on
the windows of all the houses in the street, not forgetting the House
of the Seven Gables, which--many such sunrises as it had
witnessed--looked cheerfully at the present one. The reflected
radiance served to show, pretty distinctly, the aspect and arrangement
of the room which Hepzibah entered, after descending the stairs. It
was a low-studded room, with a beam across the ceiling, panelled with
dark wood, and having a large chimney-piece, set round with pictured
tiles, but now closed by an iron fire-board, through which ran the
funnel of a modern stove. There was a carpet on the floor, originally
of rich texture, but so worn and faded in these latter years that its
once brilliant figure had quite vanished into one indistinguishable
hue. In the way of furniture, there were two tables: one, constructed
with perplexing intricacy and exhibiting as many feet as a centipede;
the other, most delicately wrought, with four long and slender legs, so
apparently frail that it was almost incredible what a length of time
the ancient tea-table had stood upon them. Half a dozen chairs stood
about the room, straight and stiff, and so ingeniously contrived for
the discomfort of the human person that they were irksome even to
sight, and conveyed the ugliest possible idea of the state of society
to which they could have been adapted. One exception there was,
however, in a very antique elbow-chair, with a high back, carved
elaborately in oak, and a roomy depth within its arms, that made up, by
its spacious comprehensiveness, for the lack of any of those artistic
curves which abound in a modern chair.
As for ornamental articles of furniture, we recollect but two, if such
they may be called. One was a map of the Pyncheon territory at the
eastward, not engraved, but the handiwork of some skilful old
draughtsman, and grotesquely illuminated with pictures of Indians and
wild beasts, among which was seen a lion; the natural history of the
region being as little known as its geography, which was put down most
fantastically awry. The other adornment was the portrait of old
Colonel Pyncheon, at two thirds length, representing the stern features
of a Puritanic-looking personage, in a skull-cap, with a laced band and
a grizzly beard; holding a Bible with one hand, and in the other
uplifting an iron sword-hilt. The latter object, being more
successfully depicted by the artist, stood out in far greater
prominence than the sacred volume. Face to face with this picture, on
entering the apartment, Miss Hepzibah Pyncheon came to a pause;
regarding it with a singular scowl, a strange contortion of the brow,
which, by people who did not know her, would probably have been
interpreted as an expression of bitter anger and ill-will. But it was
no such thing. She, in fact, felt a reverence for the pictured visage,
of which only a far-descended and time-stricken virgin could be
susceptible; and this forbidding scowl was the innocent result of her
near-sightedness, and an effort so to concentrate her powers of vision
as to substitute a firm outline of the object instead of a vague one.
We must linger a moment on this unfortunate expression of poor
Hepzibah's brow. Her scowl,--as the world, or such part of it as
sometimes caught a transitory glimpse of her at the window, wickedly
persisted in calling it,--her scowl had done Miss Hepzibah a very ill
office, in establishing her character as an ill-tempered old maid; nor
does it appear improbable that, by often gazing at herself in a dim
looking-glass, and perpetually encountering her own frown with its
ghostly sphere, she had been led to interpret the expression almost as
unjustly as the world did. "How miserably cross I look!" she must
often have whispered to herself; and ultimately have fancied herself
so, by a sense of inevitable doom. But her heart never frowned. It
was naturally tender, sensitive, and full of little tremors and
palpitations; all of which weaknesses it retained, while her visage was
growing so perversely stern, and even fierce. Nor had Hepzibah ever
any hardihood, except what came from the very warmest nook in her
affections.
All this time, however, we are loitering faintheartedly on the
threshold of our story. In very truth, we have an invincible
reluctance to disclose what Miss Hepzibah Pyncheon was about to do.
It has already been observed, that, in the basement story of the gable
fronting on the street, an unworthy ancestor, nearly a century ago, had
fitted up a shop. Ever since the old gentleman retired from trade, and
fell asleep under his coffin-lid, not only the shop-door, but the inner
arrangements, had been suffered to remain unchanged; while the dust of
ages gathered inch-deep over the shelves and counter, and partly filled
an old pair of scales, as if it were of value enough to be weighed. It
treasured itself up, too, in the half-open till, where there still
lingered a base sixpence, worth neither more nor less than the
hereditary pride which had here been put to shame. Such had been the
state and condition of the little shop in old Hepzibah's childhood,
when she and her brother used to play at hide-and-seek in its forsaken
precincts. So it had remained, until within a few days past.
But now, though the shop-window was still closely curtained from the
public gaze, a remarkable change had taken place in its interior. The
rich and heavy festoons of cobweb, which it had cost a long ancestral
succession of spiders their life's labor to spin and weave, had been
carefully brushed away from the ceiling. The counter, shelves, and
floor had all been scoured, and the latter was overstrewn with fresh
blue sand. The brown scales, too, had evidently undergone rigid
discipline, in an unavailing effort to rub off the rust, which, alas!
had eaten through and through their substance. Neither was the little
old shop any longer empty of merchantable goods. A curious eye,
privileged to take an account of stock and investigate behind the
counter, would have discovered a barrel, yea, two or three barrels and
half ditto,--one containing flour, another apples, and a third,
perhaps, Indian meal. There was likewise a square box of pine-wood,
full of soap in bars; also, another of the same size, in which were
tallow candles, ten to the pound. A small stock of brown sugar, some
white beans and split peas, and a few other commodities of low price,
and such as are constantly in demand, made up the bulkier portion of
the merchandise. It might have been taken for a ghostly or
phantasmagoric reflection of the old shop-keeper Pyncheon's shabbily
provided shelves, save that some of the articles were of a description
and outward form which could hardly have been known in his day. For
instance, there was a glass pickle-jar, filled with fragments of
Gibraltar rock; not, indeed, splinters of the veritable stone
foundation of the famous fortress, but bits of delectable candy, neatly
done up in white paper. Jim Crow, moreover, was seen executing his
world-renowned dance, in gingerbread. A party of leaden dragoons were
galloping along one of the shelves, in equipments and uniform of modern
cut; and there were some sugar figures, with no strong resemblance to
the humanity of any epoch, but less unsatisfactorily representing our
own fashions than those of a hundred years ago. Another phenomenon,
still more strikingly modern, was a package of lucifer matches, which,
in old times, would have been thought actually to borrow their
instantaneous flame from the nether fires of Tophet.
In short, to bring the matter at once to a point, it was
incontrovertibly evident that somebody had taken the shop and fixtures
of the long-retired and forgotten Mr. Pyncheon, and was about to renew
the enterprise of that departed worthy, with a different set of
customers. Who could this bold adventurer be? And, of all places in
the world, why had he chosen the House of the Seven Gables as the scene
of his commercial speculations?
We return to the elderly maiden. She at length withdrew her eyes from
the dark countenance of the Colonel's portrait, heaved a sigh,--indeed,
her breast was a very cave of Aolus that morning,--and stept across the
room on tiptoe, as is the customary gait of elderly women. Passing
through an intervening passage, she opened a door that communicated
with the shop, just now so elaborately described. Owing to the
projection of the upper story--and still more to the thick shadow of
the Pyncheon Elm, which stood almost directly in front of the
gable--the twilight, here, was still as much akin to night as morning.
Another heavy sigh from Miss Hepzibah! After a moment's pause on the
threshold, peering towards the window with her near-sighted scowl, as
if frowning down some bitter enemy, she suddenly projected herself into
the shop. The haste, and, as it were, the galvanic impulse of the
movement, were really quite startling.
Nervously--in a sort of frenzy, we might almost say--she began to busy
herself in arranging some children's playthings, and other little
wares, on the shelves and at the shop-window. In the aspect of this
dark-arrayed, pale-faced, ladylike old figure there was a deeply tragic
character that contrasted irreconcilably with the ludicrous pettiness
of her employment. It seemed a queer anomaly, that so gaunt and dismal
a personage should take a toy in hand; a miracle, that the toy did not
vanish in her grasp; a miserably absurd idea, that she should go on
perplexing her stiff and sombre intellect with the question how to
tempt little boys into her premises! Yet such is undoubtedly her
object. Now she places a gingerbread elephant against the window, but
with so tremulous a touch that it tumbles upon the floor, with the
dismemberment of three legs and its trunk; it has ceased to be an
elephant, and has become a few bits of musty gingerbread. There,
again, she has upset a tumbler of marbles, all of which roll different
ways, and each individual marble, devil-directed, into the most
difficult obscurity that it can find. Heaven help our poor old
Hepzibah, and forgive us for taking a ludicrous view of her position!
As her rigid and rusty frame goes down upon its hands and knees, in
quest of the absconding marbles, we positively feel so much the more
inclined to shed tears of sympathy, from the very fact that we must
needs turn aside and laugh at her. For here,--and if we fail to
impress it suitably upon the reader, it is our own fault, not that of
the theme, here is one of the truest points of melancholy interest that
occur in ordinary life. It was the final throe of what called itself
old gentility. A lady--who had fed herself from childhood with the
shadowy food of aristocratic reminiscences, and whose religion it was
that a lady's hand soils itself irremediably by doing aught for
bread,--this born lady, after sixty years of narrowing means, is fain
to step down from her pedestal of imaginary rank. Poverty, treading
closely at her heels for a lifetime, has come up with her at last. She
must earn her own food, or starve! And we have stolen upon Miss
Hepzibah Pyncheon, too irreverently, at the instant of time when the
patrician lady is to be transformed into the plebeian woman.
In this republican country, amid the fluctuating waves of our social
life, somebody is always at the drowning-point. The tragedy is enacted
with as continual a repetition as that of a popular drama on a holiday,
and, nevertheless, is felt as deeply, perhaps, as when an hereditary
noble sinks below his order. More deeply; since, with us, rank is the
grosser substance of wealth and a splendid establishment, and has no
spiritual existence after the death of these, but dies hopelessly along
with them. And, therefore, since we have been unfortunate enough to
introduce our heroine at so inauspicious a juncture, we would entreat
for a mood of due solemnity in the spectators of her fate. Let us
behold, in poor Hepzibah, the immemorial, lady--two hundred years old,
on this side of the water, and thrice as many on the other,--with her
antique portraits, pedigrees, coats of arms, records and traditions,
and her claim, as joint heiress, to that princely territory at the
eastward, no longer a wilderness, but a populous fertility,--born, too,
in Pyncheon Street, under the Pyncheon Elm, and in the Pyncheon House,
where she has spent all her days,--reduced. Now, in that very house,
to be the hucksteress of a cent-shop.
This business of setting up a petty shop is almost the only resource of
women, in circumstances at all similar to those of our unfortunate
recluse. With her near-sightedness, and those tremulous fingers of
hers, at once inflexible and delicate, she could not be a seamstress;
although her sampler, of fifty years gone by, exhibited some of the
most recondite specimens of ornamental needlework. A school for little
children had been often in her thoughts; and, at one time, she had
begun a review of her early studies in the New England Primer, with a
view to prepare herself for the office of instructress. But the love
of children had never been quickened in Hepzibah's heart, and was now
torpid, if not extinct; she watched the little people of the
neighborhood from her chamber-window, and doubted whether she could
tolerate a more intimate acquaintance with them. Besides, in our day,
the very ABC has become a science greatly too abstruse to be any longer
taught by pointing a pin from letter to letter. A modern child could
teach old Hepzibah more than old Hepzibah could teach the child.
So--with many a cold, deep heart-quake at the idea of at last coming
into sordid contact with the world, from which she had so long kept
aloof, while every added day of seclusion had rolled another stone
against the cavern door of her hermitage--the poor thing bethought
herself of the ancient shop-window, the rusty scales, and dusty till.
She might have held back a little longer; but another circumstance, not
yet hinted at, had somewhat hastened her decision. Her humble
preparations, therefore, were duly made, and the enterprise was now to
be commenced. Nor was she entitled to complain of any remarkable
singularity in her fate; for, in the town of her nativity, we might
point to several little shops of a similar description, some of them in
houses as ancient as that of the Seven Gables; and one or two, it may
be, where a decayed gentlewoman stands behind the counter, as grim an
image of family pride as Miss Hepzibah Pyncheon herself.
It was overpoweringly ridiculous,--we must honestly confess it,--the
deportment of the maiden lady while setting her shop in order for the
public eye. She stole on tiptoe to the window, as cautiously as if she
conceived some bloody-minded villain to be watching behind the
elm-tree, with intent to take her life. Stretching out her long, lank
arm, she put a paper of pearl-buttons, a jew's-harp, or whatever the
small article might be, in its destined place, and straightway vanished
back into the dusk, as if the world need never hope for another glimpse
of her. It might have been fancied, indeed, that she expected to
minister to the wants of the community unseen, like a disembodied
divinity or enchantress, holding forth her bargains to the reverential
and awe-stricken purchaser in an invisible hand. But Hepzibah had no
such flattering dream. She was well aware that she must ultimately come
forward, and stand revealed in her proper individuality; but, like
other sensitive persons, she could not bear to be observed in the
gradual process, and chose rather to flash forth on the world's
astonished gaze at once.
The inevitable moment was not much longer to be delayed. The sunshine
might now be seen stealing down the front of the opposite house, from
the windows of which came a reflected gleam, struggling through the
boughs of the elm-tree, and enlightening the interior of the shop more
distinctly than heretofore. The town appeared to be waking up. A
baker's cart had already rattled through the street, chasing away the
latest vestige of night's sanctity with the jingle-jangle of its
dissonant bells. A milkman was distributing the contents of his cans
from door to door; and the harsh peal of a fisherman's conch shell was
heard far off, around the corner. None of these tokens escaped
Hepzibah's notice. The moment had arrived. To delay longer would be
only to lengthen out her misery. Nothing remained, except to take down
the bar from the shop-door, leaving the entrance free--more than
free--welcome, as if all were household friends--to every passer-by,
whose eyes might be attracted by the commodities at the window. This
last act Hepzibah now performed, letting the bar fall with what smote
upon her excited nerves as a most astounding clatter. Then--as if the
only barrier betwixt herself and the world had been thrown down, and a
flood of evil consequences would come tumbling through the gap--she
fled into the inner parlor, threw herself into the ancestral
elbow-chair, and wept.
Our miserable old Hepzibah! It is a heavy annoyance to a writer, who
endeavors to represent nature, its various attitudes and circumstances,
in a reasonably correct outline and true coloring, that so much of the
mean and ludicrous should be hopelessly mixed up with the purest pathos
which life anywhere supplies to him. What tragic dignity, for example,
can be wrought into a scene like this! How can we elevate our history
of retribution for the sin of long ago, when, as one of our most
prominent figures, we are compelled to introduce--not a young and
lovely woman, nor even the stately remains of beauty, storm-shattered
by affliction--but a gaunt, sallow, rusty-jointed maiden, in a
long-waisted silk gown, and with the strange horror of a turban on her
head! Her visage is not even ugly. It is redeemed from insignificance
only by the contraction of her eyebrows into a near-sighted scowl.
And, finally, her great life-trial seems to be, that, after sixty years
of idleness, she finds it convenient to earn comfortable bread by
setting up a shop in a small way. Nevertheless, if we look through all
the heroic fortunes of mankind, we shall find this same entanglement of
something mean and trivial with whatever is noblest in joy or sorrow.
Life is made up of marble and mud. And, without all the deeper trust
in a comprehensive sympathy above us, we might hence be led to suspect
the insult of a sneer, as well as an immitigable frown, on the iron
countenance of fate. What is called poetic insight is the gift of
discerning, in this sphere of strangely mingled elements, the beauty
and the majesty which are compelled to assume a garb so sordid.
| After tracing the family history of the Pyncheons in the previous chapter, Hawthorne details the present state of the Pyncheons. The author immediately establishes Hepzibah Pyncheon as a pitiful and pathetic character, reduced to abject poverty despite her familial legacy and possession of the House of the Seven Gables. That she must open a small store at her old age is a tragic loss of dignity, particularly for woman for whom dignity is the only thing that remains. Hepzibah is no longer a young nor a beautiful woman, although Hawthorne indicates that she was once attractive. She now looks upon the world with a great scowl that mars her appearance. This scowl, the result of poor vision, marks her as a mean and bitter old maid, yet does not capture the actual state of this frail and delicate woman. Hepzibah thus becomes a character easy to misrepresent in the course of a story filled with representations of characters. Hawthorne includes a number of instances of portraiture: he makes great note of the painting of Colonel Pyncheon that still remains in the House, while Hepzibah gazes upon the picture of a young man before opening the shop. These examples of portraiture contribute to the idea of recurring events; even more than a century after his death, Colonel Pyncheon is still a fixture who dominates the House of the Seven Gables. The indignity that Hepzibah must face is compounded by her position as a member of the Pyncheon family, for this status marks her as a lady "two hundred years old, on this side of the water, and thrice as many on the other" with a pedigree and tradition. As a member of this elite family, she is a direct representation of her ancestors, relating to the idea established in the previous chapter that the sins of Colonel Pyncheon have been passed to his descendants. This phenomena, however, seems to be contrary to the democratic tradition. Hawthorne writes that in a republican nation, family fortunes fluctuate, indicating that it is difficult to establish such a concrete and perpetual legacy. The Pyncheons therefore stand out as representing an elite, monarchical tradition contrary to the democracy in which they live. It is the democratic character of Hepzibah's action that is the one redeeming quality of her new job. When Hepzibah opens the store, she emerges as an individual separate from an anonymous and impenetrable family tradition. When she opens the shop she stands "revealed in her proper individuality," however sensitive and fragile. Hepzibah may no longer be a lady in the Pyncheon tradition, yet for the first time she becomes a separate and distinguishable person | analysis |
MISS HEPZIBAH PYNCHEON sat in the oaken elbow-chair, with her hands
over her face, giving way to that heavy down-sinking of the heart which
most persons have experienced, when the image of hope itself seems
ponderously moulded of lead, on the eve of an enterprise at once
doubtful and momentous. She was suddenly startled by the tinkling
alarum--high, sharp, and irregular--of a little bell. The maiden lady
arose upon her feet, as pale as a ghost at cock-crow; for she was an
enslaved spirit, and this the talisman to which she owed obedience.
This little bell,--to speak in plainer terms,--being fastened over the
shop-door, was so contrived as to vibrate by means of a steel spring,
and thus convey notice to the inner regions of the house when any
customer should cross the threshold. Its ugly and spiteful little din
(heard now for the first time, perhaps, since Hepzibah's periwigged
predecessor had retired from trade) at once set every nerve of her body
in responsive and tumultuous vibration. The crisis was upon her! Her
first customer was at the door!
Without giving herself time for a second thought, she rushed into the
shop, pale, wild, desperate in gesture and expression, scowling
portentously, and looking far better qualified to do fierce battle with
a housebreaker than to stand smiling behind the counter, bartering
small wares for a copper recompense. Any ordinary customer, indeed,
would have turned his back and fled. And yet there was nothing fierce
in Hepzibah's poor old heart; nor had she, at the moment, a single
bitter thought against the world at large, or one individual man or
woman. She wished them all well, but wished, too, that she herself
were done with them, and in her quiet grave.
The applicant, by this time, stood within the doorway. Coming freshly,
as he did, out of the morning light, he appeared to have brought some
of its cheery influences into the shop along with him. It was a
slender young man, not more than one or two and twenty years old, with
rather a grave and thoughtful expression for his years, but likewise a
springy alacrity and vigor. These qualities were not only perceptible,
physically, in his make and motions, but made themselves felt almost
immediately in his character. A brown beard, not too silken in its
texture, fringed his chin, but as yet without completely hiding it; he
wore a short mustache, too, and his dark, high-featured countenance
looked all the better for these natural ornaments. As for his dress,
it was of the simplest kind; a summer sack of cheap and ordinary
material, thin checkered pantaloons, and a straw hat, by no means of
the finest braid. Oak Hall might have supplied his entire equipment.
He was chiefly marked as a gentleman--if such, indeed, he made any
claim to be--by the rather remarkable whiteness and nicety of his clean
linen.
He met the scowl of old Hepzibah without apparent alarm, as having
heretofore encountered it and found it harmless.
"So, my dear Miss Pyncheon," said the daguerreotypist,--for it was that
sole other occupant of the seven-gabled mansion,--"I am glad to see
that you have not shrunk from your good purpose. I merely look in to
offer my best wishes, and to ask if I can assist you any further in
your preparations."
People in difficulty and distress, or in any manner at odds with the
world, can endure a vast amount of harsh treatment, and perhaps be only
the stronger for it; whereas they give way at once before the simplest
expression of what they perceive to be genuine sympathy. So it proved
with poor Hepzibah; for, when she saw the young man's smile,--looking
so much the brighter on a thoughtful face,--and heard his kindly tone,
she broke first into a hysteric giggle and then began to sob.
"Ah, Mr. Holgrave," cried she, as soon as she could speak, "I never can
go through with it! Never, never, never! I wish I were dead, and in the
old family tomb, with all my forefathers! With my father, and my
mother, and my sister! Yes, and with my brother, who had far better
find me there than here! The world is too chill and hard,--and I am too
old, and too feeble, and too hopeless!"
"Oh, believe me, Miss Hepzibah," said the young man quietly, "these
feelings will not trouble you any longer, after you are once fairly in
the midst of your enterprise. They are unavoidable at this moment,
standing, as you do, on the outer verge of your long seclusion, and
peopling the world with ugly shapes, which you will soon find to be as
unreal as the giants and ogres of a child's story-book. I find nothing
so singular in life, as that everything appears to lose its substance
the instant one actually grapples with it. So it will be with what you
think so terrible."
"But I am a woman!" said Hepzibah piteously. "I was going to say, a
lady,--but I consider that as past."
"Well; no matter if it be past!" answered the artist, a strange gleam
of half-hidden sarcasm flashing through the kindliness of his manner.
"Let it go! You are the better without it. I speak frankly, my dear
Miss Pyncheon!--for are we not friends? I look upon this as one of the
fortunate days of your life. It ends an epoch and begins one.
Hitherto, the life-blood has been gradually chilling in your veins as
you sat aloof, within your circle of gentility, while the rest of the
world was fighting out its battle with one kind of necessity or
another. Henceforth, you will at least have the sense of healthy and
natural effort for a purpose, and of lending your strength be it great
or small--to the united struggle of mankind. This is success,--all the
success that anybody meets with!"
"It is natural enough, Mr. Holgrave, that you should have ideas like
these," rejoined Hepzibah, drawing up her gaunt figure with slightly
offended dignity. "You are a man, a young man, and brought up, I
suppose, as almost everybody is nowadays, with a view to seeking your
fortune. But I was born a lady, and have always lived one; no matter
in what narrowness of means, always a lady."
"But I was not born a gentleman; neither have I lived like one," said
Holgrave, slightly smiling; "so, my dear madam, you will hardly expect
me to sympathize with sensibilities of this kind; though, unless I
deceive myself, I have some imperfect comprehension of them. These
names of gentleman and lady had a meaning, in the past history of the
world, and conferred privileges, desirable or otherwise, on those
entitled to bear them. In the present--and still more in the future
condition of society-they imply, not privilege, but restriction!"
"These are new notions," said the old gentlewoman, shaking her head.
"I shall never understand them; neither do I wish it."
"We will cease to speak of them, then," replied the artist, with a
friendlier smile than his last one, "and I will leave you to feel
whether it is not better to be a true woman than a lady. Do you really
think, Miss Hepzibah, that any lady of your family has ever done a more
heroic thing, since this house was built, than you are performing in it
to-day? Never; and if the Pyncheons had always acted so nobly, I doubt
whether an old wizard Maule's anathema, of which you told me once,
would have had much weight with Providence against them."
"Ah!--no, no!" said Hepzibah, not displeased at this allusion to the
sombre dignity of an inherited curse. "If old Maule's ghost, or a
descendant of his, could see me behind the counter to-day, he would
call it the fulfillment of his worst wishes. But I thank you for your
kindness, Mr. Holgrave, and will do my utmost to be a good shop-keeper."
"Pray do" said Holgrave, "and let me have the pleasure of being your
first customer. I am about taking a walk to the seashore, before going
to my rooms, where I misuse Heaven's blessed sunshine by tracing out
human features through its agency. A few of those biscuits, dipt in
sea-water, will be just what I need for breakfast. What is the price
of half a dozen?"
"Let me be a lady a moment longer," replied Hepzibah, with a manner of
antique stateliness to which a melancholy smile lent a kind of grace.
She put the biscuits into his hand, but rejected the compensation. "A
Pyncheon must not, at all events under her forefathers' roof, receive
money for a morsel of bread from her only friend!"
Holgrave took his departure, leaving her, for the moment, with spirits
not quite so much depressed. Soon, however, they had subsided nearly
to their former dead level. With a beating heart, she listened to the
footsteps of early passengers, which now began to be frequent along the
street. Once or twice they seemed to linger; these strangers, or
neighbors, as the case might be, were looking at the display of toys
and petty commodities in Hepzibah's shop-window. She was doubly
tortured; in part, with a sense of overwhelming shame that strange and
unloving eyes should have the privilege of gazing, and partly because
the idea occurred to her, with ridiculous importunity, that the window
was not arranged so skilfully, nor nearly to so much advantage, as it
might have been. It seemed as if the whole fortune or failure of her
shop might depend on the display of a different set of articles, or
substituting a fairer apple for one which appeared to be specked. So
she made the change, and straightway fancied that everything was
spoiled by it; not recognizing that it was the nervousness of the
juncture, and her own native squeamishness as an old maid, that wrought
all the seeming mischief.
Anon, there was an encounter, just at the door-step, betwixt two
laboring men, as their rough voices denoted them to be. After some
slight talk about their own affairs, one of them chanced to notice the
shop-window, and directed the other's attention to it.
"See here!" cried he; "what do you think of this? Trade seems to be
looking up in Pyncheon Street!"
"Well, well, this is a sight, to be sure!" exclaimed the other. "In
the old Pyncheon House, and underneath the Pyncheon Elm! Who would have
thought it? Old Maid Pyncheon is setting up a cent-shop!"
"Will she make it go, think you, Dixey?" said his friend. "I don't
call it a very good stand. There's another shop just round the corner."
"Make it go!" cried Dixey, with a most contemptuous expression, as if
the very idea were impossible to be conceived. "Not a bit of it! Why,
her face--I've seen it, for I dug her garden for her one year--her face
is enough to frighten the Old Nick himself, if he had ever so great a
mind to trade with her. People can't stand it, I tell you! She scowls
dreadfully, reason or none, out of pure ugliness of temper."
"Well, that's not so much matter," remarked the other man. "These
sour-tempered folks are mostly handy at business, and know pretty well
what they are about. But, as you say, I don't think she'll do much.
This business of keeping cent-shops is overdone, like all other kinds
of trade, handicraft, and bodily labor. I know it, to my cost! My wife
kept a cent-shop three months, and lost five dollars on her outlay."
"Poor business!" responded Dixey, in a tone as if he were shaking his
head,--"poor business."
For some reason or other, not very easy to analyze, there had hardly
been so bitter a pang in all her previous misery about the matter as
what thrilled Hepzibah's heart on overhearing the above conversation.
The testimony in regard to her scowl was frightfully important; it
seemed to hold up her image wholly relieved from the false light of her
self-partialities, and so hideous that she dared not look at it. She
was absurdly hurt, moreover, by the slight and idle effect that her
setting up shop--an event of such breathless interest to
herself--appeared to have upon the public, of which these two men were
the nearest representatives. A glance; a passing word or two; a coarse
laugh; and she was doubtless forgotten before they turned the corner.
They cared nothing for her dignity, and just as little for her
degradation. Then, also, the augury of ill-success, uttered from the
sure wisdom of experience, fell upon her half-dead hope like a clod
into a grave. The man's wife had already tried the same experiment,
and failed! How could the born lady--the recluse of half a lifetime,
utterly unpractised in the world, at sixty years of age,--how could she
ever dream of succeeding, when the hard, vulgar, keen, busy, hackneyed
New England woman had lost five dollars on her little outlay! Success
presented itself as an impossibility, and the hope of it as a wild
hallucination.
Some malevolent spirit, doing his utmost to drive Hepzibah mad,
unrolled before her imagination a kind of panorama, representing the
great thoroughfare of a city all astir with customers. So many and so
magnificent shops as there were! Groceries, toy-shops, drygoods stores,
with their immense panes of plate-glass, their gorgeous fixtures, their
vast and complete assortments of merchandise, in which fortunes had
been invested; and those noble mirrors at the farther end of each
establishment, doubling all this wealth by a brightly burnished vista
of unrealities! On one side of the street this splendid bazaar, with a
multitude of perfumed and glossy salesmen, smirking, smiling, bowing,
and measuring out the goods. On the other, the dusky old House of the
Seven Gables, with the antiquated shop-window under its projecting
story, and Hepzibah herself, in a gown of rusty black silk, behind the
counter, scowling at the world as it went by! This mighty contrast
thrust itself forward as a fair expression of the odds against which
she was to begin her struggle for a subsistence. Success?
Preposterous! She would never think of it again! The house might just
as well be buried in an eternal fog while all other houses had the
sunshine on them; for not a foot would ever cross the threshold, nor a
hand so much as try the door!
But, at this instant, the shop-bell, right over her head, tinkled as if
it were bewitched. The old gentlewoman's heart seemed to be attached
to the same steel spring, for it went through a series of sharp jerks,
in unison with the sound. The door was thrust open, although no human
form was perceptible on the other side of the half-window. Hepzibah,
nevertheless, stood at a gaze, with her hands clasped, looking very
much as if she had summoned up an evil spirit, and were afraid, yet
resolved, to hazard the encounter.
"Heaven help me!" she groaned mentally. "Now is my hour of need!"
The door, which moved with difficulty on its creaking and rusty hinges,
being forced quite open, a square and sturdy little urchin became
apparent, with cheeks as red as an apple. He was clad rather shabbily
(but, as it seemed, more owing to his mother's carelessness than his
father's poverty), in a blue apron, very wide and short trousers, shoes
somewhat out at the toes, and a chip hat, with the frizzles of his
curly hair sticking through its crevices. A book and a small slate,
under his arm, indicated that he was on his way to school. He stared
at Hepzibah a moment, as an elder customer than himself would have been
likely enough to do, not knowing what to make of the tragic attitude
and queer scowl wherewith she regarded him.
"Well, child," said she, taking heart at sight of a personage so little
formidable,--"well, my child, what did you wish for?"
"That Jim Crow there in the window," answered the urchin, holding out a
cent, and pointing to the gingerbread figure that had attracted his
notice, as he loitered along to school; "the one that has not a broken
foot."
So Hepzibah put forth her lank arm, and, taking the effigy from the
shop-window, delivered it to her first customer.
"No matter for the money," said she, giving him a little push towards
the door; for her old gentility was contumaciously squeamish at sight
of the copper coin, and, besides, it seemed such pitiful meanness to
take the child's pocket-money in exchange for a bit of stale
gingerbread. "No matter for the cent. You are welcome to Jim Crow."
The child, staring with round eyes at this instance of liberality,
wholly unprecedented in his large experience of cent-shops, took the
man of gingerbread, and quitted the premises. No sooner had he reached
the sidewalk (little cannibal that he was!) than Jim Crow's head was in
his mouth. As he had not been careful to shut the door, Hepzibah was
at the pains of closing it after him, with a pettish ejaculation or two
about the troublesomeness of young people, and particularly of small
boys. She had just placed another representative of the renowned Jim
Crow at the window, when again the shop-bell tinkled clamorously, and
again the door being thrust open, with its characteristic jerk and jar,
disclosed the same sturdy little urchin who, precisely two minutes ago,
had made his exit. The crumbs and discoloration of the cannibal feast,
as yet hardly consummated, were exceedingly visible about his mouth.
"What is it now, child?" asked the maiden lady rather impatiently; "did
you come back to shut the door?"
"No," answered the urchin, pointing to the figure that had just been
put up; "I want that other Jim Crow."
"Well, here it is for you," said Hepzibah, reaching it down; but
recognizing that this pertinacious customer would not quit her on any
other terms, so long as she had a gingerbread figure in her shop, she
partly drew back her extended hand, "Where is the cent?"
The little boy had the cent ready, but, like a true-born Yankee, would
have preferred the better bargain to the worse. Looking somewhat
chagrined, he put the coin into Hepzibah's hand, and departed, sending
the second Jim Crow in quest of the former one. The new shop-keeper
dropped the first solid result of her commercial enterprise into the
till. It was done! The sordid stain of that copper coin could never be
washed away from her palm. The little schoolboy, aided by the impish
figure of the negro dancer, had wrought an irreparable ruin. The
structure of ancient aristocracy had been demolished by him, even as if
his childish gripe had torn down the seven-gabled mansion. Now let
Hepzibah turn the old Pyncheon portraits with their faces to the wall,
and take the map of her Eastern territory to kindle the kitchen fire,
and blow up the flame with the empty breath of her ancestral
traditions! What had she to do with ancestry? Nothing; no more than
with posterity! No lady, now, but simply Hepzibah Pyncheon, a forlorn
old maid, and keeper of a cent-shop!
Nevertheless, even while she paraded these ideas somewhat
ostentatiously through her mind, it is altogether surprising what a
calmness had come over her. The anxiety and misgivings which had
tormented her, whether asleep or in melancholy day-dreams, ever since
her project began to take an aspect of solidity, had now vanished quite
away. She felt the novelty of her position, indeed, but no longer with
disturbance or affright. Now and then, there came a thrill of almost
youthful enjoyment. It was the invigorating breath of a fresh outward
atmosphere, after the long torpor and monotonous seclusion of her life.
So wholesome is effort! So miraculous the strength that we do not know
of! The healthiest glow that Hepzibah had known for years had come now
in the dreaded crisis, when, for the first time, she had put forth her
hand to help herself. The little circlet of the schoolboy's copper
coin--dim and lustreless though it was, with the small services which
it had been doing here and there about the world--had proved a
talisman, fragrant with good, and deserving to be set in gold and worn
next her heart. It was as potent, and perhaps endowed with the same
kind of efficacy, as a galvanic ring! Hepzibah, at all events, was
indebted to its subtile operation both in body and spirit; so much the
more, as it inspired her with energy to get some breakfast, at which,
still the better to keep up her courage, she allowed herself an extra
spoonful in her infusion of black tea.
Her introductory day of shop-keeping did not run on, however, without
many and serious interruptions of this mood of cheerful vigor. As a
general rule, Providence seldom vouchsafes to mortals any more than
just that degree of encouragement which suffices to keep them at a
reasonably full exertion of their powers. In the case of our old
gentlewoman, after the excitement of new effort had subsided, the
despondency of her whole life threatened, ever and anon, to return. It
was like the heavy mass of clouds which we may often see obscuring the
sky, and making a gray twilight everywhere, until, towards nightfall,
it yields temporarily to a glimpse of sunshine. But, always, the
envious cloud strives to gather again across the streak of celestial
azure.
Customers came in, as the forenoon advanced, but rather slowly; in some
cases, too, it must be owned, with little satisfaction either to
themselves or Miss Hepzibah; nor, on the whole, with an aggregate of
very rich emolument to the till. A little girl, sent by her mother to
match a skein of cotton thread, of a peculiar hue, took one that the
near-sighted old lady pronounced extremely like, but soon came running
back, with a blunt and cross message, that it would not do, and,
besides, was very rotten! Then, there was a pale, care-wrinkled woman,
not old but haggard, and already with streaks of gray among her hair,
like silver ribbons; one of those women, naturally delicate, whom you
at once recognize as worn to death by a brute--probably a drunken
brute--of a husband, and at least nine children. She wanted a few
pounds of flour, and offered the money, which the decayed gentlewoman
silently rejected, and gave the poor soul better measure than if she
had taken it. Shortly afterwards, a man in a blue cotton frock, much
soiled, came in and bought a pipe, filling the whole shop, meanwhile,
with the hot odor of strong drink, not only exhaled in the torrid
atmosphere of his breath, but oozing out of his entire system, like an
inflammable gas. It was impressed on Hepzibah's mind that this was the
husband of the care-wrinkled woman. He asked for a paper of tobacco;
and as she had neglected to provide herself with the article, her
brutal customer dashed down his newly-bought pipe and left the shop,
muttering some unintelligible words, which had the tone and bitterness
of a curse. Hereupon Hepzibah threw up her eyes, unintentionally
scowling in the face of Providence!
No less than five persons, during the forenoon, inquired for
ginger-beer, or root-beer, or any drink of a similar brewage, and,
obtaining nothing of the kind, went off in an exceedingly bad humor.
Three of them left the door open, and the other two pulled it so
spitefully in going out that the little bell played the very deuce with
Hepzibah's nerves. A round, bustling, fire-ruddy housewife of the
neighborhood burst breathless into the shop, fiercely demanding yeast;
and when the poor gentlewoman, with her cold shyness of manner, gave
her hot customer to understand that she did not keep the article, this
very capable housewife took upon herself to administer a regular rebuke.
"A cent-shop, and no yeast!" quoth she; "That will never do! Who ever
heard of such a thing? Your loaf will never rise, no more than mine
will to-day. You had better shut up shop at once."
"Well," said Hepzibah, heaving a deep sigh, "perhaps I had!"
Several times, moreover, besides the above instance, her lady-like
sensibilities were seriously infringed upon by the familiar, if not
rude, tone with which people addressed her. They evidently considered
themselves not merely her equals, but her patrons and superiors. Now,
Hepzibah had unconsciously flattered herself with the idea that there
would be a gleam or halo, of some kind or other, about her person,
which would insure an obeisance to her sterling gentility, or, at
least, a tacit recognition of it. On the other hand, nothing tortured
her more intolerably than when this recognition was too prominently
expressed. To one or two rather officious offers of sympathy, her
responses were little short of acrimonious; and, we regret to say,
Hepzibah was thrown into a positively unchristian state of mind by the
suspicion that one of her customers was drawn to the shop, not by any
real need of the article which she pretended to seek, but by a wicked
wish to stare at her. The vulgar creature was determined to see for
herself what sort of a figure a mildewed piece of aristocracy, after
wasting all the bloom and much of the decline of her life apart from
the world, would cut behind a counter. In this particular case,
however mechanical and innocuous it might be at other times, Hepzibah's
contortion of brow served her in good stead.
"I never was so frightened in my life!" said the curious customer, in
describing the incident to one of her acquaintances. "She's a real old
vixen, take my word of it! She says little, to be sure; but if you
could only see the mischief in her eye!"
On the whole, therefore, her new experience led our decayed gentlewoman
to very disagreeable conclusions as to the temper and manners of what
she termed the lower classes, whom heretofore she had looked down upon
with a gentle and pitying complaisance, as herself occupying a sphere
of unquestionable superiority. But, unfortunately, she had likewise to
struggle against a bitter emotion of a directly opposite kind: a
sentiment of virulence, we mean, towards the idle aristocracy to which
it had so recently been her pride to belong. When a lady, in a
delicate and costly summer garb, with a floating veil and gracefully
swaying gown, and, altogether, an ethereal lightness that made you look
at her beautifully slippered feet, to see whether she trod on the dust
or floated in the air,--when such a vision happened to pass through
this retired street, leaving it tenderly and delusively fragrant with
her passage, as if a bouquet of tea-roses had been borne along,--then
again, it is to be feared, old Hepzibah's scowl could no longer
vindicate itself entirely on the plea of near-sightedness.
"For what end," thought she, giving vent to that feeling of hostility
which is the only real abasement of the poor in presence of the
rich,--"for what good end, in the wisdom of Providence, does that woman
live? Must the whole world toil, that the palms of her hands may be
kept white and delicate?"
Then, ashamed and penitent, she hid her face.
"May God forgive me!" said she.
Doubtless, God did forgive her. But, taking the inward and outward
history of the first half-day into consideration, Hepzibah began to
fear that the shop would prove her ruin in a moral and religious point
of view, without contributing very essentially towards even her
temporal welfare.
| The First Customer: While sitting in her shop, a bell alarms Hepzibah. Her first customer arrives, a slender young man in his early twenties with a grave expression but a physical vigor. This customer, Mr. Holgrave, is the daguerreotype artist who is a boarder in the house. He wishes her well on her shop, but she cries, thinking that she can never go through with running a shop. He comforts her, telling her that she now has a purpose in life that is joined with the rest of mankind. He tells her that titles of gentleman' and lady' now mean little, implying restriction rather than privilege. He tells her that her action is the most heroic in the history of her house. She claims that, if the ghost of Matthew Maule saw what she is doing, he would consider it fulfillment of his worst wishes. He buys biscuits from her, but she refuses to accept payment from her only friend. Later, Hepzibah listens to men outside her shop, who talk about how she scowls dreadfully and dismiss the idea of a cent-shop. Her next customer is a young urchin on his way to school who buys a bit of stale gingerbread. When she refuses to charge him, he stares at her with amazement at her kindness. When he buys a second one, he pays Hepzibah her first copper coin, a single cent that, to Hepzibah, demolishes the structure of her ancient aristocracy. Customers gradually come to Hepzibah's shop, often criticizing her for lacking certain wares. This led her to disagreeable conclusions about the temper and manners of the lower classes, but also to a bitter emotion toward the idle aristocracy. | summary |
MISS HEPZIBAH PYNCHEON sat in the oaken elbow-chair, with her hands
over her face, giving way to that heavy down-sinking of the heart which
most persons have experienced, when the image of hope itself seems
ponderously moulded of lead, on the eve of an enterprise at once
doubtful and momentous. She was suddenly startled by the tinkling
alarum--high, sharp, and irregular--of a little bell. The maiden lady
arose upon her feet, as pale as a ghost at cock-crow; for she was an
enslaved spirit, and this the talisman to which she owed obedience.
This little bell,--to speak in plainer terms,--being fastened over the
shop-door, was so contrived as to vibrate by means of a steel spring,
and thus convey notice to the inner regions of the house when any
customer should cross the threshold. Its ugly and spiteful little din
(heard now for the first time, perhaps, since Hepzibah's periwigged
predecessor had retired from trade) at once set every nerve of her body
in responsive and tumultuous vibration. The crisis was upon her! Her
first customer was at the door!
Without giving herself time for a second thought, she rushed into the
shop, pale, wild, desperate in gesture and expression, scowling
portentously, and looking far better qualified to do fierce battle with
a housebreaker than to stand smiling behind the counter, bartering
small wares for a copper recompense. Any ordinary customer, indeed,
would have turned his back and fled. And yet there was nothing fierce
in Hepzibah's poor old heart; nor had she, at the moment, a single
bitter thought against the world at large, or one individual man or
woman. She wished them all well, but wished, too, that she herself
were done with them, and in her quiet grave.
The applicant, by this time, stood within the doorway. Coming freshly,
as he did, out of the morning light, he appeared to have brought some
of its cheery influences into the shop along with him. It was a
slender young man, not more than one or two and twenty years old, with
rather a grave and thoughtful expression for his years, but likewise a
springy alacrity and vigor. These qualities were not only perceptible,
physically, in his make and motions, but made themselves felt almost
immediately in his character. A brown beard, not too silken in its
texture, fringed his chin, but as yet without completely hiding it; he
wore a short mustache, too, and his dark, high-featured countenance
looked all the better for these natural ornaments. As for his dress,
it was of the simplest kind; a summer sack of cheap and ordinary
material, thin checkered pantaloons, and a straw hat, by no means of
the finest braid. Oak Hall might have supplied his entire equipment.
He was chiefly marked as a gentleman--if such, indeed, he made any
claim to be--by the rather remarkable whiteness and nicety of his clean
linen.
He met the scowl of old Hepzibah without apparent alarm, as having
heretofore encountered it and found it harmless.
"So, my dear Miss Pyncheon," said the daguerreotypist,--for it was that
sole other occupant of the seven-gabled mansion,--"I am glad to see
that you have not shrunk from your good purpose. I merely look in to
offer my best wishes, and to ask if I can assist you any further in
your preparations."
People in difficulty and distress, or in any manner at odds with the
world, can endure a vast amount of harsh treatment, and perhaps be only
the stronger for it; whereas they give way at once before the simplest
expression of what they perceive to be genuine sympathy. So it proved
with poor Hepzibah; for, when she saw the young man's smile,--looking
so much the brighter on a thoughtful face,--and heard his kindly tone,
she broke first into a hysteric giggle and then began to sob.
"Ah, Mr. Holgrave," cried she, as soon as she could speak, "I never can
go through with it! Never, never, never! I wish I were dead, and in the
old family tomb, with all my forefathers! With my father, and my
mother, and my sister! Yes, and with my brother, who had far better
find me there than here! The world is too chill and hard,--and I am too
old, and too feeble, and too hopeless!"
"Oh, believe me, Miss Hepzibah," said the young man quietly, "these
feelings will not trouble you any longer, after you are once fairly in
the midst of your enterprise. They are unavoidable at this moment,
standing, as you do, on the outer verge of your long seclusion, and
peopling the world with ugly shapes, which you will soon find to be as
unreal as the giants and ogres of a child's story-book. I find nothing
so singular in life, as that everything appears to lose its substance
the instant one actually grapples with it. So it will be with what you
think so terrible."
"But I am a woman!" said Hepzibah piteously. "I was going to say, a
lady,--but I consider that as past."
"Well; no matter if it be past!" answered the artist, a strange gleam
of half-hidden sarcasm flashing through the kindliness of his manner.
"Let it go! You are the better without it. I speak frankly, my dear
Miss Pyncheon!--for are we not friends? I look upon this as one of the
fortunate days of your life. It ends an epoch and begins one.
Hitherto, the life-blood has been gradually chilling in your veins as
you sat aloof, within your circle of gentility, while the rest of the
world was fighting out its battle with one kind of necessity or
another. Henceforth, you will at least have the sense of healthy and
natural effort for a purpose, and of lending your strength be it great
or small--to the united struggle of mankind. This is success,--all the
success that anybody meets with!"
"It is natural enough, Mr. Holgrave, that you should have ideas like
these," rejoined Hepzibah, drawing up her gaunt figure with slightly
offended dignity. "You are a man, a young man, and brought up, I
suppose, as almost everybody is nowadays, with a view to seeking your
fortune. But I was born a lady, and have always lived one; no matter
in what narrowness of means, always a lady."
"But I was not born a gentleman; neither have I lived like one," said
Holgrave, slightly smiling; "so, my dear madam, you will hardly expect
me to sympathize with sensibilities of this kind; though, unless I
deceive myself, I have some imperfect comprehension of them. These
names of gentleman and lady had a meaning, in the past history of the
world, and conferred privileges, desirable or otherwise, on those
entitled to bear them. In the present--and still more in the future
condition of society-they imply, not privilege, but restriction!"
"These are new notions," said the old gentlewoman, shaking her head.
"I shall never understand them; neither do I wish it."
"We will cease to speak of them, then," replied the artist, with a
friendlier smile than his last one, "and I will leave you to feel
whether it is not better to be a true woman than a lady. Do you really
think, Miss Hepzibah, that any lady of your family has ever done a more
heroic thing, since this house was built, than you are performing in it
to-day? Never; and if the Pyncheons had always acted so nobly, I doubt
whether an old wizard Maule's anathema, of which you told me once,
would have had much weight with Providence against them."
"Ah!--no, no!" said Hepzibah, not displeased at this allusion to the
sombre dignity of an inherited curse. "If old Maule's ghost, or a
descendant of his, could see me behind the counter to-day, he would
call it the fulfillment of his worst wishes. But I thank you for your
kindness, Mr. Holgrave, and will do my utmost to be a good shop-keeper."
"Pray do" said Holgrave, "and let me have the pleasure of being your
first customer. I am about taking a walk to the seashore, before going
to my rooms, where I misuse Heaven's blessed sunshine by tracing out
human features through its agency. A few of those biscuits, dipt in
sea-water, will be just what I need for breakfast. What is the price
of half a dozen?"
"Let me be a lady a moment longer," replied Hepzibah, with a manner of
antique stateliness to which a melancholy smile lent a kind of grace.
She put the biscuits into his hand, but rejected the compensation. "A
Pyncheon must not, at all events under her forefathers' roof, receive
money for a morsel of bread from her only friend!"
Holgrave took his departure, leaving her, for the moment, with spirits
not quite so much depressed. Soon, however, they had subsided nearly
to their former dead level. With a beating heart, she listened to the
footsteps of early passengers, which now began to be frequent along the
street. Once or twice they seemed to linger; these strangers, or
neighbors, as the case might be, were looking at the display of toys
and petty commodities in Hepzibah's shop-window. She was doubly
tortured; in part, with a sense of overwhelming shame that strange and
unloving eyes should have the privilege of gazing, and partly because
the idea occurred to her, with ridiculous importunity, that the window
was not arranged so skilfully, nor nearly to so much advantage, as it
might have been. It seemed as if the whole fortune or failure of her
shop might depend on the display of a different set of articles, or
substituting a fairer apple for one which appeared to be specked. So
she made the change, and straightway fancied that everything was
spoiled by it; not recognizing that it was the nervousness of the
juncture, and her own native squeamishness as an old maid, that wrought
all the seeming mischief.
Anon, there was an encounter, just at the door-step, betwixt two
laboring men, as their rough voices denoted them to be. After some
slight talk about their own affairs, one of them chanced to notice the
shop-window, and directed the other's attention to it.
"See here!" cried he; "what do you think of this? Trade seems to be
looking up in Pyncheon Street!"
"Well, well, this is a sight, to be sure!" exclaimed the other. "In
the old Pyncheon House, and underneath the Pyncheon Elm! Who would have
thought it? Old Maid Pyncheon is setting up a cent-shop!"
"Will she make it go, think you, Dixey?" said his friend. "I don't
call it a very good stand. There's another shop just round the corner."
"Make it go!" cried Dixey, with a most contemptuous expression, as if
the very idea were impossible to be conceived. "Not a bit of it! Why,
her face--I've seen it, for I dug her garden for her one year--her face
is enough to frighten the Old Nick himself, if he had ever so great a
mind to trade with her. People can't stand it, I tell you! She scowls
dreadfully, reason or none, out of pure ugliness of temper."
"Well, that's not so much matter," remarked the other man. "These
sour-tempered folks are mostly handy at business, and know pretty well
what they are about. But, as you say, I don't think she'll do much.
This business of keeping cent-shops is overdone, like all other kinds
of trade, handicraft, and bodily labor. I know it, to my cost! My wife
kept a cent-shop three months, and lost five dollars on her outlay."
"Poor business!" responded Dixey, in a tone as if he were shaking his
head,--"poor business."
For some reason or other, not very easy to analyze, there had hardly
been so bitter a pang in all her previous misery about the matter as
what thrilled Hepzibah's heart on overhearing the above conversation.
The testimony in regard to her scowl was frightfully important; it
seemed to hold up her image wholly relieved from the false light of her
self-partialities, and so hideous that she dared not look at it. She
was absurdly hurt, moreover, by the slight and idle effect that her
setting up shop--an event of such breathless interest to
herself--appeared to have upon the public, of which these two men were
the nearest representatives. A glance; a passing word or two; a coarse
laugh; and she was doubtless forgotten before they turned the corner.
They cared nothing for her dignity, and just as little for her
degradation. Then, also, the augury of ill-success, uttered from the
sure wisdom of experience, fell upon her half-dead hope like a clod
into a grave. The man's wife had already tried the same experiment,
and failed! How could the born lady--the recluse of half a lifetime,
utterly unpractised in the world, at sixty years of age,--how could she
ever dream of succeeding, when the hard, vulgar, keen, busy, hackneyed
New England woman had lost five dollars on her little outlay! Success
presented itself as an impossibility, and the hope of it as a wild
hallucination.
Some malevolent spirit, doing his utmost to drive Hepzibah mad,
unrolled before her imagination a kind of panorama, representing the
great thoroughfare of a city all astir with customers. So many and so
magnificent shops as there were! Groceries, toy-shops, drygoods stores,
with their immense panes of plate-glass, their gorgeous fixtures, their
vast and complete assortments of merchandise, in which fortunes had
been invested; and those noble mirrors at the farther end of each
establishment, doubling all this wealth by a brightly burnished vista
of unrealities! On one side of the street this splendid bazaar, with a
multitude of perfumed and glossy salesmen, smirking, smiling, bowing,
and measuring out the goods. On the other, the dusky old House of the
Seven Gables, with the antiquated shop-window under its projecting
story, and Hepzibah herself, in a gown of rusty black silk, behind the
counter, scowling at the world as it went by! This mighty contrast
thrust itself forward as a fair expression of the odds against which
she was to begin her struggle for a subsistence. Success?
Preposterous! She would never think of it again! The house might just
as well be buried in an eternal fog while all other houses had the
sunshine on them; for not a foot would ever cross the threshold, nor a
hand so much as try the door!
But, at this instant, the shop-bell, right over her head, tinkled as if
it were bewitched. The old gentlewoman's heart seemed to be attached
to the same steel spring, for it went through a series of sharp jerks,
in unison with the sound. The door was thrust open, although no human
form was perceptible on the other side of the half-window. Hepzibah,
nevertheless, stood at a gaze, with her hands clasped, looking very
much as if she had summoned up an evil spirit, and were afraid, yet
resolved, to hazard the encounter.
"Heaven help me!" she groaned mentally. "Now is my hour of need!"
The door, which moved with difficulty on its creaking and rusty hinges,
being forced quite open, a square and sturdy little urchin became
apparent, with cheeks as red as an apple. He was clad rather shabbily
(but, as it seemed, more owing to his mother's carelessness than his
father's poverty), in a blue apron, very wide and short trousers, shoes
somewhat out at the toes, and a chip hat, with the frizzles of his
curly hair sticking through its crevices. A book and a small slate,
under his arm, indicated that he was on his way to school. He stared
at Hepzibah a moment, as an elder customer than himself would have been
likely enough to do, not knowing what to make of the tragic attitude
and queer scowl wherewith she regarded him.
"Well, child," said she, taking heart at sight of a personage so little
formidable,--"well, my child, what did you wish for?"
"That Jim Crow there in the window," answered the urchin, holding out a
cent, and pointing to the gingerbread figure that had attracted his
notice, as he loitered along to school; "the one that has not a broken
foot."
So Hepzibah put forth her lank arm, and, taking the effigy from the
shop-window, delivered it to her first customer.
"No matter for the money," said she, giving him a little push towards
the door; for her old gentility was contumaciously squeamish at sight
of the copper coin, and, besides, it seemed such pitiful meanness to
take the child's pocket-money in exchange for a bit of stale
gingerbread. "No matter for the cent. You are welcome to Jim Crow."
The child, staring with round eyes at this instance of liberality,
wholly unprecedented in his large experience of cent-shops, took the
man of gingerbread, and quitted the premises. No sooner had he reached
the sidewalk (little cannibal that he was!) than Jim Crow's head was in
his mouth. As he had not been careful to shut the door, Hepzibah was
at the pains of closing it after him, with a pettish ejaculation or two
about the troublesomeness of young people, and particularly of small
boys. She had just placed another representative of the renowned Jim
Crow at the window, when again the shop-bell tinkled clamorously, and
again the door being thrust open, with its characteristic jerk and jar,
disclosed the same sturdy little urchin who, precisely two minutes ago,
had made his exit. The crumbs and discoloration of the cannibal feast,
as yet hardly consummated, were exceedingly visible about his mouth.
"What is it now, child?" asked the maiden lady rather impatiently; "did
you come back to shut the door?"
"No," answered the urchin, pointing to the figure that had just been
put up; "I want that other Jim Crow."
"Well, here it is for you," said Hepzibah, reaching it down; but
recognizing that this pertinacious customer would not quit her on any
other terms, so long as she had a gingerbread figure in her shop, she
partly drew back her extended hand, "Where is the cent?"
The little boy had the cent ready, but, like a true-born Yankee, would
have preferred the better bargain to the worse. Looking somewhat
chagrined, he put the coin into Hepzibah's hand, and departed, sending
the second Jim Crow in quest of the former one. The new shop-keeper
dropped the first solid result of her commercial enterprise into the
till. It was done! The sordid stain of that copper coin could never be
washed away from her palm. The little schoolboy, aided by the impish
figure of the negro dancer, had wrought an irreparable ruin. The
structure of ancient aristocracy had been demolished by him, even as if
his childish gripe had torn down the seven-gabled mansion. Now let
Hepzibah turn the old Pyncheon portraits with their faces to the wall,
and take the map of her Eastern territory to kindle the kitchen fire,
and blow up the flame with the empty breath of her ancestral
traditions! What had she to do with ancestry? Nothing; no more than
with posterity! No lady, now, but simply Hepzibah Pyncheon, a forlorn
old maid, and keeper of a cent-shop!
Nevertheless, even while she paraded these ideas somewhat
ostentatiously through her mind, it is altogether surprising what a
calmness had come over her. The anxiety and misgivings which had
tormented her, whether asleep or in melancholy day-dreams, ever since
her project began to take an aspect of solidity, had now vanished quite
away. She felt the novelty of her position, indeed, but no longer with
disturbance or affright. Now and then, there came a thrill of almost
youthful enjoyment. It was the invigorating breath of a fresh outward
atmosphere, after the long torpor and monotonous seclusion of her life.
So wholesome is effort! So miraculous the strength that we do not know
of! The healthiest glow that Hepzibah had known for years had come now
in the dreaded crisis, when, for the first time, she had put forth her
hand to help herself. The little circlet of the schoolboy's copper
coin--dim and lustreless though it was, with the small services which
it had been doing here and there about the world--had proved a
talisman, fragrant with good, and deserving to be set in gold and worn
next her heart. It was as potent, and perhaps endowed with the same
kind of efficacy, as a galvanic ring! Hepzibah, at all events, was
indebted to its subtile operation both in body and spirit; so much the
more, as it inspired her with energy to get some breakfast, at which,
still the better to keep up her courage, she allowed herself an extra
spoonful in her infusion of black tea.
Her introductory day of shop-keeping did not run on, however, without
many and serious interruptions of this mood of cheerful vigor. As a
general rule, Providence seldom vouchsafes to mortals any more than
just that degree of encouragement which suffices to keep them at a
reasonably full exertion of their powers. In the case of our old
gentlewoman, after the excitement of new effort had subsided, the
despondency of her whole life threatened, ever and anon, to return. It
was like the heavy mass of clouds which we may often see obscuring the
sky, and making a gray twilight everywhere, until, towards nightfall,
it yields temporarily to a glimpse of sunshine. But, always, the
envious cloud strives to gather again across the streak of celestial
azure.
Customers came in, as the forenoon advanced, but rather slowly; in some
cases, too, it must be owned, with little satisfaction either to
themselves or Miss Hepzibah; nor, on the whole, with an aggregate of
very rich emolument to the till. A little girl, sent by her mother to
match a skein of cotton thread, of a peculiar hue, took one that the
near-sighted old lady pronounced extremely like, but soon came running
back, with a blunt and cross message, that it would not do, and,
besides, was very rotten! Then, there was a pale, care-wrinkled woman,
not old but haggard, and already with streaks of gray among her hair,
like silver ribbons; one of those women, naturally delicate, whom you
at once recognize as worn to death by a brute--probably a drunken
brute--of a husband, and at least nine children. She wanted a few
pounds of flour, and offered the money, which the decayed gentlewoman
silently rejected, and gave the poor soul better measure than if she
had taken it. Shortly afterwards, a man in a blue cotton frock, much
soiled, came in and bought a pipe, filling the whole shop, meanwhile,
with the hot odor of strong drink, not only exhaled in the torrid
atmosphere of his breath, but oozing out of his entire system, like an
inflammable gas. It was impressed on Hepzibah's mind that this was the
husband of the care-wrinkled woman. He asked for a paper of tobacco;
and as she had neglected to provide herself with the article, her
brutal customer dashed down his newly-bought pipe and left the shop,
muttering some unintelligible words, which had the tone and bitterness
of a curse. Hereupon Hepzibah threw up her eyes, unintentionally
scowling in the face of Providence!
No less than five persons, during the forenoon, inquired for
ginger-beer, or root-beer, or any drink of a similar brewage, and,
obtaining nothing of the kind, went off in an exceedingly bad humor.
Three of them left the door open, and the other two pulled it so
spitefully in going out that the little bell played the very deuce with
Hepzibah's nerves. A round, bustling, fire-ruddy housewife of the
neighborhood burst breathless into the shop, fiercely demanding yeast;
and when the poor gentlewoman, with her cold shyness of manner, gave
her hot customer to understand that she did not keep the article, this
very capable housewife took upon herself to administer a regular rebuke.
"A cent-shop, and no yeast!" quoth she; "That will never do! Who ever
heard of such a thing? Your loaf will never rise, no more than mine
will to-day. You had better shut up shop at once."
"Well," said Hepzibah, heaving a deep sigh, "perhaps I had!"
Several times, moreover, besides the above instance, her lady-like
sensibilities were seriously infringed upon by the familiar, if not
rude, tone with which people addressed her. They evidently considered
themselves not merely her equals, but her patrons and superiors. Now,
Hepzibah had unconsciously flattered herself with the idea that there
would be a gleam or halo, of some kind or other, about her person,
which would insure an obeisance to her sterling gentility, or, at
least, a tacit recognition of it. On the other hand, nothing tortured
her more intolerably than when this recognition was too prominently
expressed. To one or two rather officious offers of sympathy, her
responses were little short of acrimonious; and, we regret to say,
Hepzibah was thrown into a positively unchristian state of mind by the
suspicion that one of her customers was drawn to the shop, not by any
real need of the article which she pretended to seek, but by a wicked
wish to stare at her. The vulgar creature was determined to see for
herself what sort of a figure a mildewed piece of aristocracy, after
wasting all the bloom and much of the decline of her life apart from
the world, would cut behind a counter. In this particular case,
however mechanical and innocuous it might be at other times, Hepzibah's
contortion of brow served her in good stead.
"I never was so frightened in my life!" said the curious customer, in
describing the incident to one of her acquaintances. "She's a real old
vixen, take my word of it! She says little, to be sure; but if you
could only see the mischief in her eye!"
On the whole, therefore, her new experience led our decayed gentlewoman
to very disagreeable conclusions as to the temper and manners of what
she termed the lower classes, whom heretofore she had looked down upon
with a gentle and pitying complaisance, as herself occupying a sphere
of unquestionable superiority. But, unfortunately, she had likewise to
struggle against a bitter emotion of a directly opposite kind: a
sentiment of virulence, we mean, towards the idle aristocracy to which
it had so recently been her pride to belong. When a lady, in a
delicate and costly summer garb, with a floating veil and gracefully
swaying gown, and, altogether, an ethereal lightness that made you look
at her beautifully slippered feet, to see whether she trod on the dust
or floated in the air,--when such a vision happened to pass through
this retired street, leaving it tenderly and delusively fragrant with
her passage, as if a bouquet of tea-roses had been borne along,--then
again, it is to be feared, old Hepzibah's scowl could no longer
vindicate itself entirely on the plea of near-sightedness.
"For what end," thought she, giving vent to that feeling of hostility
which is the only real abasement of the poor in presence of the
rich,--"for what good end, in the wisdom of Providence, does that woman
live? Must the whole world toil, that the palms of her hands may be
kept white and delicate?"
Then, ashamed and penitent, she hid her face.
"May God forgive me!" said she.
Doubtless, God did forgive her. But, taking the inward and outward
history of the first half-day into consideration, Hepzibah began to
fear that the shop would prove her ruin in a moral and religious point
of view, without contributing very essentially towards even her
temporal welfare.
| The introduction of Mr. Holgrave places Hepzibah's actions in the firm democratic tradition that Hawthorne indicated in the previous chapter. Although Hepzibah views the shop as an indignity and an embarrassment considering her self-determined status as a lady, Mr. Holgrave views the shop as a victory for Hepzibah, for she will be part of the "united struggle of mankind. Holgrave enthusiastically espouses liberal values that clash with Hepzibah's reliance on heredity. He finds heroism in Hepzibah and restriction in her status as a Pyncheon. Hepzibah, in contrast, cannot share the view of Holgrave and Hawthorne that her actions place her as a commendable member of a democratic tradition. She only sees the indignity of finding a career at such an old age and attempts to grasp and whatever nobility she has left. She refuses to let Holgrave pay for biscuits, for a Pyncheon must not receive money from her only friend, and equally refuses payment from the little boy who bought gingerbread. When she does finally make the boy pay, his copper coin demolishes Hepzibah's view of herself as a member of the aristocracy. However, although Hepzibah views this as a tragedy, she soon begins to grudgingly accept the view espoused by Holgrave. The sale invigorates Hepzibah, giving her "a thrill of almost youthful enjoyment," and her work even threatens to prove the ruin of her elitist moral system. By the end of her first day, she develops an animosity not for the lower order with whom she now consorts, but for the idle rich to whom she once belonged. Hepzibah thus makes an implicit repudiation of her own past, realizing the absurdity of her status. In a story that depends upon the recurrence of past events, this repudiation is a subtle yet significant change | analysis |
TOWARDS noon, Hepzibah saw an elderly gentleman, large and portly, and
of remarkably dignified demeanor, passing slowly along on the opposite
side of the white and dusty street. On coming within the shadow of the
Pyncheon Elm, he stopt, and (taking off his hat, meanwhile, to wipe the
perspiration from his brow) seemed to scrutinize, with especial
interest, the dilapidated and rusty-visaged House of the Seven Gables.
He himself, in a very different style, was as well worth looking at as
the house. No better model need be sought, nor could have been found,
of a very high order of respectability, which, by some indescribable
magic, not merely expressed itself in his looks and gestures, but even
governed the fashion of his garments, and rendered them all proper and
essential to the man. Without appearing to differ, in any tangible
way, from other people's clothes, there was yet a wide and rich gravity
about them that must have been a characteristic of the wearer, since it
could not be defined as pertaining either to the cut or material. His
gold-headed cane, too,--a serviceable staff, of dark polished
wood,--had similar traits, and, had it chosen to take a walk by itself,
would have been recognized anywhere as a tolerably adequate
representative of its master. This character--which showed itself so
strikingly in everything about him, and the effect of which we seek to
convey to the reader--went no deeper than his station, habits of life,
and external circumstances. One perceived him to be a personage of
marked influence and authority; and, especially, you could feel just as
certain that he was opulent as if he had exhibited his bank account, or
as if you had seen him touching the twigs of the Pyncheon Elm, and,
Midas-like, transmuting them to gold.
In his youth, he had probably been considered a handsome man; at his
present age, his brow was too heavy, his temples too bare, his
remaining hair too gray, his eye too cold, his lips too closely
compressed, to bear any relation to mere personal beauty. He would
have made a good and massive portrait; better now, perhaps, than at any
previous period of his life, although his look might grow positively
harsh in the process of being fixed upon the canvas. The artist would
have found it desirable to study his face, and prove its capacity for
varied expression; to darken it with a frown,--to kindle it up with a
smile.
While the elderly gentleman stood looking at the Pyncheon House, both
the frown and the smile passed successively over his countenance. His
eye rested on the shop-window, and putting up a pair of gold-bowed
spectacles, which he held in his hand, he minutely surveyed Hepzibah's
little arrangement of toys and commodities. At first it seemed not to
please him,--nay, to cause him exceeding displeasure,--and yet, the
very next moment, he smiled. While the latter expression was yet on
his lips, he caught a glimpse of Hepzibah, who had involuntarily bent
forward to the window; and then the smile changed from acrid and
disagreeable to the sunniest complacency and benevolence. He bowed,
with a happy mixture of dignity and courteous kindliness, and pursued
his way.
"There he is!" said Hepzibah to herself, gulping down a very bitter
emotion, and, since she could not rid herself of it, trying to drive it
back into her heart. "What does he think of it, I wonder? Does it
please him? Ah! he is looking back!"
The gentleman had paused in the street, and turned himself half about,
still with his eyes fixed on the shop-window. In fact, he wheeled
wholly round, and commenced a step or two, as if designing to enter the
shop; but, as it chanced, his purpose was anticipated by Hepzibah's
first customer, the little cannibal of Jim Crow, who, staring up at the
window, was irresistibly attracted by an elephant of gingerbread. What
a grand appetite had this small urchin!--Two Jim Crows immediately
after breakfast!--and now an elephant, as a preliminary whet before
dinner. By the time this latter purchase was completed, the elderly
gentleman had resumed his way, and turned the street corner.
"Take it as you like, Cousin Jaffrey," muttered the maiden lady, as
she drew back, after cautiously thrusting out her head, and looking up
and down the street,--"Take it as you like! You have seen my little
shop-window. Well!--what have you to say?--is not the Pyncheon House
my own, while I'm alive?"
After this incident, Hepzibah retreated to the back parlor, where she
at first caught up a half-finished stocking, and began knitting at it
with nervous and irregular jerks; but quickly finding herself at odds
with the stitches, she threw it aside, and walked hurriedly about the
room. At length she paused before the portrait of the stern old
Puritan, her ancestor, and the founder of the house. In one sense, this
picture had almost faded into the canvas, and hidden itself behind the
duskiness of age; in another, she could not but fancy that it had been
growing more prominent and strikingly expressive, ever since her
earliest familiarity with it as a child. For, while the physical
outline and substance were darkening away from the beholder's eye, the
bold, hard, and, at the same time, indirect character of the man seemed
to be brought out in a kind of spiritual relief. Such an effect may
occasionally be observed in pictures of antique date. They acquire a
look which an artist (if he have anything like the complacency of
artists nowadays) would never dream of presenting to a patron as his
own characteristic expression, but which, nevertheless, we at once
recognize as reflecting the unlovely truth of a human soul. In such
cases, the painter's deep conception of his subject's inward traits has
wrought itself into the essence of the picture, and is seen after the
superficial coloring has been rubbed off by time.
While gazing at the portrait, Hepzibah trembled under its eye. Her
hereditary reverence made her afraid to judge the character of the
original so harshly as a perception of the truth compelled her to do.
But still she gazed, because the face of the picture enabled her--at
least, she fancied so--to read more accurately, and to a greater depth,
the face which she had just seen in the street.
"This is the very man!" murmured she to herself. "Let Jaffrey Pyncheon
smile as he will, there is that look beneath! Put on him a skull-cap,
and a band, and a black cloak, and a Bible in one hand and a sword in
the other,--then let Jaffrey smile as he might,--nobody would doubt
that it was the old Pyncheon come again. He has proved himself the
very man to build up a new house! Perhaps, too, to draw down a new
curse!"
Thus did Hepzibah bewilder herself with these fantasies of the old
time. She had dwelt too much alone,--too long in the Pyncheon
House,--until her very brain was impregnated with the dry-rot of its
timbers. She needed a walk along the noonday street to keep her sane.
By the spell of contrast, another portrait rose up before her, painted
with more daring flattery than any artist would have ventured upon, but
yet so delicately touched that the likeness remained perfect.
Malbone's miniature, though from the same original, was far inferior to
Hepzibah's air-drawn picture, at which affection and sorrowful
remembrance wrought together. Soft, mildly, and cheerfully
contemplative, with full, red lips, just on the verge of a smile, which
the eyes seemed to herald by a gentle kindling-up of their orbs!
Feminine traits, moulded inseparably with those of the other sex! The
miniature, likewise, had this last peculiarity; so that you inevitably
thought of the original as resembling his mother, and she a lovely and
lovable woman, with perhaps some beautiful infirmity of character, that
made it all the pleasanter to know and easier to love her.
"Yes," thought Hepzibah, with grief of which it was only the more
tolerable portion that welled up from her heart to her eyelids, "they
persecuted his mother in him! He never was a Pyncheon!"
But here the shop-bell rang; it was like a sound from a remote
distance,--so far had Hepzibah descended into the sepulchral depths of
her reminiscences. On entering the shop, she found an old man there, a
humble resident of Pyncheon Street, and whom, for a great many years
past, she had suffered to be a kind of familiar of the house. He was
an immemorial personage, who seemed always to have had a white head and
wrinkles, and never to have possessed but a single tooth, and that a
half-decayed one, in the front of the upper jaw. Well advanced as
Hepzibah was, she could not remember when Uncle Venner, as the
neighborhood called him, had not gone up and down the street, stooping
a little and drawing his feet heavily over the gravel or pavement. But
still there was something tough and vigorous about him, that not only
kept him in daily breath, but enabled him to fill a place which would
else have been vacant in the apparently crowded world. To go of
errands with his slow and shuffling gait, which made you doubt how he
ever was to arrive anywhere; to saw a small household's foot or two of
firewood, or knock to pieces an old barrel, or split up a pine board
for kindling-stuff; in summer, to dig the few yards of garden ground
appertaining to a low-rented tenement, and share the produce of his
labor at the halves; in winter, to shovel away the snow from the
sidewalk, or open paths to the woodshed, or along the clothes-line;
such were some of the essential offices which Uncle Venner performed
among at least a score of families. Within that circle, he claimed the
same sort of privilege, and probably felt as much warmth of interest,
as a clergyman does in the range of his parishioners. Not that he laid
claim to the tithe pig; but, as an analogous mode of reverence, he went
his rounds, every morning, to gather up the crumbs of the table and
overflowings of the dinner-pot, as food for a pig of his own.
In his younger days--for, after all, there was a dim tradition that he
had been, not young, but younger--Uncle Venner was commonly regarded as
rather deficient, than otherwise, in his wits. In truth he had
virtually pleaded guilty to the charge, by scarcely aiming at such
success as other men seek, and by taking only that humble and modest
part in the intercourse of life which belongs to the alleged
deficiency. But now, in his extreme old age,--whether it were that his
long and hard experience had actually brightened him, or that his
decaying judgment rendered him less capable of fairly measuring
himself,--the venerable man made pretensions to no little wisdom, and
really enjoyed the credit of it. There was likewise, at times, a vein
of something like poetry in him; it was the moss or wall-flower of his
mind in its small dilapidation, and gave a charm to what might have
been vulgar and commonplace in his earlier and middle life. Hepzibah
had a regard for him, because his name was ancient in the town and had
formerly been respectable. It was a still better reason for awarding
him a species of familiar reverence that Uncle Venner was himself the
most ancient existence, whether of man or thing, in Pyncheon Street,
except the House of the Seven Gables, and perhaps the elm that
overshadowed it.
This patriarch now presented himself before Hepzibah, clad in an old
blue coat, which had a fashionable air, and must have accrued to him
from the cast-off wardrobe of some dashing clerk. As for his trousers,
they were of tow-cloth, very short in the legs, and bagging down
strangely in the rear, but yet having a suitableness to his figure
which his other garment entirely lacked. His hat had relation to no
other part of his dress, and but very little to the head that wore it.
Thus Uncle Venner was a miscellaneous old gentleman, partly himself,
but, in good measure, somebody else; patched together, too, of
different epochs; an epitome of times and fashions.
"So, you have really begun trade," said he,--"really begun trade!
Well, I'm glad to see it. Young people should never live idle in the
world, nor old ones neither, unless when the rheumatize gets hold of
them. It has given me warning already; and in two or three years
longer, I shall think of putting aside business and retiring to my
farm. That's yonder,--the great brick house, you know,--the workhouse,
most folks call it; but I mean to do my work first, and go there to be
idle and enjoy myself. And I'm glad to see you beginning to do your
work, Miss Hepzibah!"
"Thank you, Uncle Venner" said Hepzibah, smiling; for she always felt
kindly towards the simple and talkative old man. Had he been an old
woman, she might probably have repelled the freedom, which she now took
in good part. "It is time for me to begin work, indeed! Or, to speak
the truth, I have just begun when I ought to be giving it up."
"Oh, never say that, Miss Hepzibah!" answered the old man. "You are a
young woman yet. Why, I hardly thought myself younger than I am now,
it seems so little while ago since I used to see you playing about the
door of the old house, quite a small child! Oftener, though, you used
to be sitting at the threshold, and looking gravely into the street;
for you had always a grave kind of way with you,--a grown-up air, when
you were only the height of my knee. It seems as if I saw you now; and
your grandfather with his red cloak, and his white wig, and his cocked
hat, and his cane, coming out of the house, and stepping so grandly up
the street! Those old gentlemen that grew up before the Revolution used
to put on grand airs. In my young days, the great man of the town was
commonly called King; and his wife, not Queen to be sure, but Lady.
Nowadays, a man would not dare to be called King; and if he feels
himself a little above common folks, he only stoops so much the lower
to them. I met your cousin, the Judge, ten minutes ago; and, in my old
tow-cloth trousers, as you see, the Judge raised his hat to me, I do
believe! At any rate, the Judge bowed and smiled!"
"Yes," said Hepzibah, with something bitter stealing unawares into her
tone; "my cousin Jaffrey is thought to have a very pleasant smile!"
"And so he has" replied Uncle Venner. "And that's rather remarkable in
a Pyncheon; for, begging your pardon, Miss Hepzibah, they never had the
name of being an easy and agreeable set of folks. There was no getting
close to them. But Now, Miss Hepzibah, if an old man may be bold to
ask, why don't Judge Pyncheon, with his great means, step forward, and
tell his cousin to shut up her little shop at once? It's for your
credit to be doing something, but it's not for the Judge's credit to
let you!"
"We won't talk of this, if you please, Uncle Venner," said Hepzibah
coldly. "I ought to say, however, that, if I choose to earn bread for
myself, it is not Judge Pyncheon's fault. Neither will he deserve the
blame," added she more kindly, remembering Uncle Venner's privileges of
age and humble familiarity, "if I should, by and by, find it convenient
to retire with you to your farm."
"And it's no bad place, either, that farm of mine!" cried the old man
cheerily, as if there were something positively delightful in the
prospect. "No bad place is the great brick farm-house, especially for
them that will find a good many old cronies there, as will be my case.
I quite long to be among them, sometimes, of the winter evenings; for
it is but dull business for a lonesome elderly man, like me, to be
nodding, by the hour together, with no company but his air-tight stove.
Summer or winter, there's a great deal to be said in favor of my farm!
And, take it in the autumn, what can be pleasanter than to spend a
whole day on the sunny side of a barn or a wood-pile, chatting with
somebody as old as one's self; or, perhaps, idling away the time with a
natural-born simpleton, who knows how to be idle, because even our busy
Yankees never have found out how to put him to any use? Upon my word,
Miss Hepzibah, I doubt whether I've ever been so comfortable as I mean
to be at my farm, which most folks call the workhouse. But
you,--you're a young woman yet,--you never need go there! Something
still better will turn up for you. I'm sure of it!"
Hepzibah fancied that there was something peculiar in her venerable
friend's look and tone; insomuch, that she gazed into his face with
considerable earnestness, endeavoring to discover what secret meaning,
if any, might be lurking there. Individuals whose affairs have reached
an utterly desperate crisis almost invariably keep themselves alive
with hopes, so much the more airily magnificent as they have the less
of solid matter within their grasp whereof to mould any judicious and
moderate expectation of good. Thus, all the while Hepzibah was
perfecting the scheme of her little shop, she had cherished an
unacknowledged idea that some harlequin trick of fortune would
intervene in her favor. For example, an uncle--who had sailed for
India fifty years before, and never been heard of since--might yet
return, and adopt her to be the comfort of his very extreme and
decrepit age, and adorn her with pearls, diamonds, and Oriental shawls
and turbans, and make her the ultimate heiress of his unreckonable
riches. Or the member of Parliament, now at the head of the English
branch of the family,--with which the elder stock, on this side of the
Atlantic, had held little or no intercourse for the last two
centuries,--this eminent gentleman might invite Hepzibah to quit the
ruinous House of the Seven Gables, and come over to dwell with her
kindred at Pyncheon Hall. But, for reasons the most imperative, she
could not yield to his request. It was more probable, therefore, that
the descendants of a Pyncheon who had emigrated to Virginia, in some
past generation, and became a great planter there,--hearing of
Hepzibah's destitution, and impelled by the splendid generosity of
character with which their Virginian mixture must have enriched the New
England blood,--would send her a remittance of a thousand dollars, with
a hint of repeating the favor annually. Or,--and, surely, anything so
undeniably just could not be beyond the limits of reasonable
anticipation,--the great claim to the heritage of Waldo County might
finally be decided in favor of the Pyncheons; so that, instead of
keeping a cent-shop, Hepzibah would build a palace, and look down from
its highest tower on hill, dale, forest, field, and town, as her own
share of the ancestral territory.
These were some of the fantasies which she had long dreamed about; and,
aided by these, Uncle Venner's casual attempt at encouragement kindled
a strange festal glory in the poor, bare, melancholy chambers of her
brain, as if that inner world were suddenly lighted up with gas. But
either he knew nothing of her castles in the air,--as how should
he?--or else her earnest scowl disturbed his recollection, as it might
a more courageous man's. Instead of pursuing any weightier topic,
Uncle Venner was pleased to favor Hepzibah with some sage counsel in
her shop-keeping capacity.
"Give no credit!"--these were some of his golden maxims,--"Never take
paper-money. Look well to your change! Ring the silver on the
four-pound weight! Shove back all English half-pence and base copper
tokens, such as are very plenty about town! At your leisure hours, knit
children's woollen socks and mittens! Brew your own yeast, and make
your own ginger-beer!"
And while Hepzibah was doing her utmost to digest the hard little
pellets of his already uttered wisdom, he gave vent to his final, and
what he declared to be his all-important advice, as follows:--
"Put on a bright face for your customers, and smile pleasantly as you
hand them what they ask for! A stale article, if you dip it in a good,
warm, sunny smile, will go off better than a fresh one that you've
scowled upon."
To this last apothegm poor Hepzibah responded with a sigh so deep and
heavy that it almost rustled Uncle Venner quite away, like a withered
leaf,--as he was,--before an autumnal gale. Recovering himself,
however, he bent forward, and, with a good deal of feeling in his
ancient visage, beckoned her nearer to him.
"When do you expect him home?" whispered he.
"Whom do you mean?" asked Hepzibah, turning pale.
"Ah!--You don't love to talk about it," said Uncle Venner. "Well,
well! we'll say no more, though there's word of it all over town. I
remember him, Miss Hepzibah, before he could run alone!"
During the remainder of the day, poor Hepzibah acquitted herself even
less creditably, as a shop-keeper, than in her earlier efforts. She
appeared to be walking in a dream; or, more truly, the vivid life and
reality assumed by her emotions made all outward occurrences
unsubstantial, like the teasing phantasms of a half-conscious slumber.
She still responded, mechanically, to the frequent summons of the
shop-bell, and, at the demand of her customers, went prying with vague
eyes about the shop, proffering them one article after another, and
thrusting aside--perversely, as most of them supposed--the identical
thing they asked for. There is sad confusion, indeed, when the spirit
thus flits away into the past, or into the more awful future, or, in
any manner, steps across the spaceless boundary betwixt its own region
and the actual world; where the body remains to guide itself as best it
may, with little more than the mechanism of animal life. It is like
death, without death's quiet privilege,--its freedom from mortal care.
Worst of all, when the actual duties are comprised in such petty
details as now vexed the brooding soul of the old gentlewoman. As the
animosity of fate would have it, there was a great influx of custom in
the course of the afternoon. Hepzibah blundered to and fro about her
small place of business, committing the most unheard-of errors: now
stringing up twelve, and now seven, tallow-candles, instead of ten to
the pound; selling ginger for Scotch snuff, pins for needles, and
needles for pins; misreckoning her change, sometimes to the public
detriment, and much oftener to her own; and thus she went on, doing her
utmost to bring chaos back again, until, at the close of the day's
labor, to her inexplicable astonishment, she found the money-drawer
almost destitute of coin. After all her painful traffic, the whole
proceeds were perhaps half a dozen coppers, and a questionable
ninepence which ultimately proved to be copper likewise.
At this price, or at whatever price, she rejoiced that the day had
reached its end. Never before had she had such a sense of the
intolerable length of time that creeps between dawn and sunset, and of
the miserable irksomeness of having aught to do, and of the better
wisdom that it would be to lie down at once, in sullen resignation, and
let life, and its toils and vexations, trample over one's prostrate
body as they may! Hepzibah's final operation was with the little
devourer of Jim Crow and the elephant, who now proposed to eat a camel.
In her bewilderment, she offered him first a wooden dragoon, and next a
handful of marbles; neither of which being adapted to his else
omnivorous appetite, she hastily held out her whole remaining stock of
natural history in gingerbread, and huddled the small customer out of
the shop. She then muffled the bell in an unfinished stocking, and put
up the oaken bar across the door.
During the latter process, an omnibus came to a stand-still under the
branches of the elm-tree. Hepzibah's heart was in her mouth. Remote
and dusky, and with no sunshine on all the intervening space, was that
region of the Past whence her only guest might be expected to arrive!
Was she to meet him now?
Somebody, at all events, was passing from the farthest interior of the
omnibus towards its entrance. A gentleman alighted; but it was only
to offer his hand to a young girl whose slender figure, nowise needing
such assistance, now lightly descended the steps, and made an airy
little jump from the final one to the sidewalk. She rewarded her
cavalier with a smile, the cheery glow of which was seen reflected on
his own face as he reentered the vehicle. The girl then turned towards
the House of the Seven Gables, to the door of which, meanwhile,--not
the shop-door, but the antique portal,--the omnibus-man had carried a
light trunk and a bandbox. First giving a sharp rap of the old iron
knocker, he left his passenger and her luggage at the door-step, and
departed.
"Who can it be?" thought Hepzibah, who had been screwing her visual
organs into the acutest focus of which they were capable. "The girl
must have mistaken the house." She stole softly into the hall, and,
herself invisible, gazed through the dusty side-lights of the portal at
the young, blooming, and very cheerful face which presented itself for
admittance into the gloomy old mansion. It was a face to which almost
any door would have opened of its own accord.
The young girl, so fresh, so unconventional, and yet so orderly and
obedient to common rules, as you at once recognized her to be, was
widely in contrast, at that moment, with everything about her. The
sordid and ugly luxuriance of gigantic weeds that grew in the angle of
the house, and the heavy projection that overshadowed her, and the
time-worn framework of the door,--none of these things belonged to her
sphere. But, even as a ray of sunshine, fall into what dismal place it
may, instantaneously creates for itself a propriety in being there, so
did it seem altogether fit that the girl should be standing at the
threshold. It was no less evidently proper that the door should swing
open to admit her. The maiden lady herself, sternly inhospitable in
her first purposes, soon began to feel that the door ought to be shoved
back, and the rusty key be turned in the reluctant lock.
"Can it be Phoebe?" questioned she within herself. "It must be little
Phoebe; for it can be nobody else,--and there is a look of her father
about her, too! But what does she want here? And how like a country
cousin, to come down upon a poor body in this way, without so much as a
day's notice, or asking whether she would be welcome! Well; she must
have a night's lodging, I suppose; and to-morrow the child shall go
back to her mother."
Phoebe, it must be understood, was that one little offshoot of the
Pyncheon race to whom we have already referred, as a native of a rural
part of New England, where the old fashions and feelings of
relationship are still partially kept up. In her own circle, it was
regarded as by no means improper for kinsfolk to visit one another
without invitation, or preliminary and ceremonious warning. Yet, in
consideration of Miss Hepzibah's recluse way of life, a letter had
actually been written and despatched, conveying information of Phoebe's
projected visit. This epistle, for three or four days past, had been
in the pocket of the penny-postman, who, happening to have no other
business in Pyncheon Street, had not yet made it convenient to call at
the House of the Seven Gables.
"No--she can stay only one night," said Hepzibah, unbolting the door.
"If Clifford were to find her here, it might disturb him!"
| A Day Behind the Counter: A dignified elderly gentleman, large and portly, stops outside the shop. He had a gravity and an appearance of influence and authority. He does not enter the shop, however. This man, Judge Jaffrey Pyncheon, disturbs Hepzibah, his cousin. The small child who bought gingerbread early that morning instead returns and buys more food. After this incident, Hepzibah retreats to the back parlor and stares at the portrait of Colonel Pyncheon, who greatly resembles Jaffrey. She once again looks at the miniature picture, lamenting that he was persecuted. Hepzibah returns to the shop to find an elderly man known as Uncle Venner to all had entered. He was largely regarded as mentally deficient, and considered as old as the House of the Seven Gables itself. Uncle Venner congratulates Hepzibah for opening her shop, but tells her that Jaffrey should have intervened to help her before she had to enter the workforce. However, she refuses to blame her cousin. Before leaving, Uncle Venner gives her advice, including to put on a bright face for her customers. Uncle Venner asks her when he' will return home, but she does not know what he is talking about. That night, a young girl, Phoebe, comes to the house. She is part of the Pyncheon family that lives in rural New England. Before letting Phoebe in, Hepzibah vows that Phoebe can stay only one night, for if Clifford were to find her here, it would disturb him. | summary |
TOWARDS noon, Hepzibah saw an elderly gentleman, large and portly, and
of remarkably dignified demeanor, passing slowly along on the opposite
side of the white and dusty street. On coming within the shadow of the
Pyncheon Elm, he stopt, and (taking off his hat, meanwhile, to wipe the
perspiration from his brow) seemed to scrutinize, with especial
interest, the dilapidated and rusty-visaged House of the Seven Gables.
He himself, in a very different style, was as well worth looking at as
the house. No better model need be sought, nor could have been found,
of a very high order of respectability, which, by some indescribable
magic, not merely expressed itself in his looks and gestures, but even
governed the fashion of his garments, and rendered them all proper and
essential to the man. Without appearing to differ, in any tangible
way, from other people's clothes, there was yet a wide and rich gravity
about them that must have been a characteristic of the wearer, since it
could not be defined as pertaining either to the cut or material. His
gold-headed cane, too,--a serviceable staff, of dark polished
wood,--had similar traits, and, had it chosen to take a walk by itself,
would have been recognized anywhere as a tolerably adequate
representative of its master. This character--which showed itself so
strikingly in everything about him, and the effect of which we seek to
convey to the reader--went no deeper than his station, habits of life,
and external circumstances. One perceived him to be a personage of
marked influence and authority; and, especially, you could feel just as
certain that he was opulent as if he had exhibited his bank account, or
as if you had seen him touching the twigs of the Pyncheon Elm, and,
Midas-like, transmuting them to gold.
In his youth, he had probably been considered a handsome man; at his
present age, his brow was too heavy, his temples too bare, his
remaining hair too gray, his eye too cold, his lips too closely
compressed, to bear any relation to mere personal beauty. He would
have made a good and massive portrait; better now, perhaps, than at any
previous period of his life, although his look might grow positively
harsh in the process of being fixed upon the canvas. The artist would
have found it desirable to study his face, and prove its capacity for
varied expression; to darken it with a frown,--to kindle it up with a
smile.
While the elderly gentleman stood looking at the Pyncheon House, both
the frown and the smile passed successively over his countenance. His
eye rested on the shop-window, and putting up a pair of gold-bowed
spectacles, which he held in his hand, he minutely surveyed Hepzibah's
little arrangement of toys and commodities. At first it seemed not to
please him,--nay, to cause him exceeding displeasure,--and yet, the
very next moment, he smiled. While the latter expression was yet on
his lips, he caught a glimpse of Hepzibah, who had involuntarily bent
forward to the window; and then the smile changed from acrid and
disagreeable to the sunniest complacency and benevolence. He bowed,
with a happy mixture of dignity and courteous kindliness, and pursued
his way.
"There he is!" said Hepzibah to herself, gulping down a very bitter
emotion, and, since she could not rid herself of it, trying to drive it
back into her heart. "What does he think of it, I wonder? Does it
please him? Ah! he is looking back!"
The gentleman had paused in the street, and turned himself half about,
still with his eyes fixed on the shop-window. In fact, he wheeled
wholly round, and commenced a step or two, as if designing to enter the
shop; but, as it chanced, his purpose was anticipated by Hepzibah's
first customer, the little cannibal of Jim Crow, who, staring up at the
window, was irresistibly attracted by an elephant of gingerbread. What
a grand appetite had this small urchin!--Two Jim Crows immediately
after breakfast!--and now an elephant, as a preliminary whet before
dinner. By the time this latter purchase was completed, the elderly
gentleman had resumed his way, and turned the street corner.
"Take it as you like, Cousin Jaffrey," muttered the maiden lady, as
she drew back, after cautiously thrusting out her head, and looking up
and down the street,--"Take it as you like! You have seen my little
shop-window. Well!--what have you to say?--is not the Pyncheon House
my own, while I'm alive?"
After this incident, Hepzibah retreated to the back parlor, where she
at first caught up a half-finished stocking, and began knitting at it
with nervous and irregular jerks; but quickly finding herself at odds
with the stitches, she threw it aside, and walked hurriedly about the
room. At length she paused before the portrait of the stern old
Puritan, her ancestor, and the founder of the house. In one sense, this
picture had almost faded into the canvas, and hidden itself behind the
duskiness of age; in another, she could not but fancy that it had been
growing more prominent and strikingly expressive, ever since her
earliest familiarity with it as a child. For, while the physical
outline and substance were darkening away from the beholder's eye, the
bold, hard, and, at the same time, indirect character of the man seemed
to be brought out in a kind of spiritual relief. Such an effect may
occasionally be observed in pictures of antique date. They acquire a
look which an artist (if he have anything like the complacency of
artists nowadays) would never dream of presenting to a patron as his
own characteristic expression, but which, nevertheless, we at once
recognize as reflecting the unlovely truth of a human soul. In such
cases, the painter's deep conception of his subject's inward traits has
wrought itself into the essence of the picture, and is seen after the
superficial coloring has been rubbed off by time.
While gazing at the portrait, Hepzibah trembled under its eye. Her
hereditary reverence made her afraid to judge the character of the
original so harshly as a perception of the truth compelled her to do.
But still she gazed, because the face of the picture enabled her--at
least, she fancied so--to read more accurately, and to a greater depth,
the face which she had just seen in the street.
"This is the very man!" murmured she to herself. "Let Jaffrey Pyncheon
smile as he will, there is that look beneath! Put on him a skull-cap,
and a band, and a black cloak, and a Bible in one hand and a sword in
the other,--then let Jaffrey smile as he might,--nobody would doubt
that it was the old Pyncheon come again. He has proved himself the
very man to build up a new house! Perhaps, too, to draw down a new
curse!"
Thus did Hepzibah bewilder herself with these fantasies of the old
time. She had dwelt too much alone,--too long in the Pyncheon
House,--until her very brain was impregnated with the dry-rot of its
timbers. She needed a walk along the noonday street to keep her sane.
By the spell of contrast, another portrait rose up before her, painted
with more daring flattery than any artist would have ventured upon, but
yet so delicately touched that the likeness remained perfect.
Malbone's miniature, though from the same original, was far inferior to
Hepzibah's air-drawn picture, at which affection and sorrowful
remembrance wrought together. Soft, mildly, and cheerfully
contemplative, with full, red lips, just on the verge of a smile, which
the eyes seemed to herald by a gentle kindling-up of their orbs!
Feminine traits, moulded inseparably with those of the other sex! The
miniature, likewise, had this last peculiarity; so that you inevitably
thought of the original as resembling his mother, and she a lovely and
lovable woman, with perhaps some beautiful infirmity of character, that
made it all the pleasanter to know and easier to love her.
"Yes," thought Hepzibah, with grief of which it was only the more
tolerable portion that welled up from her heart to her eyelids, "they
persecuted his mother in him! He never was a Pyncheon!"
But here the shop-bell rang; it was like a sound from a remote
distance,--so far had Hepzibah descended into the sepulchral depths of
her reminiscences. On entering the shop, she found an old man there, a
humble resident of Pyncheon Street, and whom, for a great many years
past, she had suffered to be a kind of familiar of the house. He was
an immemorial personage, who seemed always to have had a white head and
wrinkles, and never to have possessed but a single tooth, and that a
half-decayed one, in the front of the upper jaw. Well advanced as
Hepzibah was, she could not remember when Uncle Venner, as the
neighborhood called him, had not gone up and down the street, stooping
a little and drawing his feet heavily over the gravel or pavement. But
still there was something tough and vigorous about him, that not only
kept him in daily breath, but enabled him to fill a place which would
else have been vacant in the apparently crowded world. To go of
errands with his slow and shuffling gait, which made you doubt how he
ever was to arrive anywhere; to saw a small household's foot or two of
firewood, or knock to pieces an old barrel, or split up a pine board
for kindling-stuff; in summer, to dig the few yards of garden ground
appertaining to a low-rented tenement, and share the produce of his
labor at the halves; in winter, to shovel away the snow from the
sidewalk, or open paths to the woodshed, or along the clothes-line;
such were some of the essential offices which Uncle Venner performed
among at least a score of families. Within that circle, he claimed the
same sort of privilege, and probably felt as much warmth of interest,
as a clergyman does in the range of his parishioners. Not that he laid
claim to the tithe pig; but, as an analogous mode of reverence, he went
his rounds, every morning, to gather up the crumbs of the table and
overflowings of the dinner-pot, as food for a pig of his own.
In his younger days--for, after all, there was a dim tradition that he
had been, not young, but younger--Uncle Venner was commonly regarded as
rather deficient, than otherwise, in his wits. In truth he had
virtually pleaded guilty to the charge, by scarcely aiming at such
success as other men seek, and by taking only that humble and modest
part in the intercourse of life which belongs to the alleged
deficiency. But now, in his extreme old age,--whether it were that his
long and hard experience had actually brightened him, or that his
decaying judgment rendered him less capable of fairly measuring
himself,--the venerable man made pretensions to no little wisdom, and
really enjoyed the credit of it. There was likewise, at times, a vein
of something like poetry in him; it was the moss or wall-flower of his
mind in its small dilapidation, and gave a charm to what might have
been vulgar and commonplace in his earlier and middle life. Hepzibah
had a regard for him, because his name was ancient in the town and had
formerly been respectable. It was a still better reason for awarding
him a species of familiar reverence that Uncle Venner was himself the
most ancient existence, whether of man or thing, in Pyncheon Street,
except the House of the Seven Gables, and perhaps the elm that
overshadowed it.
This patriarch now presented himself before Hepzibah, clad in an old
blue coat, which had a fashionable air, and must have accrued to him
from the cast-off wardrobe of some dashing clerk. As for his trousers,
they were of tow-cloth, very short in the legs, and bagging down
strangely in the rear, but yet having a suitableness to his figure
which his other garment entirely lacked. His hat had relation to no
other part of his dress, and but very little to the head that wore it.
Thus Uncle Venner was a miscellaneous old gentleman, partly himself,
but, in good measure, somebody else; patched together, too, of
different epochs; an epitome of times and fashions.
"So, you have really begun trade," said he,--"really begun trade!
Well, I'm glad to see it. Young people should never live idle in the
world, nor old ones neither, unless when the rheumatize gets hold of
them. It has given me warning already; and in two or three years
longer, I shall think of putting aside business and retiring to my
farm. That's yonder,--the great brick house, you know,--the workhouse,
most folks call it; but I mean to do my work first, and go there to be
idle and enjoy myself. And I'm glad to see you beginning to do your
work, Miss Hepzibah!"
"Thank you, Uncle Venner" said Hepzibah, smiling; for she always felt
kindly towards the simple and talkative old man. Had he been an old
woman, she might probably have repelled the freedom, which she now took
in good part. "It is time for me to begin work, indeed! Or, to speak
the truth, I have just begun when I ought to be giving it up."
"Oh, never say that, Miss Hepzibah!" answered the old man. "You are a
young woman yet. Why, I hardly thought myself younger than I am now,
it seems so little while ago since I used to see you playing about the
door of the old house, quite a small child! Oftener, though, you used
to be sitting at the threshold, and looking gravely into the street;
for you had always a grave kind of way with you,--a grown-up air, when
you were only the height of my knee. It seems as if I saw you now; and
your grandfather with his red cloak, and his white wig, and his cocked
hat, and his cane, coming out of the house, and stepping so grandly up
the street! Those old gentlemen that grew up before the Revolution used
to put on grand airs. In my young days, the great man of the town was
commonly called King; and his wife, not Queen to be sure, but Lady.
Nowadays, a man would not dare to be called King; and if he feels
himself a little above common folks, he only stoops so much the lower
to them. I met your cousin, the Judge, ten minutes ago; and, in my old
tow-cloth trousers, as you see, the Judge raised his hat to me, I do
believe! At any rate, the Judge bowed and smiled!"
"Yes," said Hepzibah, with something bitter stealing unawares into her
tone; "my cousin Jaffrey is thought to have a very pleasant smile!"
"And so he has" replied Uncle Venner. "And that's rather remarkable in
a Pyncheon; for, begging your pardon, Miss Hepzibah, they never had the
name of being an easy and agreeable set of folks. There was no getting
close to them. But Now, Miss Hepzibah, if an old man may be bold to
ask, why don't Judge Pyncheon, with his great means, step forward, and
tell his cousin to shut up her little shop at once? It's for your
credit to be doing something, but it's not for the Judge's credit to
let you!"
"We won't talk of this, if you please, Uncle Venner," said Hepzibah
coldly. "I ought to say, however, that, if I choose to earn bread for
myself, it is not Judge Pyncheon's fault. Neither will he deserve the
blame," added she more kindly, remembering Uncle Venner's privileges of
age and humble familiarity, "if I should, by and by, find it convenient
to retire with you to your farm."
"And it's no bad place, either, that farm of mine!" cried the old man
cheerily, as if there were something positively delightful in the
prospect. "No bad place is the great brick farm-house, especially for
them that will find a good many old cronies there, as will be my case.
I quite long to be among them, sometimes, of the winter evenings; for
it is but dull business for a lonesome elderly man, like me, to be
nodding, by the hour together, with no company but his air-tight stove.
Summer or winter, there's a great deal to be said in favor of my farm!
And, take it in the autumn, what can be pleasanter than to spend a
whole day on the sunny side of a barn or a wood-pile, chatting with
somebody as old as one's self; or, perhaps, idling away the time with a
natural-born simpleton, who knows how to be idle, because even our busy
Yankees never have found out how to put him to any use? Upon my word,
Miss Hepzibah, I doubt whether I've ever been so comfortable as I mean
to be at my farm, which most folks call the workhouse. But
you,--you're a young woman yet,--you never need go there! Something
still better will turn up for you. I'm sure of it!"
Hepzibah fancied that there was something peculiar in her venerable
friend's look and tone; insomuch, that she gazed into his face with
considerable earnestness, endeavoring to discover what secret meaning,
if any, might be lurking there. Individuals whose affairs have reached
an utterly desperate crisis almost invariably keep themselves alive
with hopes, so much the more airily magnificent as they have the less
of solid matter within their grasp whereof to mould any judicious and
moderate expectation of good. Thus, all the while Hepzibah was
perfecting the scheme of her little shop, she had cherished an
unacknowledged idea that some harlequin trick of fortune would
intervene in her favor. For example, an uncle--who had sailed for
India fifty years before, and never been heard of since--might yet
return, and adopt her to be the comfort of his very extreme and
decrepit age, and adorn her with pearls, diamonds, and Oriental shawls
and turbans, and make her the ultimate heiress of his unreckonable
riches. Or the member of Parliament, now at the head of the English
branch of the family,--with which the elder stock, on this side of the
Atlantic, had held little or no intercourse for the last two
centuries,--this eminent gentleman might invite Hepzibah to quit the
ruinous House of the Seven Gables, and come over to dwell with her
kindred at Pyncheon Hall. But, for reasons the most imperative, she
could not yield to his request. It was more probable, therefore, that
the descendants of a Pyncheon who had emigrated to Virginia, in some
past generation, and became a great planter there,--hearing of
Hepzibah's destitution, and impelled by the splendid generosity of
character with which their Virginian mixture must have enriched the New
England blood,--would send her a remittance of a thousand dollars, with
a hint of repeating the favor annually. Or,--and, surely, anything so
undeniably just could not be beyond the limits of reasonable
anticipation,--the great claim to the heritage of Waldo County might
finally be decided in favor of the Pyncheons; so that, instead of
keeping a cent-shop, Hepzibah would build a palace, and look down from
its highest tower on hill, dale, forest, field, and town, as her own
share of the ancestral territory.
These were some of the fantasies which she had long dreamed about; and,
aided by these, Uncle Venner's casual attempt at encouragement kindled
a strange festal glory in the poor, bare, melancholy chambers of her
brain, as if that inner world were suddenly lighted up with gas. But
either he knew nothing of her castles in the air,--as how should
he?--or else her earnest scowl disturbed his recollection, as it might
a more courageous man's. Instead of pursuing any weightier topic,
Uncle Venner was pleased to favor Hepzibah with some sage counsel in
her shop-keeping capacity.
"Give no credit!"--these were some of his golden maxims,--"Never take
paper-money. Look well to your change! Ring the silver on the
four-pound weight! Shove back all English half-pence and base copper
tokens, such as are very plenty about town! At your leisure hours, knit
children's woollen socks and mittens! Brew your own yeast, and make
your own ginger-beer!"
And while Hepzibah was doing her utmost to digest the hard little
pellets of his already uttered wisdom, he gave vent to his final, and
what he declared to be his all-important advice, as follows:--
"Put on a bright face for your customers, and smile pleasantly as you
hand them what they ask for! A stale article, if you dip it in a good,
warm, sunny smile, will go off better than a fresh one that you've
scowled upon."
To this last apothegm poor Hepzibah responded with a sigh so deep and
heavy that it almost rustled Uncle Venner quite away, like a withered
leaf,--as he was,--before an autumnal gale. Recovering himself,
however, he bent forward, and, with a good deal of feeling in his
ancient visage, beckoned her nearer to him.
"When do you expect him home?" whispered he.
"Whom do you mean?" asked Hepzibah, turning pale.
"Ah!--You don't love to talk about it," said Uncle Venner. "Well,
well! we'll say no more, though there's word of it all over town. I
remember him, Miss Hepzibah, before he could run alone!"
During the remainder of the day, poor Hepzibah acquitted herself even
less creditably, as a shop-keeper, than in her earlier efforts. She
appeared to be walking in a dream; or, more truly, the vivid life and
reality assumed by her emotions made all outward occurrences
unsubstantial, like the teasing phantasms of a half-conscious slumber.
She still responded, mechanically, to the frequent summons of the
shop-bell, and, at the demand of her customers, went prying with vague
eyes about the shop, proffering them one article after another, and
thrusting aside--perversely, as most of them supposed--the identical
thing they asked for. There is sad confusion, indeed, when the spirit
thus flits away into the past, or into the more awful future, or, in
any manner, steps across the spaceless boundary betwixt its own region
and the actual world; where the body remains to guide itself as best it
may, with little more than the mechanism of animal life. It is like
death, without death's quiet privilege,--its freedom from mortal care.
Worst of all, when the actual duties are comprised in such petty
details as now vexed the brooding soul of the old gentlewoman. As the
animosity of fate would have it, there was a great influx of custom in
the course of the afternoon. Hepzibah blundered to and fro about her
small place of business, committing the most unheard-of errors: now
stringing up twelve, and now seven, tallow-candles, instead of ten to
the pound; selling ginger for Scotch snuff, pins for needles, and
needles for pins; misreckoning her change, sometimes to the public
detriment, and much oftener to her own; and thus she went on, doing her
utmost to bring chaos back again, until, at the close of the day's
labor, to her inexplicable astonishment, she found the money-drawer
almost destitute of coin. After all her painful traffic, the whole
proceeds were perhaps half a dozen coppers, and a questionable
ninepence which ultimately proved to be copper likewise.
At this price, or at whatever price, she rejoiced that the day had
reached its end. Never before had she had such a sense of the
intolerable length of time that creeps between dawn and sunset, and of
the miserable irksomeness of having aught to do, and of the better
wisdom that it would be to lie down at once, in sullen resignation, and
let life, and its toils and vexations, trample over one's prostrate
body as they may! Hepzibah's final operation was with the little
devourer of Jim Crow and the elephant, who now proposed to eat a camel.
In her bewilderment, she offered him first a wooden dragoon, and next a
handful of marbles; neither of which being adapted to his else
omnivorous appetite, she hastily held out her whole remaining stock of
natural history in gingerbread, and huddled the small customer out of
the shop. She then muffled the bell in an unfinished stocking, and put
up the oaken bar across the door.
During the latter process, an omnibus came to a stand-still under the
branches of the elm-tree. Hepzibah's heart was in her mouth. Remote
and dusky, and with no sunshine on all the intervening space, was that
region of the Past whence her only guest might be expected to arrive!
Was she to meet him now?
Somebody, at all events, was passing from the farthest interior of the
omnibus towards its entrance. A gentleman alighted; but it was only
to offer his hand to a young girl whose slender figure, nowise needing
such assistance, now lightly descended the steps, and made an airy
little jump from the final one to the sidewalk. She rewarded her
cavalier with a smile, the cheery glow of which was seen reflected on
his own face as he reentered the vehicle. The girl then turned towards
the House of the Seven Gables, to the door of which, meanwhile,--not
the shop-door, but the antique portal,--the omnibus-man had carried a
light trunk and a bandbox. First giving a sharp rap of the old iron
knocker, he left his passenger and her luggage at the door-step, and
departed.
"Who can it be?" thought Hepzibah, who had been screwing her visual
organs into the acutest focus of which they were capable. "The girl
must have mistaken the house." She stole softly into the hall, and,
herself invisible, gazed through the dusty side-lights of the portal at
the young, blooming, and very cheerful face which presented itself for
admittance into the gloomy old mansion. It was a face to which almost
any door would have opened of its own accord.
The young girl, so fresh, so unconventional, and yet so orderly and
obedient to common rules, as you at once recognized her to be, was
widely in contrast, at that moment, with everything about her. The
sordid and ugly luxuriance of gigantic weeds that grew in the angle of
the house, and the heavy projection that overshadowed her, and the
time-worn framework of the door,--none of these things belonged to her
sphere. But, even as a ray of sunshine, fall into what dismal place it
may, instantaneously creates for itself a propriety in being there, so
did it seem altogether fit that the girl should be standing at the
threshold. It was no less evidently proper that the door should swing
open to admit her. The maiden lady herself, sternly inhospitable in
her first purposes, soon began to feel that the door ought to be shoved
back, and the rusty key be turned in the reluctant lock.
"Can it be Phoebe?" questioned she within herself. "It must be little
Phoebe; for it can be nobody else,--and there is a look of her father
about her, too! But what does she want here? And how like a country
cousin, to come down upon a poor body in this way, without so much as a
day's notice, or asking whether she would be welcome! Well; she must
have a night's lodging, I suppose; and to-morrow the child shall go
back to her mother."
Phoebe, it must be understood, was that one little offshoot of the
Pyncheon race to whom we have already referred, as a native of a rural
part of New England, where the old fashions and feelings of
relationship are still partially kept up. In her own circle, it was
regarded as by no means improper for kinsfolk to visit one another
without invitation, or preliminary and ceremonious warning. Yet, in
consideration of Miss Hepzibah's recluse way of life, a letter had
actually been written and despatched, conveying information of Phoebe's
projected visit. This epistle, for three or four days past, had been
in the pocket of the penny-postman, who, happening to have no other
business in Pyncheon Street, had not yet made it convenient to call at
the House of the Seven Gables.
"No--she can stay only one night," said Hepzibah, unbolting the door.
"If Clifford were to find her here, it might disturb him!"
| In contrast to his Hepzibah, whose scowl obscures her kindness and frailty, Jaffrey Pyncheon gives an appearance of respectability and kindness that is at odds with his actual personality. He presents himself as a man of considerable influence and authority, honorable and even friendly. He does nothing overtly sinister when he approaches the store, and even smiles at the sight of Hepzibah. Yet Hepzibah feels a strange aversion toward Jaffrey; she associates him with Colonel Pyncheon, even calling him a modern day version of the sinister Colonel. It is Jaffrey Pyncheon whom Hawthorne mentioned in the first chapter detailing the Pyncheon history as the nephew who will inherit the House of the Seven Gables, the character who represents all of those qualities inherent in Colonel Pyncheon, and the two characters share a similar amoral boldness that cannot be hidden. Just as the artist evoked the character's harsh soul in the picture that represents Judge Pyncheon for posterity, Judge Jaffrey appears hostile and dangerous even when he simply passes by Hepzibah's shop. This chapter foreshadows the later introduction of Clifford Pyncheon, the man convicted of the Pyncheon murder so many years before. Hepzibah dutifully waits for the return of Clifford it is his picture that she often gazes upon and believes that she cannot make decisions about the house without him | analysis |
PHOEBE PYNCHEON slept, on the night of her arrival, in a chamber that
looked down on the garden of the old house. It fronted towards the
east, so that at a very seasonable hour a glow of crimson light came
flooding through the window, and bathed the dingy ceiling and
paper-hangings in its own hue. There were curtains to Phoebe's bed; a
dark, antique canopy, and ponderous festoons of a stuff which had been
rich, and even magnificent, in its time; but which now brooded over the
girl like a cloud, making a night in that one corner, while elsewhere
it was beginning to be day. The morning light, however, soon stole
into the aperture at the foot of the bed, betwixt those faded curtains.
Finding the new guest there,--with a bloom on her cheeks like the
morning's own, and a gentle stir of departing slumber in her limbs, as
when an early breeze moves the foliage,--the dawn kissed her brow. It
was the caress which a dewy maiden--such as the Dawn is,
immortally--gives to her sleeping sister, partly from the impulse of
irresistible fondness, and partly as a pretty hint that it is time now
to unclose her eyes.
At the touch of those lips of light, Phoebe quietly awoke, and, for a
moment, did not recognize where she was, nor how those heavy curtains
chanced to be festooned around her. Nothing, indeed, was absolutely
plain to her, except that it was now early morning, and that, whatever
might happen next, it was proper, first of all, to get up and say her
prayers. She was the more inclined to devotion from the grim aspect of
the chamber and its furniture, especially the tall, stiff chairs; one
of which stood close by her bedside, and looked as if some
old-fashioned personage had been sitting there all night, and had
vanished only just in season to escape discovery.
When Phoebe was quite dressed, she peeped out of the window, and saw a
rosebush in the garden. Being a very tall one, and of luxuriant
growth, it had been propped up against the side of the house, and was
literally covered with a rare and very beautiful species of white rose.
A large portion of them, as the girl afterwards discovered, had blight
or mildew at their hearts; but, viewed at a fair distance, the whole
rosebush looked as if it had been brought from Eden that very summer,
together with the mould in which it grew. The truth was, nevertheless,
that it had been planted by Alice Pyncheon,--she was Phoebe's
great-great-grand-aunt,--in soil which, reckoning only its cultivation
as a garden-plat, was now unctuous with nearly two hundred years of
vegetable decay. Growing as they did, however, out of the old earth,
the flowers still sent a fresh and sweet incense up to their Creator;
nor could it have been the less pure and acceptable because Phoebe's
young breath mingled with it, as the fragrance floated past the window.
Hastening down the creaking and carpetless staircase, she found her way
into the garden, gathered some of the most perfect of the roses, and
brought them to her chamber.
Little Phoebe was one of those persons who possess, as their exclusive
patrimony, the gift of practical arrangement. It is a kind of natural
magic that enables these favored ones to bring out the hidden
capabilities of things around them; and particularly to give a look of
comfort and habitableness to any place which, for however brief a
period, may happen to be their home. A wild hut of underbrush, tossed
together by wayfarers through the primitive forest, would acquire the
home aspect by one night's lodging of such a woman, and would retain it
long after her quiet figure had disappeared into the surrounding shade.
No less a portion of such homely witchcraft was requisite to reclaim,
as it were, Phoebe's waste, cheerless, and dusky chamber, which had
been untenanted so long--except by spiders, and mice, and rats, and
ghosts--that it was all overgrown with the desolation which watches to
obliterate every trace of man's happier hours. What was precisely
Phoebe's process we find it impossible to say. She appeared to have no
preliminary design, but gave a touch here and another there; brought
some articles of furniture to light and dragged others into the shadow;
looped up or let down a window-curtain; and, in the course of half an
hour, had fully succeeded in throwing a kindly and hospitable smile
over the apartment. No longer ago than the night before, it had
resembled nothing so much as the old maid's heart; for there was
neither sunshine nor household fire in one nor the other, and, save for
ghosts and ghostly reminiscences, not a guest, for many years gone by,
had entered the heart or the chamber.
There was still another peculiarity of this inscrutable charm. The
bedchamber, no doubt, was a chamber of very great and varied
experience, as a scene of human life: the joy of bridal nights had
throbbed itself away here; new immortals had first drawn earthly breath
here; and here old people had died. But--whether it were the white
roses, or whatever the subtile influence might be--a person of delicate
instinct would have known at once that it was now a maiden's
bedchamber, and had been purified of all former evil and sorrow by her
sweet breath and happy thoughts. Her dreams of the past night, being
such cheerful ones, had exorcised the gloom, and now haunted the
chamber in its stead.
After arranging matters to her satisfaction, Phoebe emerged from her
chamber, with a purpose to descend again into the garden. Besides the
rosebush, she had observed several other species of flowers growing
there in a wilderness of neglect, and obstructing one another's
development (as is often the parallel case in human society) by their
uneducated entanglement and confusion. At the head of the stairs,
however, she met Hepzibah, who, it being still early, invited her into
a room which she would probably have called her boudoir, had her
education embraced any such French phrase. It was strewn about with a
few old books, and a work-basket, and a dusty writing-desk; and had, on
one side, a large black article of furniture, of very strange
appearance, which the old gentlewoman told Phoebe was a harpsichord.
It looked more like a coffin than anything else; and, indeed,--not
having been played upon, or opened, for years,--there must have been a
vast deal of dead music in it, stifled for want of air. Human finger
was hardly known to have touched its chords since the days of Alice
Pyncheon, who had learned the sweet accomplishment of melody in Europe.
Hepzibah bade her young guest sit down, and, herself taking a chair
near by, looked as earnestly at Phoebe's trim little figure as if she
expected to see right into its springs and motive secrets.
"Cousin Phoebe," said she, at last, "I really can't see my way clear to
keep you with me."
These words, however, had not the inhospitable bluntness with which
they may strike the reader; for the two relatives, in a talk before
bedtime, had arrived at a certain degree of mutual understanding.
Hepzibah knew enough to enable her to appreciate the circumstances
(resulting from the second marriage of the girl's mother) which made it
desirable for Phoebe to establish herself in another home. Nor did she
misinterpret Phoebe's character, and the genial activity pervading
it,--one of the most valuable traits of the true New England
woman,--which had impelled her forth, as might be said, to seek her
fortune, but with a self-respecting purpose to confer as much benefit
as she could anywise receive. As one of her nearest kindred, she had
naturally betaken herself to Hepzibah, with no idea of forcing herself
on her cousin's protection, but only for a visit of a week or two,
which might be indefinitely extended, should it prove for the happiness
of both.
To Hepzibah's blunt observation, therefore, Phoebe replied as frankly,
and more cheerfully.
"Dear cousin, I cannot tell how it will be," said she. "But I really
think we may suit one another much better than you suppose."
"You are a nice girl,--I see it plainly," continued Hepzibah; "and it
is not any question as to that point which makes me hesitate. But,
Phoebe, this house of mine is but a melancholy place for a young person
to be in. It lets in the wind and rain, and the snow, too, in the
garret and upper chambers, in winter-time, but it never lets in the
sunshine. And as for myself, you see what I am,--a dismal and lonesome
old woman (for I begin to call myself old, Phoebe), whose temper, I am
afraid, is none of the best, and whose spirits are as bad as can be! I
cannot make your life pleasant, Cousin Phoebe, neither can I so much as
give you bread to eat."
"You will find me a cheerful little body" answered Phoebe, smiling, and
yet with a kind of gentle dignity, "and I mean to earn my bread. You
know I have not been brought up a Pyncheon. A girl learns many things
in a New England village."
"Ah! Phoebe," said Hepzibah, sighing, "your knowledge would do but
little for you here! And then it is a wretched thought that you should
fling away your young days in a place like this. Those cheeks would
not be so rosy after a month or two. Look at my face!" and, indeed,
the contrast was very striking,--"you see how pale I am! It is my idea
that the dust and continual decay of these old houses are unwholesome
for the lungs."
"There is the garden,--the flowers to be taken care of," observed
Phoebe. "I should keep myself healthy with exercise in the open air."
"And, after all, child," exclaimed Hepzibah, suddenly rising, as if to
dismiss the subject, "it is not for me to say who shall be a guest or
inhabitant of the old Pyncheon House. Its master is coming."
"Do you mean Judge Pyncheon?" asked Phoebe in surprise.
"Judge Pyncheon!" answered her cousin angrily. "He will hardly cross
the threshold while I live! No, no! But, Phoebe, you shall see the face
of him I speak of."
She went in quest of the miniature already described, and returned with
it in her hand. Giving it to Phoebe, she watched her features
narrowly, and with a certain jealousy as to the mode in which the girl
would show herself affected by the picture.
"How do you like the face?" asked Hepzibah.
"It is handsome!--it is very beautiful!" said Phoebe admiringly. "It
is as sweet a face as a man's can be, or ought to be. It has something
of a child's expression,--and yet not childish,--only one feels so very
kindly towards him! He ought never to suffer anything. One would bear
much for the sake of sparing him toil or sorrow. Who is it, Cousin
Hepzibah?"
"Did you never hear," whispered her cousin, bending towards her, "of
Clifford Pyncheon?"
"Never. I thought there were no Pyncheons left, except yourself and
our cousin Jaffrey," answered Phoebe. "And yet I seem to have heard
the name of Clifford Pyncheon. Yes!--from my father or my mother; but
has he not been a long while dead?"
"Well, well, child, perhaps he has!" said Hepzibah with a sad, hollow
laugh; "but, in old houses like this, you know, dead people are very
apt to come back again! We shall see. And, Cousin Phoebe, since, after
all that I have said, your courage does not fail you, we will not part
so soon. You are welcome, my child, for the present, to such a home as
your kinswoman can offer you."
With this measured, but not exactly cold assurance of a hospitable
purpose, Hepzibah kissed her cheek.
They now went below stairs, where Phoebe--not so much assuming the
office as attracting it to herself, by the magnetism of innate
fitness--took the most active part in preparing breakfast. The
mistress of the house, meanwhile, as is usual with persons of her stiff
and unmalleable cast, stood mostly aside; willing to lend her aid, yet
conscious that her natural inaptitude would be likely to impede the
business in hand. Phoebe and the fire that boiled the teakettle were
equally bright, cheerful, and efficient, in their respective offices.
Hepzibah gazed forth from her habitual sluggishness, the necessary
result of long solitude, as from another sphere. She could not help
being interested, however, and even amused, at the readiness with which
her new inmate adapted herself to the circumstances, and brought the
house, moreover, and all its rusty old appliances, into a suitableness
for her purposes. Whatever she did, too, was done without conscious
effort, and with frequent outbreaks of song, which were exceedingly
pleasant to the ear. This natural tunefulness made Phoebe seem like a
bird in a shadowy tree; or conveyed the idea that the stream of life
warbled through her heart as a brook sometimes warbles through a
pleasant little dell. It betokened the cheeriness of an active
temperament, finding joy in its activity, and, therefore, rendering it
beautiful; it was a New England trait,--the stern old stuff of
Puritanism with a gold thread in the web.
Hepzibah brought out some old silver spoons with the family crest upon
them, and a china tea-set painted over with grotesque figures of man,
bird, and beast, in as grotesque a landscape. These pictured people
were odd humorists, in a world of their own,--a world of vivid
brilliancy, so far as color went, and still unfaded, although the
teapot and small cups were as ancient as the custom itself of
tea-drinking.
"Your great-great-great-great-grandmother had these cups, when she was
married," said Hepzibah to Phoebe. "She was a Davenport, of a good
family. They were almost the first teacups ever seen in the colony;
and if one of them were to be broken, my heart would break with it.
But it is nonsense to speak so about a brittle teacup, when I remember
what my heart has gone through without breaking."
The cups--not having been used, perhaps, since Hepzibah's youth--had
contracted no small burden of dust, which Phoebe washed away with so
much care and delicacy as to satisfy even the proprietor of this
invaluable china.
"What a nice little housewife you are!" exclaimed the latter, smiling,
and at the same time frowning so prodigiously that the smile was
sunshine under a thunder-cloud. "Do you do other things as well? Are
you as good at your book as you are at washing teacups?"
"Not quite, I am afraid," said Phoebe, laughing at the form of
Hepzibah's question. "But I was schoolmistress for the little children
in our district last summer, and might have been so still."
"Ah! 'tis all very well!" observed the maiden lady, drawing herself up.
"But these things must have come to you with your mother's blood. I
never knew a Pyncheon that had any turn for them."
It is very queer, but not the less true, that people are generally
quite as vain, or even more so, of their deficiencies than of their
available gifts; as was Hepzibah of this native inapplicability, so to
speak, of the Pyncheons to any useful purpose. She regarded it as an
hereditary trait; and so, perhaps, it was, but unfortunately a morbid
one, such as is often generated in families that remain long above the
surface of society.
Before they left the breakfast-table, the shop-bell rang sharply, and
Hepzibah set down the remnant of her final cup of tea, with a look of
sallow despair that was truly piteous to behold. In cases of
distasteful occupation, the second day is generally worse than the
first. We return to the rack with all the soreness of the preceding
torture in our limbs. At all events, Hepzibah had fully satisfied
herself of the impossibility of ever becoming wonted to this peevishly
obstreperous little bell. Ring as often as it might, the sound always
smote upon her nervous system rudely and suddenly. And especially now,
while, with her crested teaspoons and antique china, she was flattering
herself with ideas of gentility, she felt an unspeakable disinclination
to confront a customer.
"Do not trouble yourself, dear cousin!" cried Phoebe, starting lightly
up. "I am shop-keeper to-day."
"You, child!" exclaimed Hepzibah. "What can a little country girl know
of such matters?"
"Oh, I have done all the shopping for the family at our village store,"
said Phoebe. "And I have had a table at a fancy fair, and made better
sales than anybody. These things are not to be learnt; they depend
upon a knack that comes, I suppose," added she, smiling, "with one's
mother's blood. You shall see that I am as nice a little saleswoman as
I am a housewife!"
The old gentlewoman stole behind Phoebe, and peeped from the passageway
into the shop, to note how she would manage her undertaking. It was a
case of some intricacy. A very ancient woman, in a white short gown
and a green petticoat, with a string of gold beads about her neck, and
what looked like a nightcap on her head, had brought a quantity of yarn
to barter for the commodities of the shop. She was probably the very
last person in town who still kept the time-honored spinning-wheel in
constant revolution. It was worth while to hear the croaking and
hollow tones of the old lady, and the pleasant voice of Phoebe,
mingling in one twisted thread of talk; and still better to contrast
their figures,--so light and bloomy,--so decrepit and dusky,--with only
the counter betwixt them, in one sense, but more than threescore years,
in another. As for the bargain, it was wrinkled slyness and craft
pitted against native truth and sagacity.
"Was not that well done?" asked Phoebe, laughing, when the customer was
gone.
"Nicely done, indeed, child!" answered Hepzibah. "I could not have
gone through with it nearly so well. As you say, it must be a knack
that belongs to you on the mother's side."
It is a very genuine admiration, that with which persons too shy or too
awkward to take a due part in the bustling world regard the real actors
in life's stirring scenes; so genuine, in fact, that the former are
usually fain to make it palatable to their self-love, by assuming that
these active and forcible qualities are incompatible with others, which
they choose to deem higher and more important. Thus, Hepzibah was well
content to acknowledge Phoebe's vastly superior gifts as a
shop-keeper'--she listened, with compliant ear, to her suggestion of
various methods whereby the influx of trade might be increased, and
rendered profitable, without a hazardous outlay of capital. She
consented that the village maiden should manufacture yeast, both liquid
and in cakes; and should brew a certain kind of beer, nectareous to the
palate, and of rare stomachic virtues; and, moreover, should bake and
exhibit for sale some little spice-cakes, which whosoever tasted would
longingly desire to taste again. All such proofs of a ready mind and
skilful handiwork were highly acceptable to the aristocratic
hucksteress, so long as she could murmur to herself with a grim smile,
and a half-natural sigh, and a sentiment of mixed wonder, pity, and
growing affection:--
"What a nice little body she is! If she only could be a lady; too--but
that's impossible! Phoebe is no Pyncheon. She takes everything from
her mother!"
As to Phoebe's not being a lady, or whether she were a lady or no, it
was a point, perhaps, difficult to decide, but which could hardly have
come up for judgment at all in any fair and healthy mind. Out of New
England, it would be impossible to meet with a person combining so many
ladylike attributes with so many others that form no necessary (if
compatible) part of the character. She shocked no canon of taste; she
was admirably in keeping with herself, and never jarred against
surrounding circumstances. Her figure, to be sure,--so small as to be
almost childlike, and so elastic that motion seemed as easy or easier
to it than rest, would hardly have suited one's idea of a countess.
Neither did her face--with the brown ringlets on either side, and the
slightly piquant nose, and the wholesome bloom, and the clear shade of
tan, and the half dozen freckles, friendly remembrances of the April
sun and breeze--precisely give us a right to call her beautiful. But
there was both lustre and depth in her eyes. She was very pretty; as
graceful as a bird, and graceful much in the same way; as pleasant
about the house as a gleam of sunshine falling on the floor through a
shadow of twinkling leaves, or as a ray of firelight that dances on the
wall while evening is drawing nigh. Instead of discussing her claim
to rank among ladies, it would be preferable to regard Phoebe as the
example of feminine grace and availability combined, in a state of
society, if there were any such, where ladies did not exist. There it
should be woman's office to move in the midst of practical affairs, and
to gild them all, the very homeliest,--were it even the scouring of
pots and kettles,--with an atmosphere of loveliness and joy.
Such was the sphere of Phoebe. To find the born and educated lady, on
the other hand, we need look no farther than Hepzibah, our forlorn old
maid, in her rustling and rusty silks, with her deeply cherished and
ridiculous consciousness of long descent, her shadowy claims to
princely territory, and, in the way of accomplishment, her
recollections, it may be, of having formerly thrummed on a harpsichord,
and walked a minuet, and worked an antique tapestry-stitch on her
sampler. It was a fair parallel between new Plebeianism and old
Gentility.
It really seemed as if the battered visage of the House of the Seven
Gables, black and heavy-browed as it still certainly looked, must have
shown a kind of cheerfulness glimmering through its dusky windows as
Phoebe passed to and fro in the interior. Otherwise, it is impossible
to explain how the people of the neighborhood so soon became aware of
the girl's presence. There was a great run of custom, setting steadily
in, from about ten o' clock until towards noon,--relaxing, somewhat, at
dinner-time, but recommencing in the afternoon, and, finally, dying
away a half an hour or so before the long day's sunset. One of the
stanchest patrons was little Ned Higgins, the devourer of Jim Crow and
the elephant, who to-day signalized his omnivorous prowess by
swallowing two dromedaries and a locomotive. Phoebe laughed, as she
summed up her aggregate of sales upon the slate; while Hepzibah, first
drawing on a pair of silk gloves, reckoned over the sordid accumulation
of copper coin, not without silver intermixed, that had jingled into
the till.
"We must renew our stock, Cousin Hepzibah!" cried the little
saleswoman. "The gingerbread figures are all gone, and so are those
Dutch wooden milkmaids, and most of our other playthings. There has
been constant inquiry for cheap raisins, and a great cry for whistles,
and trumpets, and jew's-harps; and at least a dozen little boys have
asked for molasses-candy. And we must contrive to get a peck of russet
apples, late in the season as it is. But, dear cousin, what an
enormous heap of copper! Positively a copper mountain!"
"Well done! well done! well done!" quoth Uncle Venner, who had taken
occasion to shuffle in and out of the shop several times in the course
of the day. "Here's a girl that will never end her days at my farm!
Bless my eyes, what a brisk little soul!"
"Yes, Phoebe is a nice girl!" said Hepzibah, with a scowl of austere
approbation. "But, Uncle Venner, you have known the family a great
many years. Can you tell me whether there ever was a Pyncheon whom she
takes after?"
"I don't believe there ever was," answered the venerable man. "At any
rate, it never was my luck to see her like among them, nor, for that
matter, anywhere else. I've seen a great deal of the world, not only
in people's kitchens and back-yards but at the street-corners, and on
the wharves, and in other places where my business calls me; and I'm
free to say, Miss Hepzibah, that I never knew a human creature do her
work so much like one of God's angels as this child Phoebe does!"
Uncle Venner's eulogium, if it appear rather too high-strained for the
person and occasion, had, nevertheless, a sense in which it was both
subtile and true. There was a spiritual quality in Phoebe's activity.
The life of the long and busy day--spent in occupations that might so
easily have taken a squalid and ugly aspect--had been made pleasant,
and even lovely, by the spontaneous grace with which these homely
duties seemed to bloom out of her character; so that labor, while she
dealt with it, had the easy and flexible charm of play. Angels do not
toil, but let their good works grow out of them; and so did Phoebe.
The two relatives--the young maid and the old one--found time before
nightfall, in the intervals of trade, to make rapid advances towards
affection and confidence. A recluse, like Hepzibah, usually displays
remarkable frankness, and at least temporary affability, on being
absolutely cornered, and brought to the point of personal intercourse;
like the angel whom Jacob wrestled with, she is ready to bless you when
once overcome.
The old gentlewoman took a dreary and proud satisfaction in leading
Phoebe from room to room of the house, and recounting the traditions
with which, as we may say, the walls were lugubriously frescoed. She
showed the indentations made by the lieutenant-governor's sword-hilt in
the door-panels of the apartment where old Colonel Pyncheon, a dead
host, had received his affrighted visitors with an awful frown. The
dusky terror of that frown, Hepzibah observed, was thought to be
lingering ever since in the passageway. She bade Phoebe step into one
of the tall chairs, and inspect the ancient map of the Pyncheon
territory at the eastward. In a tract of land on which she laid her
finger, there existed a silver mine, the locality of which was
precisely pointed out in some memoranda of Colonel Pyncheon himself,
but only to be made known when the family claim should be recognized by
government. Thus it was for the interest of all New England that the
Pyncheons should have justice done them. She told, too, how that there
was undoubtedly an immense treasure of English guineas hidden somewhere
about the house, or in the cellar, or possibly in the garden.
"If you should happen to find it, Phoebe," said Hepzibah, glancing
aside at her with a grim yet kindly smile, "we will tie up the
shop-bell for good and all!"
"Yes, dear cousin," answered Phoebe; "but, in the mean time, I hear
somebody ringing it!"
When the customer was gone, Hepzibah talked rather vaguely, and at
great length, about a certain Alice Pyncheon, who had been exceedingly
beautiful and accomplished in her lifetime, a hundred years ago. The
fragrance of her rich and delightful character still lingered about the
place where she had lived, as a dried rose-bud scents the drawer where
it has withered and perished. This lovely Alice had met with some
great and mysterious calamity, and had grown thin and white, and
gradually faded out of the world. But, even now, she was supposed to
haunt the House of the Seven Gables, and, a great many times,--especially
when one of the Pyncheons was to die,--she had been heard playing sadly
and beautifully on the harpsichord. One of these tunes, just as it had
sounded from her spiritual touch, had been written down by an amateur of
music; it was so exquisitely mournful that nobody, to this day, could
bear to hear it played, unless when a great sorrow had made them know
the still profounder sweetness of it.
"Was it the same harpsichord that you showed me?" inquired Phoebe.
"The very same," said Hepzibah. "It was Alice Pyncheon's harpsichord.
When I was learning music, my father would never let me open it. So,
as I could only play on my teacher's instrument, I have forgotten all
my music long ago."
Leaving these antique themes, the old lady began to talk about the
daguerreotypist, whom, as he seemed to be a well-meaning and orderly
young man, and in narrow circumstances, she had permitted to take up
his residence in one of the seven gables. But, on seeing more of Mr.
Holgrave, she hardly knew what to make of him. He had the strangest
companions imaginable; men with long beards, and dressed in linen
blouses, and other such new-fangled and ill-fitting garments;
reformers, temperance lecturers, and all manner of cross-looking
philanthropists; community-men, and come-outers, as Hepzibah believed,
who acknowledged no law, and ate no solid food, but lived on the scent
of other people's cookery, and turned up their noses at the fare. As
for the daguerreotypist, she had read a paragraph in a penny paper, the
other day, accusing him of making a speech full of wild and
disorganizing matter, at a meeting of his banditti-like associates.
For her own part, she had reason to believe that he practised animal
magnetism, and, if such things were in fashion nowadays, should be apt
to suspect him of studying the Black Art up there in his lonesome
chamber.
"But, dear cousin," said Phoebe, "if the young man is so dangerous, why
do you let him stay? If he does nothing worse, he may set the house on
fire!"
"Why, sometimes," answered Hepzibah, "I have seriously made it a
question, whether I ought not to send him away. But, with all his
oddities, he is a quiet kind of a person, and has such a way of taking
hold of one's mind, that, without exactly liking him (for I don't know
enough of the young man), I should be sorry to lose sight of him
entirely. A woman clings to slight acquaintances when she lives so
much alone as I do."
"But if Mr. Holgrave is a lawless person!" remonstrated Phoebe, a part
of whose essence it was to keep within the limits of law.
"Oh!" said Hepzibah carelessly,--for, formal as she was, still, in her
life's experience, she had gnashed her teeth against human law,--"I
suppose he has a law of his own!"
| May and November: Phoebe Pyncheon slept in a chamber that looked down on the garden of the old house. She quietly awoke and did not recognize where she was. Phoebe possessed the gift of practical arrangement, a kind of natural magic that enables people to bring out the hidden capabilities of things around them. She rearranges her room to make it more pleasant, then emerges to go into the garden. She meets Hepzibah at the head of the stairs, who tells Phoebe that she cannot stay. These words, however, were not inhospitable. Phoebe tells Hepzibah that the two may suit one another better than she supposes. Hepzibah tells Phoebe that it is not her place to say who shall be a guest of the Pyncheon House, for its master is cousin. She shows Phoebe the miniature, and tells her that it is Clifford Pyncheon. Phoebe remarks that she thought that Jaffrey and Hepzibah were the only Pyncheons not dead, and Hepzibah replies that in old houses like this, dead people are apt to come back. When a customer arrives at the shop, Phoebe offers to be the shopkeeper for the day. Phoebe proves a superior shopkeeper. She was not a lady, but she was the example of feminine grace and availability where ladies did not exist. Hepzibah wonders if there is a Pyncheon that Phoebe resembles, but Uncle Venner believes that there never was. Hepzibah gives Phoebe a tour of the house in which she explains about a number of legends , and tells Phoebe about Alice Pyncheon, who had been exceedingly beautiful and accomplished when she lived a century before. Alice met with some mysterious calamity and faded away, but she was now supposed to haunt the House of the Seven Gables by playing on the harpsichord. Phoebe did not know what to make of Mr. Holgrave; she believed that he studied some Black Art in his lonesome chamber. | summary |
PHOEBE PYNCHEON slept, on the night of her arrival, in a chamber that
looked down on the garden of the old house. It fronted towards the
east, so that at a very seasonable hour a glow of crimson light came
flooding through the window, and bathed the dingy ceiling and
paper-hangings in its own hue. There were curtains to Phoebe's bed; a
dark, antique canopy, and ponderous festoons of a stuff which had been
rich, and even magnificent, in its time; but which now brooded over the
girl like a cloud, making a night in that one corner, while elsewhere
it was beginning to be day. The morning light, however, soon stole
into the aperture at the foot of the bed, betwixt those faded curtains.
Finding the new guest there,--with a bloom on her cheeks like the
morning's own, and a gentle stir of departing slumber in her limbs, as
when an early breeze moves the foliage,--the dawn kissed her brow. It
was the caress which a dewy maiden--such as the Dawn is,
immortally--gives to her sleeping sister, partly from the impulse of
irresistible fondness, and partly as a pretty hint that it is time now
to unclose her eyes.
At the touch of those lips of light, Phoebe quietly awoke, and, for a
moment, did not recognize where she was, nor how those heavy curtains
chanced to be festooned around her. Nothing, indeed, was absolutely
plain to her, except that it was now early morning, and that, whatever
might happen next, it was proper, first of all, to get up and say her
prayers. She was the more inclined to devotion from the grim aspect of
the chamber and its furniture, especially the tall, stiff chairs; one
of which stood close by her bedside, and looked as if some
old-fashioned personage had been sitting there all night, and had
vanished only just in season to escape discovery.
When Phoebe was quite dressed, she peeped out of the window, and saw a
rosebush in the garden. Being a very tall one, and of luxuriant
growth, it had been propped up against the side of the house, and was
literally covered with a rare and very beautiful species of white rose.
A large portion of them, as the girl afterwards discovered, had blight
or mildew at their hearts; but, viewed at a fair distance, the whole
rosebush looked as if it had been brought from Eden that very summer,
together with the mould in which it grew. The truth was, nevertheless,
that it had been planted by Alice Pyncheon,--she was Phoebe's
great-great-grand-aunt,--in soil which, reckoning only its cultivation
as a garden-plat, was now unctuous with nearly two hundred years of
vegetable decay. Growing as they did, however, out of the old earth,
the flowers still sent a fresh and sweet incense up to their Creator;
nor could it have been the less pure and acceptable because Phoebe's
young breath mingled with it, as the fragrance floated past the window.
Hastening down the creaking and carpetless staircase, she found her way
into the garden, gathered some of the most perfect of the roses, and
brought them to her chamber.
Little Phoebe was one of those persons who possess, as their exclusive
patrimony, the gift of practical arrangement. It is a kind of natural
magic that enables these favored ones to bring out the hidden
capabilities of things around them; and particularly to give a look of
comfort and habitableness to any place which, for however brief a
period, may happen to be their home. A wild hut of underbrush, tossed
together by wayfarers through the primitive forest, would acquire the
home aspect by one night's lodging of such a woman, and would retain it
long after her quiet figure had disappeared into the surrounding shade.
No less a portion of such homely witchcraft was requisite to reclaim,
as it were, Phoebe's waste, cheerless, and dusky chamber, which had
been untenanted so long--except by spiders, and mice, and rats, and
ghosts--that it was all overgrown with the desolation which watches to
obliterate every trace of man's happier hours. What was precisely
Phoebe's process we find it impossible to say. She appeared to have no
preliminary design, but gave a touch here and another there; brought
some articles of furniture to light and dragged others into the shadow;
looped up or let down a window-curtain; and, in the course of half an
hour, had fully succeeded in throwing a kindly and hospitable smile
over the apartment. No longer ago than the night before, it had
resembled nothing so much as the old maid's heart; for there was
neither sunshine nor household fire in one nor the other, and, save for
ghosts and ghostly reminiscences, not a guest, for many years gone by,
had entered the heart or the chamber.
There was still another peculiarity of this inscrutable charm. The
bedchamber, no doubt, was a chamber of very great and varied
experience, as a scene of human life: the joy of bridal nights had
throbbed itself away here; new immortals had first drawn earthly breath
here; and here old people had died. But--whether it were the white
roses, or whatever the subtile influence might be--a person of delicate
instinct would have known at once that it was now a maiden's
bedchamber, and had been purified of all former evil and sorrow by her
sweet breath and happy thoughts. Her dreams of the past night, being
such cheerful ones, had exorcised the gloom, and now haunted the
chamber in its stead.
After arranging matters to her satisfaction, Phoebe emerged from her
chamber, with a purpose to descend again into the garden. Besides the
rosebush, she had observed several other species of flowers growing
there in a wilderness of neglect, and obstructing one another's
development (as is often the parallel case in human society) by their
uneducated entanglement and confusion. At the head of the stairs,
however, she met Hepzibah, who, it being still early, invited her into
a room which she would probably have called her boudoir, had her
education embraced any such French phrase. It was strewn about with a
few old books, and a work-basket, and a dusty writing-desk; and had, on
one side, a large black article of furniture, of very strange
appearance, which the old gentlewoman told Phoebe was a harpsichord.
It looked more like a coffin than anything else; and, indeed,--not
having been played upon, or opened, for years,--there must have been a
vast deal of dead music in it, stifled for want of air. Human finger
was hardly known to have touched its chords since the days of Alice
Pyncheon, who had learned the sweet accomplishment of melody in Europe.
Hepzibah bade her young guest sit down, and, herself taking a chair
near by, looked as earnestly at Phoebe's trim little figure as if she
expected to see right into its springs and motive secrets.
"Cousin Phoebe," said she, at last, "I really can't see my way clear to
keep you with me."
These words, however, had not the inhospitable bluntness with which
they may strike the reader; for the two relatives, in a talk before
bedtime, had arrived at a certain degree of mutual understanding.
Hepzibah knew enough to enable her to appreciate the circumstances
(resulting from the second marriage of the girl's mother) which made it
desirable for Phoebe to establish herself in another home. Nor did she
misinterpret Phoebe's character, and the genial activity pervading
it,--one of the most valuable traits of the true New England
woman,--which had impelled her forth, as might be said, to seek her
fortune, but with a self-respecting purpose to confer as much benefit
as she could anywise receive. As one of her nearest kindred, she had
naturally betaken herself to Hepzibah, with no idea of forcing herself
on her cousin's protection, but only for a visit of a week or two,
which might be indefinitely extended, should it prove for the happiness
of both.
To Hepzibah's blunt observation, therefore, Phoebe replied as frankly,
and more cheerfully.
"Dear cousin, I cannot tell how it will be," said she. "But I really
think we may suit one another much better than you suppose."
"You are a nice girl,--I see it plainly," continued Hepzibah; "and it
is not any question as to that point which makes me hesitate. But,
Phoebe, this house of mine is but a melancholy place for a young person
to be in. It lets in the wind and rain, and the snow, too, in the
garret and upper chambers, in winter-time, but it never lets in the
sunshine. And as for myself, you see what I am,--a dismal and lonesome
old woman (for I begin to call myself old, Phoebe), whose temper, I am
afraid, is none of the best, and whose spirits are as bad as can be! I
cannot make your life pleasant, Cousin Phoebe, neither can I so much as
give you bread to eat."
"You will find me a cheerful little body" answered Phoebe, smiling, and
yet with a kind of gentle dignity, "and I mean to earn my bread. You
know I have not been brought up a Pyncheon. A girl learns many things
in a New England village."
"Ah! Phoebe," said Hepzibah, sighing, "your knowledge would do but
little for you here! And then it is a wretched thought that you should
fling away your young days in a place like this. Those cheeks would
not be so rosy after a month or two. Look at my face!" and, indeed,
the contrast was very striking,--"you see how pale I am! It is my idea
that the dust and continual decay of these old houses are unwholesome
for the lungs."
"There is the garden,--the flowers to be taken care of," observed
Phoebe. "I should keep myself healthy with exercise in the open air."
"And, after all, child," exclaimed Hepzibah, suddenly rising, as if to
dismiss the subject, "it is not for me to say who shall be a guest or
inhabitant of the old Pyncheon House. Its master is coming."
"Do you mean Judge Pyncheon?" asked Phoebe in surprise.
"Judge Pyncheon!" answered her cousin angrily. "He will hardly cross
the threshold while I live! No, no! But, Phoebe, you shall see the face
of him I speak of."
She went in quest of the miniature already described, and returned with
it in her hand. Giving it to Phoebe, she watched her features
narrowly, and with a certain jealousy as to the mode in which the girl
would show herself affected by the picture.
"How do you like the face?" asked Hepzibah.
"It is handsome!--it is very beautiful!" said Phoebe admiringly. "It
is as sweet a face as a man's can be, or ought to be. It has something
of a child's expression,--and yet not childish,--only one feels so very
kindly towards him! He ought never to suffer anything. One would bear
much for the sake of sparing him toil or sorrow. Who is it, Cousin
Hepzibah?"
"Did you never hear," whispered her cousin, bending towards her, "of
Clifford Pyncheon?"
"Never. I thought there were no Pyncheons left, except yourself and
our cousin Jaffrey," answered Phoebe. "And yet I seem to have heard
the name of Clifford Pyncheon. Yes!--from my father or my mother; but
has he not been a long while dead?"
"Well, well, child, perhaps he has!" said Hepzibah with a sad, hollow
laugh; "but, in old houses like this, you know, dead people are very
apt to come back again! We shall see. And, Cousin Phoebe, since, after
all that I have said, your courage does not fail you, we will not part
so soon. You are welcome, my child, for the present, to such a home as
your kinswoman can offer you."
With this measured, but not exactly cold assurance of a hospitable
purpose, Hepzibah kissed her cheek.
They now went below stairs, where Phoebe--not so much assuming the
office as attracting it to herself, by the magnetism of innate
fitness--took the most active part in preparing breakfast. The
mistress of the house, meanwhile, as is usual with persons of her stiff
and unmalleable cast, stood mostly aside; willing to lend her aid, yet
conscious that her natural inaptitude would be likely to impede the
business in hand. Phoebe and the fire that boiled the teakettle were
equally bright, cheerful, and efficient, in their respective offices.
Hepzibah gazed forth from her habitual sluggishness, the necessary
result of long solitude, as from another sphere. She could not help
being interested, however, and even amused, at the readiness with which
her new inmate adapted herself to the circumstances, and brought the
house, moreover, and all its rusty old appliances, into a suitableness
for her purposes. Whatever she did, too, was done without conscious
effort, and with frequent outbreaks of song, which were exceedingly
pleasant to the ear. This natural tunefulness made Phoebe seem like a
bird in a shadowy tree; or conveyed the idea that the stream of life
warbled through her heart as a brook sometimes warbles through a
pleasant little dell. It betokened the cheeriness of an active
temperament, finding joy in its activity, and, therefore, rendering it
beautiful; it was a New England trait,--the stern old stuff of
Puritanism with a gold thread in the web.
Hepzibah brought out some old silver spoons with the family crest upon
them, and a china tea-set painted over with grotesque figures of man,
bird, and beast, in as grotesque a landscape. These pictured people
were odd humorists, in a world of their own,--a world of vivid
brilliancy, so far as color went, and still unfaded, although the
teapot and small cups were as ancient as the custom itself of
tea-drinking.
"Your great-great-great-great-grandmother had these cups, when she was
married," said Hepzibah to Phoebe. "She was a Davenport, of a good
family. They were almost the first teacups ever seen in the colony;
and if one of them were to be broken, my heart would break with it.
But it is nonsense to speak so about a brittle teacup, when I remember
what my heart has gone through without breaking."
The cups--not having been used, perhaps, since Hepzibah's youth--had
contracted no small burden of dust, which Phoebe washed away with so
much care and delicacy as to satisfy even the proprietor of this
invaluable china.
"What a nice little housewife you are!" exclaimed the latter, smiling,
and at the same time frowning so prodigiously that the smile was
sunshine under a thunder-cloud. "Do you do other things as well? Are
you as good at your book as you are at washing teacups?"
"Not quite, I am afraid," said Phoebe, laughing at the form of
Hepzibah's question. "But I was schoolmistress for the little children
in our district last summer, and might have been so still."
"Ah! 'tis all very well!" observed the maiden lady, drawing herself up.
"But these things must have come to you with your mother's blood. I
never knew a Pyncheon that had any turn for them."
It is very queer, but not the less true, that people are generally
quite as vain, or even more so, of their deficiencies than of their
available gifts; as was Hepzibah of this native inapplicability, so to
speak, of the Pyncheons to any useful purpose. She regarded it as an
hereditary trait; and so, perhaps, it was, but unfortunately a morbid
one, such as is often generated in families that remain long above the
surface of society.
Before they left the breakfast-table, the shop-bell rang sharply, and
Hepzibah set down the remnant of her final cup of tea, with a look of
sallow despair that was truly piteous to behold. In cases of
distasteful occupation, the second day is generally worse than the
first. We return to the rack with all the soreness of the preceding
torture in our limbs. At all events, Hepzibah had fully satisfied
herself of the impossibility of ever becoming wonted to this peevishly
obstreperous little bell. Ring as often as it might, the sound always
smote upon her nervous system rudely and suddenly. And especially now,
while, with her crested teaspoons and antique china, she was flattering
herself with ideas of gentility, she felt an unspeakable disinclination
to confront a customer.
"Do not trouble yourself, dear cousin!" cried Phoebe, starting lightly
up. "I am shop-keeper to-day."
"You, child!" exclaimed Hepzibah. "What can a little country girl know
of such matters?"
"Oh, I have done all the shopping for the family at our village store,"
said Phoebe. "And I have had a table at a fancy fair, and made better
sales than anybody. These things are not to be learnt; they depend
upon a knack that comes, I suppose," added she, smiling, "with one's
mother's blood. You shall see that I am as nice a little saleswoman as
I am a housewife!"
The old gentlewoman stole behind Phoebe, and peeped from the passageway
into the shop, to note how she would manage her undertaking. It was a
case of some intricacy. A very ancient woman, in a white short gown
and a green petticoat, with a string of gold beads about her neck, and
what looked like a nightcap on her head, had brought a quantity of yarn
to barter for the commodities of the shop. She was probably the very
last person in town who still kept the time-honored spinning-wheel in
constant revolution. It was worth while to hear the croaking and
hollow tones of the old lady, and the pleasant voice of Phoebe,
mingling in one twisted thread of talk; and still better to contrast
their figures,--so light and bloomy,--so decrepit and dusky,--with only
the counter betwixt them, in one sense, but more than threescore years,
in another. As for the bargain, it was wrinkled slyness and craft
pitted against native truth and sagacity.
"Was not that well done?" asked Phoebe, laughing, when the customer was
gone.
"Nicely done, indeed, child!" answered Hepzibah. "I could not have
gone through with it nearly so well. As you say, it must be a knack
that belongs to you on the mother's side."
It is a very genuine admiration, that with which persons too shy or too
awkward to take a due part in the bustling world regard the real actors
in life's stirring scenes; so genuine, in fact, that the former are
usually fain to make it palatable to their self-love, by assuming that
these active and forcible qualities are incompatible with others, which
they choose to deem higher and more important. Thus, Hepzibah was well
content to acknowledge Phoebe's vastly superior gifts as a
shop-keeper'--she listened, with compliant ear, to her suggestion of
various methods whereby the influx of trade might be increased, and
rendered profitable, without a hazardous outlay of capital. She
consented that the village maiden should manufacture yeast, both liquid
and in cakes; and should brew a certain kind of beer, nectareous to the
palate, and of rare stomachic virtues; and, moreover, should bake and
exhibit for sale some little spice-cakes, which whosoever tasted would
longingly desire to taste again. All such proofs of a ready mind and
skilful handiwork were highly acceptable to the aristocratic
hucksteress, so long as she could murmur to herself with a grim smile,
and a half-natural sigh, and a sentiment of mixed wonder, pity, and
growing affection:--
"What a nice little body she is! If she only could be a lady; too--but
that's impossible! Phoebe is no Pyncheon. She takes everything from
her mother!"
As to Phoebe's not being a lady, or whether she were a lady or no, it
was a point, perhaps, difficult to decide, but which could hardly have
come up for judgment at all in any fair and healthy mind. Out of New
England, it would be impossible to meet with a person combining so many
ladylike attributes with so many others that form no necessary (if
compatible) part of the character. She shocked no canon of taste; she
was admirably in keeping with herself, and never jarred against
surrounding circumstances. Her figure, to be sure,--so small as to be
almost childlike, and so elastic that motion seemed as easy or easier
to it than rest, would hardly have suited one's idea of a countess.
Neither did her face--with the brown ringlets on either side, and the
slightly piquant nose, and the wholesome bloom, and the clear shade of
tan, and the half dozen freckles, friendly remembrances of the April
sun and breeze--precisely give us a right to call her beautiful. But
there was both lustre and depth in her eyes. She was very pretty; as
graceful as a bird, and graceful much in the same way; as pleasant
about the house as a gleam of sunshine falling on the floor through a
shadow of twinkling leaves, or as a ray of firelight that dances on the
wall while evening is drawing nigh. Instead of discussing her claim
to rank among ladies, it would be preferable to regard Phoebe as the
example of feminine grace and availability combined, in a state of
society, if there were any such, where ladies did not exist. There it
should be woman's office to move in the midst of practical affairs, and
to gild them all, the very homeliest,--were it even the scouring of
pots and kettles,--with an atmosphere of loveliness and joy.
Such was the sphere of Phoebe. To find the born and educated lady, on
the other hand, we need look no farther than Hepzibah, our forlorn old
maid, in her rustling and rusty silks, with her deeply cherished and
ridiculous consciousness of long descent, her shadowy claims to
princely territory, and, in the way of accomplishment, her
recollections, it may be, of having formerly thrummed on a harpsichord,
and walked a minuet, and worked an antique tapestry-stitch on her
sampler. It was a fair parallel between new Plebeianism and old
Gentility.
It really seemed as if the battered visage of the House of the Seven
Gables, black and heavy-browed as it still certainly looked, must have
shown a kind of cheerfulness glimmering through its dusky windows as
Phoebe passed to and fro in the interior. Otherwise, it is impossible
to explain how the people of the neighborhood so soon became aware of
the girl's presence. There was a great run of custom, setting steadily
in, from about ten o' clock until towards noon,--relaxing, somewhat, at
dinner-time, but recommencing in the afternoon, and, finally, dying
away a half an hour or so before the long day's sunset. One of the
stanchest patrons was little Ned Higgins, the devourer of Jim Crow and
the elephant, who to-day signalized his omnivorous prowess by
swallowing two dromedaries and a locomotive. Phoebe laughed, as she
summed up her aggregate of sales upon the slate; while Hepzibah, first
drawing on a pair of silk gloves, reckoned over the sordid accumulation
of copper coin, not without silver intermixed, that had jingled into
the till.
"We must renew our stock, Cousin Hepzibah!" cried the little
saleswoman. "The gingerbread figures are all gone, and so are those
Dutch wooden milkmaids, and most of our other playthings. There has
been constant inquiry for cheap raisins, and a great cry for whistles,
and trumpets, and jew's-harps; and at least a dozen little boys have
asked for molasses-candy. And we must contrive to get a peck of russet
apples, late in the season as it is. But, dear cousin, what an
enormous heap of copper! Positively a copper mountain!"
"Well done! well done! well done!" quoth Uncle Venner, who had taken
occasion to shuffle in and out of the shop several times in the course
of the day. "Here's a girl that will never end her days at my farm!
Bless my eyes, what a brisk little soul!"
"Yes, Phoebe is a nice girl!" said Hepzibah, with a scowl of austere
approbation. "But, Uncle Venner, you have known the family a great
many years. Can you tell me whether there ever was a Pyncheon whom she
takes after?"
"I don't believe there ever was," answered the venerable man. "At any
rate, it never was my luck to see her like among them, nor, for that
matter, anywhere else. I've seen a great deal of the world, not only
in people's kitchens and back-yards but at the street-corners, and on
the wharves, and in other places where my business calls me; and I'm
free to say, Miss Hepzibah, that I never knew a human creature do her
work so much like one of God's angels as this child Phoebe does!"
Uncle Venner's eulogium, if it appear rather too high-strained for the
person and occasion, had, nevertheless, a sense in which it was both
subtile and true. There was a spiritual quality in Phoebe's activity.
The life of the long and busy day--spent in occupations that might so
easily have taken a squalid and ugly aspect--had been made pleasant,
and even lovely, by the spontaneous grace with which these homely
duties seemed to bloom out of her character; so that labor, while she
dealt with it, had the easy and flexible charm of play. Angels do not
toil, but let their good works grow out of them; and so did Phoebe.
The two relatives--the young maid and the old one--found time before
nightfall, in the intervals of trade, to make rapid advances towards
affection and confidence. A recluse, like Hepzibah, usually displays
remarkable frankness, and at least temporary affability, on being
absolutely cornered, and brought to the point of personal intercourse;
like the angel whom Jacob wrestled with, she is ready to bless you when
once overcome.
The old gentlewoman took a dreary and proud satisfaction in leading
Phoebe from room to room of the house, and recounting the traditions
with which, as we may say, the walls were lugubriously frescoed. She
showed the indentations made by the lieutenant-governor's sword-hilt in
the door-panels of the apartment where old Colonel Pyncheon, a dead
host, had received his affrighted visitors with an awful frown. The
dusky terror of that frown, Hepzibah observed, was thought to be
lingering ever since in the passageway. She bade Phoebe step into one
of the tall chairs, and inspect the ancient map of the Pyncheon
territory at the eastward. In a tract of land on which she laid her
finger, there existed a silver mine, the locality of which was
precisely pointed out in some memoranda of Colonel Pyncheon himself,
but only to be made known when the family claim should be recognized by
government. Thus it was for the interest of all New England that the
Pyncheons should have justice done them. She told, too, how that there
was undoubtedly an immense treasure of English guineas hidden somewhere
about the house, or in the cellar, or possibly in the garden.
"If you should happen to find it, Phoebe," said Hepzibah, glancing
aside at her with a grim yet kindly smile, "we will tie up the
shop-bell for good and all!"
"Yes, dear cousin," answered Phoebe; "but, in the mean time, I hear
somebody ringing it!"
When the customer was gone, Hepzibah talked rather vaguely, and at
great length, about a certain Alice Pyncheon, who had been exceedingly
beautiful and accomplished in her lifetime, a hundred years ago. The
fragrance of her rich and delightful character still lingered about the
place where she had lived, as a dried rose-bud scents the drawer where
it has withered and perished. This lovely Alice had met with some
great and mysterious calamity, and had grown thin and white, and
gradually faded out of the world. But, even now, she was supposed to
haunt the House of the Seven Gables, and, a great many times,--especially
when one of the Pyncheons was to die,--she had been heard playing sadly
and beautifully on the harpsichord. One of these tunes, just as it had
sounded from her spiritual touch, had been written down by an amateur of
music; it was so exquisitely mournful that nobody, to this day, could
bear to hear it played, unless when a great sorrow had made them know
the still profounder sweetness of it.
"Was it the same harpsichord that you showed me?" inquired Phoebe.
"The very same," said Hepzibah. "It was Alice Pyncheon's harpsichord.
When I was learning music, my father would never let me open it. So,
as I could only play on my teacher's instrument, I have forgotten all
my music long ago."
Leaving these antique themes, the old lady began to talk about the
daguerreotypist, whom, as he seemed to be a well-meaning and orderly
young man, and in narrow circumstances, she had permitted to take up
his residence in one of the seven gables. But, on seeing more of Mr.
Holgrave, she hardly knew what to make of him. He had the strangest
companions imaginable; men with long beards, and dressed in linen
blouses, and other such new-fangled and ill-fitting garments;
reformers, temperance lecturers, and all manner of cross-looking
philanthropists; community-men, and come-outers, as Hepzibah believed,
who acknowledged no law, and ate no solid food, but lived on the scent
of other people's cookery, and turned up their noses at the fare. As
for the daguerreotypist, she had read a paragraph in a penny paper, the
other day, accusing him of making a speech full of wild and
disorganizing matter, at a meeting of his banditti-like associates.
For her own part, she had reason to believe that he practised animal
magnetism, and, if such things were in fashion nowadays, should be apt
to suspect him of studying the Black Art up there in his lonesome
chamber.
"But, dear cousin," said Phoebe, "if the young man is so dangerous, why
do you let him stay? If he does nothing worse, he may set the house on
fire!"
"Why, sometimes," answered Hepzibah, "I have seriously made it a
question, whether I ought not to send him away. But, with all his
oddities, he is a quiet kind of a person, and has such a way of taking
hold of one's mind, that, without exactly liking him (for I don't know
enough of the young man), I should be sorry to lose sight of him
entirely. A woman clings to slight acquaintances when she lives so
much alone as I do."
"But if Mr. Holgrave is a lawless person!" remonstrated Phoebe, a part
of whose essence it was to keep within the limits of law.
"Oh!" said Hepzibah carelessly,--for, formal as she was, still, in her
life's experience, she had gnashed her teeth against human law,--"I
suppose he has a law of his own!"
| Phoebe Pyncheon, despite her family legacy, demonstrates none of the aristocratic traits of the Pyncheon clan. She is a natural domestic who brightens the House of the Seven Gables immediately upon her arrival and contains a boundless optimism that draws out even the meek and reserved Hepzibah. Hawthorne presents her as a an ideal, the example of "feminine grace and availability" outside of class distinctions and directly contrasts her with Hepzibah. While Phoebe represents the new Plebeianism, Hepzibah is the exemplar of the old Gentility. She is thus more suited to the life of capitalist commerce that Hepzibah undertakes, and quickly becomes an adept shopkeeper. She represents a purified form of Puritanism, the stern old stuff of an industrious worker "with a gold thread in the web," as contrasted with the iron-fisted arrogance of Puritan Colonel and his descendants. Phoebe demonstrates her determination when she insists that she can help Hepzibah. She is not rude toward Hepzibah, but when she insists that she can help the old woman, she does not shrink from pleading her case. Although the two characters have a great affection for each other and Phoebe is nothing less than polite to Hepzibah, Phoebe remains resolute. Also, while Hepzibah clings to societal structure, Phoebe has a great affinity with nature. Tending to the garden, she immediately brings life back to the House of the Seven Gables, and Hawthorne makes an extensive comparison between Phoebe and a songbird. She is a novelty among the Pyncheon family. Unlike the numerous Pyncheon descendants who follow established patterns set by their progenitors, Phoebe is a Pyncheon original. Uncle Venner can think of no family member who she resembles. Even Alice Pyncheon is an inadequate comparison. Although Hawthorne describes both Phoebe and Alice as beautiful and accomplished, Alice belongs to the aristocratic tradition that Phoebe eschews and assumes the role of a victim that does not fit the independent Phoebe. The other character who represents democratic values, Mr. Holgrave, recedes upon the entrance of Phoebe. No longer the exemplar of societal innovation, Mr. Holgrave becomes more sinister during this chapter. Phoebe suspects him of practicing some Black Art, a characteristic that aligns him with the mysterious Maule family so connected with the Pyncheon past, and considers him a lawless person | analysis |
AFTER an early tea, the little country-girl strayed into the garden.
The enclosure had formerly been very extensive, but was now contracted
within small compass, and hemmed about, partly by high wooden fences,
and partly by the outbuildings of houses that stood on another street.
In its centre was a grass-plat, surrounding a ruinous little structure,
which showed just enough of its original design to indicate that it had
once been a summer-house. A hop-vine, springing from last year's root,
was beginning to clamber over it, but would be long in covering the
roof with its green mantle. Three of the seven gables either fronted
or looked sideways, with a dark solemnity of aspect, down into the
garden.
The black, rich soil had fed itself with the decay of a long period of
time; such as fallen leaves, the petals of flowers, and the stalks and
seed--vessels of vagrant and lawless plants, more useful after their
death than ever while flaunting in the sun. The evil of these departed
years would naturally have sprung up again, in such rank weeds
(symbolic of the transmitted vices of society) as are always prone to
root themselves about human dwellings. Phoebe saw, however, that their
growth must have been checked by a degree of careful labor, bestowed
daily and systematically on the garden. The white double rosebush had
evidently been propped up anew against the house since the commencement
of the season; and a pear-tree and three damson-trees, which, except a
row of currant-bushes, constituted the only varieties of fruit, bore
marks of the recent amputation of several superfluous or defective
limbs. There were also a few species of antique and hereditary
flowers, in no very flourishing condition, but scrupulously weeded; as
if some person, either out of love or curiosity, had been anxious to
bring them to such perfection as they were capable of attaining. The
remainder of the garden presented a well-selected assortment of
esculent vegetables, in a praiseworthy state of advancement. Summer
squashes almost in their golden blossom; cucumbers, now evincing a
tendency to spread away from the main stock, and ramble far and wide;
two or three rows of string-beans and as many more that were about to
festoon themselves on poles; tomatoes, occupying a site so sheltered
and sunny that the plants were already gigantic, and promised an early
and abundant harvest.
Phoebe wondered whose care and toil it could have been that had planted
these vegetables, and kept the soil so clean and orderly. Not surely
her cousin Hepzibah's, who had no taste nor spirits for the lady-like
employment of cultivating flowers, and--with her recluse habits, and
tendency to shelter herself within the dismal shadow of the
house--would hardly have come forth under the speck of open sky to weed
and hoe among the fraternity of beans and squashes.
It being her first day of complete estrangement from rural objects,
Phoebe found an unexpected charm in this little nook of grass, and
foliage, and aristocratic flowers, and plebeian vegetables. The eye of
Heaven seemed to look down into it pleasantly, and with a peculiar
smile, as if glad to perceive that nature, elsewhere overwhelmed, and
driven out of the dusty town, had here been able to retain a
breathing-place. The spot acquired a somewhat wilder grace, and yet a
very gentle one, from the fact that a pair of robins had built their
nest in the pear-tree, and were making themselves exceedingly busy and
happy in the dark intricacy of its boughs. Bees, too,--strange to
say,--had thought it worth their while to come hither, possibly from
the range of hives beside some farm-house miles away. How many aerial
voyages might they have made, in quest of honey, or honey-laden,
betwixt dawn and sunset! Yet, late as it now was, there still arose a
pleasant hum out of one or two of the squash-blossoms, in the depths of
which these bees were plying their golden labor. There was one other
object in the garden which Nature might fairly claim as her inalienable
property, in spite of whatever man could do to render it his own. This
was a fountain, set round with a rim of old mossy stones, and paved, in
its bed, with what appeared to be a sort of mosaic-work of variously
colored pebbles. The play and slight agitation of the water, in its
upward gush, wrought magically with these variegated pebbles, and made
a continually shifting apparition of quaint figures, vanishing too
suddenly to be definable. Thence, swelling over the rim of moss-grown
stones, the water stole away under the fence, through what we regret to
call a gutter, rather than a channel. Nor must we forget to mention a
hen-coop of very reverend antiquity that stood in the farther corner of
the garden, not a great way from the fountain. It now contained only
Chanticleer, his two wives, and a solitary chicken. All of them were
pure specimens of a breed which had been transmitted down as an
heirloom in the Pyncheon family, and were said, while in their prime,
to have attained almost the size of turkeys, and, on the score of
delicate flesh, to be fit for a prince's table. In proof of the
authenticity of this legendary renown, Hepzibah could have exhibited
the shell of a great egg, which an ostrich need hardly have been
ashamed of. Be that as it might, the hens were now scarcely larger
than pigeons, and had a queer, rusty, withered aspect, and a gouty kind
of movement, and a sleepy and melancholy tone throughout all the
variations of their clucking and cackling. It was evident that the
race had degenerated, like many a noble race besides, in consequence of
too strict a watchfulness to keep it pure. These feathered people had
existed too long in their distinct variety; a fact of which the present
representatives, judging by their lugubrious deportment, seemed to be
aware. They kept themselves alive, unquestionably, and laid now and
then an egg, and hatched a chicken; not for any pleasure of their own,
but that the world might not absolutely lose what had once been so
admirable a breed of fowls. The distinguishing mark of the hens was a
crest of lamentably scanty growth, in these latter days, but so oddly
and wickedly analogous to Hepzibah's turban, that Phoebe--to the
poignant distress of her conscience, but inevitably--was led to fancy a
general resemblance betwixt these forlorn bipeds and her respectable
relative.
The girl ran into the house to get some crumbs of bread, cold potatoes,
and other such scraps as were suitable to the accommodating appetite of
fowls. Returning, she gave a peculiar call, which they seemed to
recognize. The chicken crept through the pales of the coop and ran,
with some show of liveliness, to her feet; while Chanticleer and the
ladies of his household regarded her with queer, sidelong glances, and
then croaked one to another, as if communicating their sage opinions of
her character. So wise, as well as antique, was their aspect, as to
give color to the idea, not merely that they were the descendants of a
time-honored race, but that they had existed, in their individual
capacity, ever since the House of the Seven Gables was founded, and
were somehow mixed up with its destiny. They were a species of
tutelary sprite, or Banshee; although winged and feathered differently
from most other guardian angels.
"Here, you odd little chicken!" said Phoebe; "here are some nice crumbs
for you!"
The chicken, hereupon, though almost as venerable in appearance as its
mother--possessing, indeed, the whole antiquity of its progenitors in
miniature,--mustered vivacity enough to flutter upward and alight on
Phoebe's shoulder.
"That little fowl pays you a high compliment!" said a voice behind
Phoebe.
Turning quickly, she was surprised at sight of a young man, who had
found access into the garden by a door opening out of another gable
than that whence she had emerged. He held a hoe in his hand, and,
while Phoebe was gone in quest of the crumbs, had begun to busy himself
with drawing up fresh earth about the roots of the tomatoes.
"The chicken really treats you like an old acquaintance," continued he
in a quiet way, while a smile made his face pleasanter than Phoebe at
first fancied it. "Those venerable personages in the coop, too, seem
very affably disposed. You are lucky to be in their good graces so
soon! They have known me much longer, but never honor me with any
familiarity, though hardly a day passes without my bringing them food.
Miss Hepzibah, I suppose, will interweave the fact with her other
traditions, and set it down that the fowls know you to be a Pyncheon!"
"The secret is," said Phoebe, smiling, "that I have learned how to talk
with hens and chickens."
"Ah, but these hens," answered the young man,--"these hens of
aristocratic lineage would scorn to understand the vulgar language of a
barn-yard fowl. I prefer to think--and so would Miss Hepzibah--that
they recognize the family tone. For you are a Pyncheon?"
"My name is Phoebe Pyncheon," said the girl, with a manner of some
reserve; for she was aware that her new acquaintance could be no other
than the daguerreotypist, of whose lawless propensities the old maid
had given her a disagreeable idea. "I did not know that my cousin
Hepzibah's garden was under another person's care."
"Yes," said Holgrave, "I dig, and hoe, and weed, in this black old
earth, for the sake of refreshing myself with what little nature and
simplicity may be left in it, after men have so long sown and reaped
here. I turn up the earth by way of pastime. My sober occupation, so
far as I have any, is with a lighter material. In short, I make
pictures out of sunshine; and, not to be too much dazzled with my own
trade, I have prevailed with Miss Hepzibah to let me lodge in one of
these dusky gables. It is like a bandage over one's eyes, to come into
it. But would you like to see a specimen of my productions?"
"A daguerreotype likeness, do you mean?" asked Phoebe with less
reserve; for, in spite of prejudice, her own youthfulness sprang
forward to meet his. "I don't much like pictures of that sort,--they
are so hard and stern; besides dodging away from the eye, and trying to
escape altogether. They are conscious of looking very unamiable, I
suppose, and therefore hate to be seen."
"If you would permit me," said the artist, looking at Phoebe, "I should
like to try whether the daguerreotype can bring out disagreeable traits
on a perfectly amiable face. But there certainly is truth in what you
have said. Most of my likenesses do look unamiable; but the very
sufficient reason, I fancy, is, because the originals are so. There is
a wonderful insight in Heaven's broad and simple sunshine. While we
give it credit only for depicting the merest surface, it actually
brings out the secret character with a truth that no painter would ever
venture upon, even could he detect it. There is, at least, no flattery
in my humble line of art. Now, here is a likeness which I have taken
over and over again, and still with no better result. Yet the original
wears, to common eyes, a very different expression. It would gratify
me to have your judgment on this character."
He exhibited a daguerreotype miniature in a morocco case. Phoebe
merely glanced at it, and gave it back.
"I know the face," she replied; "for its stern eye has been following
me about all day. It is my Puritan ancestor, who hangs yonder in the
parlor. To be sure, you have found some way of copying the portrait
without its black velvet cap and gray beard, and have given him a
modern coat and satin cravat, instead of his cloak and band. I don't
think him improved by your alterations."
"You would have seen other differences had you looked a little longer,"
said Holgrave, laughing, yet apparently much struck. "I can assure you
that this is a modern face, and one which you will very probably meet.
Now, the remarkable point is, that the original wears, to the world's
eye,--and, for aught I know, to his most intimate friends,--an
exceedingly pleasant countenance, indicative of benevolence, openness
of heart, sunny good-humor, and other praiseworthy qualities of that
cast. The sun, as you see, tells quite another story, and will not be
coaxed out of it, after half a dozen patient attempts on my part. Here
we have the man, sly, subtle, hard, imperious, and, withal, cold as
ice. Look at that eye! Would you like to be at its mercy? At that
mouth! Could it ever smile? And yet, if you could only see the benign
smile of the original! It is so much the more unfortunate, as he is a
public character of some eminence, and the likeness was intended to be
engraved."
"Well, I don't wish to see it any more," observed Phoebe, turning away
her eyes. "It is certainly very like the old portrait. But my cousin
Hepzibah has another picture,--a miniature. If the original is still
in the world, I think he might defy the sun to make him look stern and
hard."
"You have seen that picture, then!" exclaimed the artist, with an
expression of much interest. "I never did, but have a great curiosity
to do so. And you judge favorably of the face?"
"There never was a sweeter one," said Phoebe. "It is almost too soft
and gentle for a man's."
"Is there nothing wild in the eye?" continued Holgrave, so earnestly
that it embarrassed Phoebe, as did also the quiet freedom with which he
presumed on their so recent acquaintance. "Is there nothing dark or
sinister anywhere? Could you not conceive the original to have been
guilty of a great crime?"
"It is nonsense," said Phoebe a little impatiently, "for us to talk
about a picture which you have never seen. You mistake it for some
other. A crime, indeed! Since you are a friend of my cousin
Hepzibah's, you should ask her to show you the picture."
"It will suit my purpose still better to see the original," replied the
daguerreotypist coolly. "As to his character, we need not discuss its
points; they have already been settled by a competent tribunal, or one
which called itself competent. But, stay! Do not go yet, if you
please! I have a proposition to make you."
Phoebe was on the point of retreating, but turned back, with some
hesitation; for she did not exactly comprehend his manner, although, on
better observation, its feature seemed rather to be lack of ceremony
than any approach to offensive rudeness. There was an odd kind of
authority, too, in what he now proceeded to say, rather as if the
garden were his own than a place to which he was admitted merely by
Hepzibah's courtesy.
"If agreeable to you," he observed, "it would give me pleasure to turn
over these flowers, and those ancient and respectable fowls, to your
care. Coming fresh from country air and occupations, you will soon
feel the need of some such out-of-door employment. My own sphere does
not so much lie among flowers. You can trim and tend them, therefore,
as you please; and I will ask only the least trifle of a blossom, now
and then, in exchange for all the good, honest kitchen vegetables with
which I propose to enrich Miss Hepzibah's table. So we will be
fellow-laborers, somewhat on the community system."
Silently, and rather surprised at her own compliance, Phoebe
accordingly betook herself to weeding a flower-bed, but busied herself
still more with cogitations respecting this young man, with whom she so
unexpectedly found herself on terms approaching to familiarity. She
did not altogether like him. His character perplexed the little
country-girl, as it might a more practised observer; for, while the
tone of his conversation had generally been playful, the impression
left on her mind was that of gravity, and, except as his youth modified
it, almost sternness. She rebelled, as it were, against a certain
magnetic element in the artist's nature, which he exercised towards
her, possibly without being conscious of it.
After a little while, the twilight, deepened by the shadows of the
fruit-trees and the surrounding buildings, threw an obscurity over the
garden.
"There," said Holgrave, "it is time to give over work! That last stroke
of the hoe has cut off a beanstalk. Good-night, Miss Phoebe Pyncheon!
Any bright day, if you will put one of those rosebuds in your hair, and
come to my rooms in Central Street, I will seize the purest ray of
sunshine, and make a picture of the flower and its wearer." He retired
towards his own solitary gable, but turned his head, on reaching the
door, and called to Phoebe, with a tone which certainly had laughter in
it, yet which seemed to be more than half in earnest.
"Be careful not to drink at Maule's well!" said he. "Neither drink nor
bathe your face in it!"
"Maule's well!" answered Phoebe. "Is that it with the rim of mossy
stones? I have no thought of drinking there,--but why not?"
"Oh," rejoined the daguerreotypist, "because, like an old lady's cup of
tea, it is water bewitched!"
He vanished; and Phoebe, lingering a moment, saw a glimmering light,
and then the steady beam of a lamp, in a chamber of the gable. On
returning into Hepzibah's apartment of the house, she found the
low-studded parlor so dim and dusky that her eyes could not penetrate
the interior. She was indistinctly aware, however, that the gaunt
figure of the old gentlewoman was sitting in one of the straight-backed
chairs, a little withdrawn from the window, the faint gleam of which
showed the blanched paleness of her cheek, turned sideways towards a
corner.
"Shall I light a lamp, Cousin Hepzibah?" she asked.
"Do, if you please, my dear child," answered Hepzibah. "But put it on
the table in the corner of the passage. My eyes are weak; and I can
seldom bear the lamplight on them."
What an instrument is the human voice! How wonderfully responsive to
every emotion of the human soul! In Hepzibah's tone, at that moment,
there was a certain rich depth and moisture, as if the words,
commonplace as they were, had been steeped in the warmth of her heart.
Again, while lighting the lamp in the kitchen, Phoebe fancied that her
cousin spoke to her.
"In a moment, cousin!" answered the girl. "These matches just glimmer,
and go out."
But, instead of a response from Hepzibah, she seemed to hear the murmur
of an unknown voice. It was strangely indistinct, however, and less
like articulate words than an unshaped sound, such as would be the
utterance of feeling and sympathy, rather than of the intellect. So
vague was it, that its impression or echo in Phoebe's mind was that of
unreality. She concluded that she must have mistaken some other sound
for that of the human voice; or else that it was altogether in her
fancy.
She set the lighted lamp in the passage, and again entered the parlor.
Hepzibah's form, though its sable outline mingled with the dusk, was
now less imperfectly visible. In the remoter parts of the room,
however, its walls being so ill adapted to reflect light, there was
nearly the same obscurity as before.
"Cousin," said Phoebe, "did you speak to me just now?"
"No, child!" replied Hepzibah.
Fewer words than before, but with the same mysterious music in them!
Mellow, melancholy, yet not mournful, the tone seemed to gush up out of
the deep well of Hepzibah's heart, all steeped in its profoundest
emotion. There was a tremor in it, too, that--as all strong feeling is
electric--partly communicated itself to Phoebe. The girl sat silently
for a moment. But soon, her senses being very acute, she became
conscious of an irregular respiration in an obscure corner of the room.
Her physical organization, moreover, being at once delicate and
healthy, gave her a perception, operating with almost the effect of a
spiritual medium, that somebody was near at hand.
"My dear cousin," asked she, overcoming an indefinable reluctance, "is
there not some one in the room with us?"
"Phoebe, my dear little girl," said Hepzibah, after a moment's pause,
"you were up betimes, and have been busy all day. Pray go to bed; for
I am sure you must need rest. I will sit in the parlor awhile, and
collect my thoughts. It has been my custom for more years, child, than
you have lived!" While thus dismissing her, the maiden lady stept
forward, kissed Phoebe, and pressed her to her heart, which beat
against the girl's bosom with a strong, high, and tumultuous swell.
How came there to be so much love in this desolate old heart, that it
could afford to well over thus abundantly?
"Goodnight, cousin," said Phoebe, strangely affected by Hepzibah's
manner. "If you begin to love me, I am glad!"
She retired to her chamber, but did not soon fall asleep, nor then very
profoundly. At some uncertain period in the depths of night, and, as
it were, through the thin veil of a dream, she was conscious of a
footstep mounting the stairs heavily, but not with force and decision.
The voice of Hepzibah, with a hush through it, was going up along with
the footsteps; and, again, responsive to her cousin's voice, Phoebe
heard that strange, vague murmur, which might be likened to an
indistinct shadow of human utterance.
| Maule's Well: After an early tea, Phoebe goes into the garden, which had fallen into decay. There are vegetables which make Phoebe wonder who had planted them, for it was surely not Hepzibah. She looks at the hen-coop, where the only hens remaining are no larger than pigeons and move oddly. Their race had degenerated. Holgrave enters the garden as Phoebe is feeding the hens. He tells Phoebe that he makes pictures out of sunshine, and says that daguerreotypes bring out the secret character of a person that no painting could ever detect. There is no flattery in his art. He shows her a daguerreotype that she thinks is Colonel Pyncheon in modern dress. Phoebe mentions the miniature that Hepzibah showed her, and Holgrave asks Phoebe whether the person in that picture looks capable of committing a great crime. That night, Phoebe finds Hepzibah awake in the parlor. Phoebe hears Hepzibah murmur, a sound that is so vague that it seems to come from pure emotion. Hepzibah asks Phoebe to go to sleep, while she will stay awake to collect her thoughts. | summary |
AFTER an early tea, the little country-girl strayed into the garden.
The enclosure had formerly been very extensive, but was now contracted
within small compass, and hemmed about, partly by high wooden fences,
and partly by the outbuildings of houses that stood on another street.
In its centre was a grass-plat, surrounding a ruinous little structure,
which showed just enough of its original design to indicate that it had
once been a summer-house. A hop-vine, springing from last year's root,
was beginning to clamber over it, but would be long in covering the
roof with its green mantle. Three of the seven gables either fronted
or looked sideways, with a dark solemnity of aspect, down into the
garden.
The black, rich soil had fed itself with the decay of a long period of
time; such as fallen leaves, the petals of flowers, and the stalks and
seed--vessels of vagrant and lawless plants, more useful after their
death than ever while flaunting in the sun. The evil of these departed
years would naturally have sprung up again, in such rank weeds
(symbolic of the transmitted vices of society) as are always prone to
root themselves about human dwellings. Phoebe saw, however, that their
growth must have been checked by a degree of careful labor, bestowed
daily and systematically on the garden. The white double rosebush had
evidently been propped up anew against the house since the commencement
of the season; and a pear-tree and three damson-trees, which, except a
row of currant-bushes, constituted the only varieties of fruit, bore
marks of the recent amputation of several superfluous or defective
limbs. There were also a few species of antique and hereditary
flowers, in no very flourishing condition, but scrupulously weeded; as
if some person, either out of love or curiosity, had been anxious to
bring them to such perfection as they were capable of attaining. The
remainder of the garden presented a well-selected assortment of
esculent vegetables, in a praiseworthy state of advancement. Summer
squashes almost in their golden blossom; cucumbers, now evincing a
tendency to spread away from the main stock, and ramble far and wide;
two or three rows of string-beans and as many more that were about to
festoon themselves on poles; tomatoes, occupying a site so sheltered
and sunny that the plants were already gigantic, and promised an early
and abundant harvest.
Phoebe wondered whose care and toil it could have been that had planted
these vegetables, and kept the soil so clean and orderly. Not surely
her cousin Hepzibah's, who had no taste nor spirits for the lady-like
employment of cultivating flowers, and--with her recluse habits, and
tendency to shelter herself within the dismal shadow of the
house--would hardly have come forth under the speck of open sky to weed
and hoe among the fraternity of beans and squashes.
It being her first day of complete estrangement from rural objects,
Phoebe found an unexpected charm in this little nook of grass, and
foliage, and aristocratic flowers, and plebeian vegetables. The eye of
Heaven seemed to look down into it pleasantly, and with a peculiar
smile, as if glad to perceive that nature, elsewhere overwhelmed, and
driven out of the dusty town, had here been able to retain a
breathing-place. The spot acquired a somewhat wilder grace, and yet a
very gentle one, from the fact that a pair of robins had built their
nest in the pear-tree, and were making themselves exceedingly busy and
happy in the dark intricacy of its boughs. Bees, too,--strange to
say,--had thought it worth their while to come hither, possibly from
the range of hives beside some farm-house miles away. How many aerial
voyages might they have made, in quest of honey, or honey-laden,
betwixt dawn and sunset! Yet, late as it now was, there still arose a
pleasant hum out of one or two of the squash-blossoms, in the depths of
which these bees were plying their golden labor. There was one other
object in the garden which Nature might fairly claim as her inalienable
property, in spite of whatever man could do to render it his own. This
was a fountain, set round with a rim of old mossy stones, and paved, in
its bed, with what appeared to be a sort of mosaic-work of variously
colored pebbles. The play and slight agitation of the water, in its
upward gush, wrought magically with these variegated pebbles, and made
a continually shifting apparition of quaint figures, vanishing too
suddenly to be definable. Thence, swelling over the rim of moss-grown
stones, the water stole away under the fence, through what we regret to
call a gutter, rather than a channel. Nor must we forget to mention a
hen-coop of very reverend antiquity that stood in the farther corner of
the garden, not a great way from the fountain. It now contained only
Chanticleer, his two wives, and a solitary chicken. All of them were
pure specimens of a breed which had been transmitted down as an
heirloom in the Pyncheon family, and were said, while in their prime,
to have attained almost the size of turkeys, and, on the score of
delicate flesh, to be fit for a prince's table. In proof of the
authenticity of this legendary renown, Hepzibah could have exhibited
the shell of a great egg, which an ostrich need hardly have been
ashamed of. Be that as it might, the hens were now scarcely larger
than pigeons, and had a queer, rusty, withered aspect, and a gouty kind
of movement, and a sleepy and melancholy tone throughout all the
variations of their clucking and cackling. It was evident that the
race had degenerated, like many a noble race besides, in consequence of
too strict a watchfulness to keep it pure. These feathered people had
existed too long in their distinct variety; a fact of which the present
representatives, judging by their lugubrious deportment, seemed to be
aware. They kept themselves alive, unquestionably, and laid now and
then an egg, and hatched a chicken; not for any pleasure of their own,
but that the world might not absolutely lose what had once been so
admirable a breed of fowls. The distinguishing mark of the hens was a
crest of lamentably scanty growth, in these latter days, but so oddly
and wickedly analogous to Hepzibah's turban, that Phoebe--to the
poignant distress of her conscience, but inevitably--was led to fancy a
general resemblance betwixt these forlorn bipeds and her respectable
relative.
The girl ran into the house to get some crumbs of bread, cold potatoes,
and other such scraps as were suitable to the accommodating appetite of
fowls. Returning, she gave a peculiar call, which they seemed to
recognize. The chicken crept through the pales of the coop and ran,
with some show of liveliness, to her feet; while Chanticleer and the
ladies of his household regarded her with queer, sidelong glances, and
then croaked one to another, as if communicating their sage opinions of
her character. So wise, as well as antique, was their aspect, as to
give color to the idea, not merely that they were the descendants of a
time-honored race, but that they had existed, in their individual
capacity, ever since the House of the Seven Gables was founded, and
were somehow mixed up with its destiny. They were a species of
tutelary sprite, or Banshee; although winged and feathered differently
from most other guardian angels.
"Here, you odd little chicken!" said Phoebe; "here are some nice crumbs
for you!"
The chicken, hereupon, though almost as venerable in appearance as its
mother--possessing, indeed, the whole antiquity of its progenitors in
miniature,--mustered vivacity enough to flutter upward and alight on
Phoebe's shoulder.
"That little fowl pays you a high compliment!" said a voice behind
Phoebe.
Turning quickly, she was surprised at sight of a young man, who had
found access into the garden by a door opening out of another gable
than that whence she had emerged. He held a hoe in his hand, and,
while Phoebe was gone in quest of the crumbs, had begun to busy himself
with drawing up fresh earth about the roots of the tomatoes.
"The chicken really treats you like an old acquaintance," continued he
in a quiet way, while a smile made his face pleasanter than Phoebe at
first fancied it. "Those venerable personages in the coop, too, seem
very affably disposed. You are lucky to be in their good graces so
soon! They have known me much longer, but never honor me with any
familiarity, though hardly a day passes without my bringing them food.
Miss Hepzibah, I suppose, will interweave the fact with her other
traditions, and set it down that the fowls know you to be a Pyncheon!"
"The secret is," said Phoebe, smiling, "that I have learned how to talk
with hens and chickens."
"Ah, but these hens," answered the young man,--"these hens of
aristocratic lineage would scorn to understand the vulgar language of a
barn-yard fowl. I prefer to think--and so would Miss Hepzibah--that
they recognize the family tone. For you are a Pyncheon?"
"My name is Phoebe Pyncheon," said the girl, with a manner of some
reserve; for she was aware that her new acquaintance could be no other
than the daguerreotypist, of whose lawless propensities the old maid
had given her a disagreeable idea. "I did not know that my cousin
Hepzibah's garden was under another person's care."
"Yes," said Holgrave, "I dig, and hoe, and weed, in this black old
earth, for the sake of refreshing myself with what little nature and
simplicity may be left in it, after men have so long sown and reaped
here. I turn up the earth by way of pastime. My sober occupation, so
far as I have any, is with a lighter material. In short, I make
pictures out of sunshine; and, not to be too much dazzled with my own
trade, I have prevailed with Miss Hepzibah to let me lodge in one of
these dusky gables. It is like a bandage over one's eyes, to come into
it. But would you like to see a specimen of my productions?"
"A daguerreotype likeness, do you mean?" asked Phoebe with less
reserve; for, in spite of prejudice, her own youthfulness sprang
forward to meet his. "I don't much like pictures of that sort,--they
are so hard and stern; besides dodging away from the eye, and trying to
escape altogether. They are conscious of looking very unamiable, I
suppose, and therefore hate to be seen."
"If you would permit me," said the artist, looking at Phoebe, "I should
like to try whether the daguerreotype can bring out disagreeable traits
on a perfectly amiable face. But there certainly is truth in what you
have said. Most of my likenesses do look unamiable; but the very
sufficient reason, I fancy, is, because the originals are so. There is
a wonderful insight in Heaven's broad and simple sunshine. While we
give it credit only for depicting the merest surface, it actually
brings out the secret character with a truth that no painter would ever
venture upon, even could he detect it. There is, at least, no flattery
in my humble line of art. Now, here is a likeness which I have taken
over and over again, and still with no better result. Yet the original
wears, to common eyes, a very different expression. It would gratify
me to have your judgment on this character."
He exhibited a daguerreotype miniature in a morocco case. Phoebe
merely glanced at it, and gave it back.
"I know the face," she replied; "for its stern eye has been following
me about all day. It is my Puritan ancestor, who hangs yonder in the
parlor. To be sure, you have found some way of copying the portrait
without its black velvet cap and gray beard, and have given him a
modern coat and satin cravat, instead of his cloak and band. I don't
think him improved by your alterations."
"You would have seen other differences had you looked a little longer,"
said Holgrave, laughing, yet apparently much struck. "I can assure you
that this is a modern face, and one which you will very probably meet.
Now, the remarkable point is, that the original wears, to the world's
eye,--and, for aught I know, to his most intimate friends,--an
exceedingly pleasant countenance, indicative of benevolence, openness
of heart, sunny good-humor, and other praiseworthy qualities of that
cast. The sun, as you see, tells quite another story, and will not be
coaxed out of it, after half a dozen patient attempts on my part. Here
we have the man, sly, subtle, hard, imperious, and, withal, cold as
ice. Look at that eye! Would you like to be at its mercy? At that
mouth! Could it ever smile? And yet, if you could only see the benign
smile of the original! It is so much the more unfortunate, as he is a
public character of some eminence, and the likeness was intended to be
engraved."
"Well, I don't wish to see it any more," observed Phoebe, turning away
her eyes. "It is certainly very like the old portrait. But my cousin
Hepzibah has another picture,--a miniature. If the original is still
in the world, I think he might defy the sun to make him look stern and
hard."
"You have seen that picture, then!" exclaimed the artist, with an
expression of much interest. "I never did, but have a great curiosity
to do so. And you judge favorably of the face?"
"There never was a sweeter one," said Phoebe. "It is almost too soft
and gentle for a man's."
"Is there nothing wild in the eye?" continued Holgrave, so earnestly
that it embarrassed Phoebe, as did also the quiet freedom with which he
presumed on their so recent acquaintance. "Is there nothing dark or
sinister anywhere? Could you not conceive the original to have been
guilty of a great crime?"
"It is nonsense," said Phoebe a little impatiently, "for us to talk
about a picture which you have never seen. You mistake it for some
other. A crime, indeed! Since you are a friend of my cousin
Hepzibah's, you should ask her to show you the picture."
"It will suit my purpose still better to see the original," replied the
daguerreotypist coolly. "As to his character, we need not discuss its
points; they have already been settled by a competent tribunal, or one
which called itself competent. But, stay! Do not go yet, if you
please! I have a proposition to make you."
Phoebe was on the point of retreating, but turned back, with some
hesitation; for she did not exactly comprehend his manner, although, on
better observation, its feature seemed rather to be lack of ceremony
than any approach to offensive rudeness. There was an odd kind of
authority, too, in what he now proceeded to say, rather as if the
garden were his own than a place to which he was admitted merely by
Hepzibah's courtesy.
"If agreeable to you," he observed, "it would give me pleasure to turn
over these flowers, and those ancient and respectable fowls, to your
care. Coming fresh from country air and occupations, you will soon
feel the need of some such out-of-door employment. My own sphere does
not so much lie among flowers. You can trim and tend them, therefore,
as you please; and I will ask only the least trifle of a blossom, now
and then, in exchange for all the good, honest kitchen vegetables with
which I propose to enrich Miss Hepzibah's table. So we will be
fellow-laborers, somewhat on the community system."
Silently, and rather surprised at her own compliance, Phoebe
accordingly betook herself to weeding a flower-bed, but busied herself
still more with cogitations respecting this young man, with whom she so
unexpectedly found herself on terms approaching to familiarity. She
did not altogether like him. His character perplexed the little
country-girl, as it might a more practised observer; for, while the
tone of his conversation had generally been playful, the impression
left on her mind was that of gravity, and, except as his youth modified
it, almost sternness. She rebelled, as it were, against a certain
magnetic element in the artist's nature, which he exercised towards
her, possibly without being conscious of it.
After a little while, the twilight, deepened by the shadows of the
fruit-trees and the surrounding buildings, threw an obscurity over the
garden.
"There," said Holgrave, "it is time to give over work! That last stroke
of the hoe has cut off a beanstalk. Good-night, Miss Phoebe Pyncheon!
Any bright day, if you will put one of those rosebuds in your hair, and
come to my rooms in Central Street, I will seize the purest ray of
sunshine, and make a picture of the flower and its wearer." He retired
towards his own solitary gable, but turned his head, on reaching the
door, and called to Phoebe, with a tone which certainly had laughter in
it, yet which seemed to be more than half in earnest.
"Be careful not to drink at Maule's well!" said he. "Neither drink nor
bathe your face in it!"
"Maule's well!" answered Phoebe. "Is that it with the rim of mossy
stones? I have no thought of drinking there,--but why not?"
"Oh," rejoined the daguerreotypist, "because, like an old lady's cup of
tea, it is water bewitched!"
He vanished; and Phoebe, lingering a moment, saw a glimmering light,
and then the steady beam of a lamp, in a chamber of the gable. On
returning into Hepzibah's apartment of the house, she found the
low-studded parlor so dim and dusky that her eyes could not penetrate
the interior. She was indistinctly aware, however, that the gaunt
figure of the old gentlewoman was sitting in one of the straight-backed
chairs, a little withdrawn from the window, the faint gleam of which
showed the blanched paleness of her cheek, turned sideways towards a
corner.
"Shall I light a lamp, Cousin Hepzibah?" she asked.
"Do, if you please, my dear child," answered Hepzibah. "But put it on
the table in the corner of the passage. My eyes are weak; and I can
seldom bear the lamplight on them."
What an instrument is the human voice! How wonderfully responsive to
every emotion of the human soul! In Hepzibah's tone, at that moment,
there was a certain rich depth and moisture, as if the words,
commonplace as they were, had been steeped in the warmth of her heart.
Again, while lighting the lamp in the kitchen, Phoebe fancied that her
cousin spoke to her.
"In a moment, cousin!" answered the girl. "These matches just glimmer,
and go out."
But, instead of a response from Hepzibah, she seemed to hear the murmur
of an unknown voice. It was strangely indistinct, however, and less
like articulate words than an unshaped sound, such as would be the
utterance of feeling and sympathy, rather than of the intellect. So
vague was it, that its impression or echo in Phoebe's mind was that of
unreality. She concluded that she must have mistaken some other sound
for that of the human voice; or else that it was altogether in her
fancy.
She set the lighted lamp in the passage, and again entered the parlor.
Hepzibah's form, though its sable outline mingled with the dusk, was
now less imperfectly visible. In the remoter parts of the room,
however, its walls being so ill adapted to reflect light, there was
nearly the same obscurity as before.
"Cousin," said Phoebe, "did you speak to me just now?"
"No, child!" replied Hepzibah.
Fewer words than before, but with the same mysterious music in them!
Mellow, melancholy, yet not mournful, the tone seemed to gush up out of
the deep well of Hepzibah's heart, all steeped in its profoundest
emotion. There was a tremor in it, too, that--as all strong feeling is
electric--partly communicated itself to Phoebe. The girl sat silently
for a moment. But soon, her senses being very acute, she became
conscious of an irregular respiration in an obscure corner of the room.
Her physical organization, moreover, being at once delicate and
healthy, gave her a perception, operating with almost the effect of a
spiritual medium, that somebody was near at hand.
"My dear cousin," asked she, overcoming an indefinable reluctance, "is
there not some one in the room with us?"
"Phoebe, my dear little girl," said Hepzibah, after a moment's pause,
"you were up betimes, and have been busy all day. Pray go to bed; for
I am sure you must need rest. I will sit in the parlor awhile, and
collect my thoughts. It has been my custom for more years, child, than
you have lived!" While thus dismissing her, the maiden lady stept
forward, kissed Phoebe, and pressed her to her heart, which beat
against the girl's bosom with a strong, high, and tumultuous swell.
How came there to be so much love in this desolate old heart, that it
could afford to well over thus abundantly?
"Goodnight, cousin," said Phoebe, strangely affected by Hepzibah's
manner. "If you begin to love me, I am glad!"
She retired to her chamber, but did not soon fall asleep, nor then very
profoundly. At some uncertain period in the depths of night, and, as
it were, through the thin veil of a dream, she was conscious of a
footstep mounting the stairs heavily, but not with force and decision.
The voice of Hepzibah, with a hush through it, was going up along with
the footsteps; and, again, responsive to her cousin's voice, Phoebe
heard that strange, vague murmur, which might be likened to an
indistinct shadow of human utterance.
| The garden in the House of the Seven Gables serves as an extended metaphor for the Pyncheon family. The rich soil of the garden has fallen into decay, while the antique and hereditary flowers that remain are in no flourishing condition. The flowers are now secondary to the vegetables that may be sold, an imposed system of capitalist necessity. The hens that remain are sickly and odd; when Hawthorne writes that their "race had degenerated, like many a noble race besides," he obviously associates the hens with their owners. Furthermore, these hens contain "the whole antiquity of its progenitors in miniature," just as contemporary Pyncheons replicate the qualities of Colonel Pyncheon. In his conversation with Phoebe, Holgrave explicitly brings out the author's themes concerning representation. He believes that his daguerreotypes bring out the hidden characteristics of their subjects. Significantly, Phoebe mistakes the daguerreotype of Judge Pyncheon for a picture of the Colonel. The two share an identical physical structure and temperament, foreshadowing events in the novel in which the Judge may attempt to grasp the Pyncheon legacy for which the Colonel had striven. This is complimented by the daguerreotype of Clifford Pyncheon; although Phoebe can find nothing dark and sinister in Hepzibah's miniature of Clifford, Holgrave reminds her that he is a murderer. In accordance with the idea that these portraits reveal hidden qualities in their subjects, the lack of a threatening subtext in Clifford's portrait should call into question whether the convicted murderer is actually a violent criminal, or even a murderer at all. Hepzibah's sigh demonstrates the great psychological anguish that exists along with a great abundance for love within the character. Hawthorne indicates that the two characteristics coincide with one another. The depression that Hepzibah feels exists largely because of her capacity to care for others. Indications that her beloved Clifford will return to the House of the Seven Gables seem to place the burden that Hepzibah feels on Clifford | analysis |
WHEN Phoebe awoke,--which she did with the early twittering of the
conjugal couple of robins in the pear-tree,--she heard movements below
stairs, and, hastening down, found Hepzibah already in the kitchen.
She stood by a window, holding a book in close contiguity to her nose,
as if with the hope of gaining an olfactory acquaintance with its
contents, since her imperfect vision made it not very easy to read
them. If any volume could have manifested its essential wisdom in the
mode suggested, it would certainly have been the one now in Hepzibah's
hand; and the kitchen, in such an event, would forthwith have streamed
with the fragrance of venison, turkeys, capons, larded partridges,
puddings, cakes, and Christmas pies, in all manner of elaborate mixture
and concoction. It was a cookery book, full of innumerable old
fashions of English dishes, and illustrated with engravings, which
represented the arrangements of the table at such banquets as it might
have befitted a nobleman to give in the great hall of his castle. And,
amid these rich and potent devices of the culinary art (not one of
which, probably, had been tested, within the memory of any man's
grandfather), poor Hepzibah was seeking for some nimble little titbit,
which, with what skill she had, and such materials as were at hand, she
might toss up for breakfast.
Soon, with a deep sigh, she put aside the savory volume, and inquired
of Phoebe whether old Speckle, as she called one of the hens, had laid
an egg the preceding day. Phoebe ran to see, but returned without the
expected treasure in her hand. At that instant, however, the blast of
a fish-dealer's conch was heard, announcing his approach along the
street. With energetic raps at the shop-window, Hepzibah summoned the
man in, and made purchase of what he warranted as the finest mackerel
in his cart, and as fat a one as ever he felt with his finger so early
in the season. Requesting Phoebe to roast some coffee,--which she
casually observed was the real Mocha, and so long kept that each of the
small berries ought to be worth its weight in gold,--the maiden lady
heaped fuel into the vast receptacle of the ancient fireplace in such
quantity as soon to drive the lingering dusk out of the kitchen. The
country-girl, willing to give her utmost assistance, proposed to make
an Indian cake, after her mother's peculiar method, of easy
manufacture, and which she could vouch for as possessing a richness,
and, if rightly prepared, a delicacy, unequalled by any other mode of
breakfast-cake. Hepzibah gladly assenting, the kitchen was soon the
scene of savory preparation. Perchance, amid their proper element of
smoke, which eddied forth from the ill-constructed chimney, the ghosts
of departed cook-maids looked wonderingly on, or peeped down the great
breadth of the flue, despising the simplicity of the projected meal,
yet ineffectually pining to thrust their shadowy hands into each
inchoate dish. The half-starved rats, at any rate, stole visibly out
of their hiding-places, and sat on their hind-legs, snuffing the fumy
atmosphere, and wistfully awaiting an opportunity to nibble.
Hepzibah had no natural turn for cookery, and, to say the truth, had
fairly incurred her present meagreness by often choosing to go without
her dinner rather than be attendant on the rotation of the spit, or
ebullition of the pot. Her zeal over the fire, therefore, was quite an
heroic test of sentiment. It was touching, and positively worthy of
tears (if Phoebe, the only spectator, except the rats and ghosts
aforesaid, had not been better employed than in shedding them), to see
her rake out a bed of fresh and glowing coals, and proceed to broil the
mackerel. Her usually pale cheeks were all ablaze with heat and hurry.
She watched the fish with as much tender care and minuteness of
attention as if,--we know not how to express it otherwise,--as if her
own heart were on the gridiron, and her immortal happiness were
involved in its being done precisely to a turn!
Life, within doors, has few pleasanter prospects than a neatly arranged
and well-provisioned breakfast-table. We come to it freshly, in the
dewy youth of the day, and when our spiritual and sensual elements are
in better accord than at a later period; so that the material delights
of the morning meal are capable of being fully enjoyed, without any
very grievous reproaches, whether gastric or conscientious, for
yielding even a trifle overmuch to the animal department of our nature.
The thoughts, too, that run around the ring of familiar guests have a
piquancy and mirthfulness, and oftentimes a vivid truth, which more
rarely find their way into the elaborate intercourse of dinner.
Hepzibah's small and ancient table, supported on its slender and
graceful legs, and covered with a cloth of the richest damask, looked
worthy to be the scene and centre of one of the cheerfullest of
parties. The vapor of the broiled fish arose like incense from the
shrine of a barbarian idol, while the fragrance of the Mocha might have
gratified the nostrils of a tutelary Lar, or whatever power has scope
over a modern breakfast-table. Phoebe's Indian cakes were the sweetest
offering of all,--in their hue befitting the rustic altars of the
innocent and golden age,--or, so brightly yellow were they, resembling
some of the bread which was changed to glistening gold when Midas tried
to eat it. The butter must not be forgotten,--butter which Phoebe
herself had churned, in her own rural home, and brought it to her
cousin as a propitiatory gift,--smelling of clover-blossoms, and
diffusing the charm of pastoral scenery through the dark-panelled
parlor. All this, with the quaint gorgeousness of the old china cups
and saucers, and the crested spoons, and a silver cream-jug (Hepzibah's
only other article of plate, and shaped like the rudest porringer), set
out a board at which the stateliest of old Colonel Pyncheon's guests
need not have scorned to take his place. But the Puritan's face
scowled down out of the picture, as if nothing on the table pleased his
appetite.
By way of contributing what grace she could, Phoebe gathered some roses
and a few other flowers, possessing either scent or beauty, and
arranged them in a glass pitcher, which, having long ago lost its
handle, was so much the fitter for a flower-vase. The early
sunshine--as fresh as that which peeped into Eve's bower while she and
Adam sat at breakfast there--came twinkling through the branches of the
pear-tree, and fell quite across the table. All was now ready. There
were chairs and plates for three. A chair and plate for Hepzibah,--the
same for Phoebe,--but what other guest did her cousin look for?
Throughout this preparation there had been a constant tremor in
Hepzibah's frame; an agitation so powerful that Phoebe could see the
quivering of her gaunt shadow, as thrown by the firelight on the
kitchen wall, or by the sunshine on the parlor floor. Its
manifestations were so various, and agreed so little with one another,
that the girl knew not what to make of it. Sometimes it seemed an
ecstasy of delight and happiness. At such moments, Hepzibah would
fling out her arms, and infold Phoebe in them, and kiss her cheek as
tenderly as ever her mother had; she appeared to do so by an inevitable
impulse, and as if her bosom were oppressed with tenderness, of which
she must needs pour out a little, in order to gain breathing-room. The
next moment, without any visible cause for the change, her unwonted joy
shrank back, appalled, as it were, and clothed itself in mourning; or
it ran and hid itself, so to speak, in the dungeon of her heart, where
it had long lain chained, while a cold, spectral sorrow took the place
of the imprisoned joy, that was afraid to be enfranchised,--a sorrow as
black as that was bright. She often broke into a little, nervous,
hysteric laugh, more touching than any tears could be; and forthwith,
as if to try which was the most touching, a gush of tears would follow;
or perhaps the laughter and tears came both at once, and surrounded our
poor Hepzibah, in a moral sense, with a kind of pale, dim rainbow.
Towards Phoebe, as we have said, she was affectionate,--far tenderer
than ever before, in their brief acquaintance, except for that one kiss
on the preceding night,--yet with a continually recurring pettishness
and irritability. She would speak sharply to her; then, throwing aside
all the starched reserve of her ordinary manner, ask pardon, and the
next instant renew the just-forgiven injury.
At last, when their mutual labor was all finished, she took Phoebe's
hand in her own trembling one.
"Bear with me, my dear child," she cried; "for truly my heart is full
to the brim! Bear with me; for I love you, Phoebe, though I speak so
roughly. Think nothing of it, dearest child! By and by, I shall be
kind, and only kind!"
"My dearest cousin, cannot you tell me what has happened?" asked
Phoebe, with a sunny and tearful sympathy. "What is it that moves you
so?"
"Hush! hush! He is coming!" whispered Hepzibah, hastily wiping her
eyes. "Let him see you first, Phoebe; for you are young and rosy, and
cannot help letting a smile break out whether or no. He always liked
bright faces! And mine is old now, and the tears are hardly dry on it.
He never could abide tears. There; draw the curtain a little, so that
the shadow may fall across his side of the table! But let there be a
good deal of sunshine, too; for he never was fond of gloom, as some
people are. He has had but little sunshine in his life,--poor
Clifford,--and, oh, what a black shadow. Poor, poor Clifford!"
Thus murmuring in an undertone, as if speaking rather to her own heart
than to Phoebe, the old gentlewoman stepped on tiptoe about the room,
making such arrangements as suggested themselves at the crisis.
Meanwhile there was a step in the passage-way, above stairs. Phoebe
recognized it as the same which had passed upward, as through her
dream, in the night-time. The approaching guest, whoever it might be,
appeared to pause at the head of the staircase; he paused twice or
thrice in the descent; he paused again at the foot. Each time, the
delay seemed to be without purpose, but rather from a forgetfulness of
the purpose which had set him in motion, or as if the person's feet
came involuntarily to a stand-still because the motive-power was too
feeble to sustain his progress. Finally, he made a long pause at the
threshold of the parlor. He took hold of the knob of the door; then
loosened his grasp without opening it. Hepzibah, her hands
convulsively clasped, stood gazing at the entrance.
"Dear Cousin Hepzibah, pray don't look so!" said Phoebe, trembling; for
her cousin's emotion, and this mysteriously reluctant step, made her
feel as if a ghost were coming into the room. "You really frighten me!
Is something awful going to happen?"
"Hush!" whispered Hepzibah. "Be cheerful! whatever may happen, be
nothing but cheerful!"
The final pause at the threshold proved so long, that Hepzibah, unable
to endure the suspense, rushed forward, threw open the door, and led in
the stranger by the hand. At the first glance, Phoebe saw an elderly
personage, in an old-fashioned dressing-gown of faded damask, and
wearing his gray or almost white hair of an unusual length. It quite
overshadowed his forehead, except when he thrust it back, and stared
vaguely about the room. After a very brief inspection of his face, it
was easy to conceive that his footstep must necessarily be such an one
as that which, slowly and with as indefinite an aim as a child's first
journey across a floor, had just brought him hitherward. Yet there
were no tokens that his physical strength might not have sufficed for a
free and determined gait. It was the spirit of the man that could not
walk. The expression of his countenance--while, notwithstanding it had
the light of reason in it--seemed to waver, and glimmer, and nearly to
die away, and feebly to recover itself again. It was like a flame
which we see twinkling among half-extinguished embers; we gaze at it
more intently than if it were a positive blaze, gushing vividly
upward,--more intently, but with a certain impatience, as if it ought
either to kindle itself into satisfactory splendor, or be at once
extinguished.
For an instant after entering the room, the guest stood still,
retaining Hepzibah's hand instinctively, as a child does that of the
grown person who guides it. He saw Phoebe, however, and caught an
illumination from her youthful and pleasant aspect, which, indeed,
threw a cheerfulness about the parlor, like the circle of reflected
brilliancy around the glass vase of flowers that was standing in the
sunshine. He made a salutation, or, to speak nearer the truth, an
ill-defined, abortive attempt at curtsy. Imperfect as it was, however,
it conveyed an idea, or, at least, gave a hint, of indescribable grace,
such as no practised art of external manners could have attained. It
was too slight to seize upon at the instant; yet, as recollected
afterwards, seemed to transfigure the whole man.
"Dear Clifford," said Hepzibah, in the tone with which one soothes a
wayward infant, "this is our cousin Phoebe,--little Phoebe
Pyncheon,--Arthur's only child, you know. She has come from the
country to stay with us awhile; for our old house has grown to be very
lonely now."
"Phoebe--Phoebe Pyncheon?--Phoebe?" repeated the guest, with a strange,
sluggish, ill-defined utterance. "Arthur's child! Ah, I forget! No
matter. She is very welcome!"
"Come, dear Clifford, take this chair," said Hepzibah, leading him to
his place. "Pray, Phoebe, lower the curtain a very little more. Now
let us begin breakfast."
The guest seated himself in the place assigned him, and looked
strangely around. He was evidently trying to grapple with the present
scene, and bring it home to his mind with a more satisfactory
distinctness. He desired to be certain, at least, that he was here, in
the low-studded, cross-beamed, oaken-panelled parlor, and not in some
other spot, which had stereotyped itself into his senses. But the
effort was too great to be sustained with more than a fragmentary
success. Continually, as we may express it, he faded away out of his
place; or, in other words, his mind and consciousness took their
departure, leaving his wasted, gray, and melancholy figure--a
substantial emptiness, a material ghost--to occupy his seat at table.
Again, after a blank moment, there would be a flickering taper-gleam in
his eyeballs. It betokened that his spiritual part had returned, and
was doing its best to kindle the heart's household fire, and light up
intellectual lamps in the dark and ruinous mansion, where it was doomed
to be a forlorn inhabitant.
At one of these moments of less torpid, yet still imperfect animation,
Phoebe became convinced of what she had at first rejected as too
extravagant and startling an idea. She saw that the person before her
must have been the original of the beautiful miniature in her cousin
Hepzibah's possession. Indeed, with a feminine eye for costume, she
had at once identified the damask dressing-gown, which enveloped him,
as the same in figure, material, and fashion, with that so elaborately
represented in the picture. This old, faded garment, with all its
pristine brilliancy extinct, seemed, in some indescribable way, to
translate the wearer's untold misfortune, and make it perceptible to
the beholder's eye. It was the better to be discerned, by this
exterior type, how worn and old were the soul's more immediate
garments; that form and countenance, the beauty and grace of which had
almost transcended the skill of the most exquisite of artists. It
could the more adequately be known that the soul of the man must have
suffered some miserable wrong, from its earthly experience. There he
seemed to sit, with a dim veil of decay and ruin betwixt him and the
world, but through which, at flitting intervals, might be caught the
same expression, so refined, so softly imaginative, which
Malbone--venturing a happy touch, with suspended breath--had imparted
to the miniature! There had been something so innately characteristic
in this look, that all the dusky years, and the burden of unfit
calamity which had fallen upon him, did not suffice utterly to destroy
it.
Hepzibah had now poured out a cup of deliciously fragrant coffee, and
presented it to her guest. As his eyes met hers, he seemed bewildered
and disquieted.
"Is this you, Hepzibah?" he murmured sadly; then, more apart, and
perhaps unconscious that he was overheard, "How changed! how changed!
And is she angry with me? Why does she bend her brow so?"
Poor Hepzibah! It was that wretched scowl which time and her
near-sightedness, and the fret of inward discomfort, had rendered so
habitual that any vehemence of mood invariably evoked it. But at the
indistinct murmur of his words her whole face grew tender, and even
lovely, with sorrowful affection; the harshness of her features
disappeared, as it were, behind the warm and misty glow.
"Angry!" she repeated; "angry with you, Clifford!"
Her tone, as she uttered the exclamation, had a plaintive and really
exquisite melody thrilling through it, yet without subduing a certain
something which an obtuse auditor might still have mistaken for
asperity. It was as if some transcendent musician should draw a
soul-thrilling sweetness out of a cracked instrument, which makes its
physical imperfection heard in the midst of ethereal harmony,--so deep
was the sensibility that found an organ in Hepzibah's voice!
"There is nothing but love here, Clifford," she added,--"nothing but
love! You are at home!"
The guest responded to her tone by a smile, which did not half light up
his face. Feeble as it was, however, and gone in a moment, it had a
charm of wonderful beauty. It was followed by a coarser expression; or
one that had the effect of coarseness on the fine mould and outline of
his countenance, because there was nothing intellectual to temper it.
It was a look of appetite. He ate food with what might almost be
termed voracity; and seemed to forget himself, Hepzibah, the young
girl, and everything else around him, in the sensual enjoyment which
the bountifully spread table afforded. In his natural system, though
high-wrought and delicately refined, a sensibility to the delights of
the palate was probably inherent. It would have been kept in check,
however, and even converted into an accomplishment, and one of the
thousand modes of intellectual culture, had his more ethereal
characteristics retained their vigor. But as it existed now, the
effect was painful and made Phoebe droop her eyes.
In a little while the guest became sensible of the fragrance of the yet
untasted coffee. He quaffed it eagerly. The subtle essence acted on
him like a charmed draught, and caused the opaque substance of his
animal being to grow transparent, or, at least, translucent; so that a
spiritual gleam was transmitted through it, with a clearer lustre than
hitherto.
"More, more!" he cried, with nervous haste in his utterance, as if
anxious to retain his grasp of what sought to escape him. "This is
what I need! Give me more!"
Under this delicate and powerful influence he sat more erect, and
looked out from his eyes with a glance that took note of what it rested
on. It was not so much that his expression grew more intellectual;
this, though it had its share, was not the most peculiar effect.
Neither was what we call the moral nature so forcibly awakened as to
present itself in remarkable prominence. But a certain fine temper of
being was now not brought out in full relief, but changeably and
imperfectly betrayed, of which it was the function to deal with all
beautiful and enjoyable things. In a character where it should exist
as the chief attribute, it would bestow on its possessor an exquisite
taste, and an enviable susceptibility of happiness. Beauty would be
his life; his aspirations would all tend toward it; and, allowing his
frame and physical organs to be in consonance, his own developments
would likewise be beautiful. Such a man should have nothing to do with
sorrow; nothing with strife; nothing with the martyrdom which, in an
infinite variety of shapes, awaits those who have the heart, and will,
and conscience, to fight a battle with the world. To these heroic
tempers, such martyrdom is the richest meed in the world's gift. To
the individual before us, it could only be a grief, intense in due
proportion with the severity of the infliction. He had no right to be
a martyr; and, beholding him so fit to be happy and so feeble for all
other purposes, a generous, strong, and noble spirit would, methinks,
have been ready to sacrifice what little enjoyment it might have
planned for itself,--it would have flung down the hopes, so paltry in
its regard,--if thereby the wintry blasts of our rude sphere might come
tempered to such a man.
Not to speak it harshly or scornfully, it seemed Clifford's nature to
be a Sybarite. It was perceptible, even there, in the dark old parlor,
in the inevitable polarity with which his eyes were attracted towards
the quivering play of sunbeams through the shadowy foliage. It was
seen in his appreciating notice of the vase of flowers, the scent of
which he inhaled with a zest almost peculiar to a physical organization
so refined that spiritual ingredients are moulded in with it. It was
betrayed in the unconscious smile with which he regarded Phoebe, whose
fresh and maidenly figure was both sunshine and flowers,--their
essence, in a prettier and more agreeable mode of manifestation. Not
less evident was this love and necessity for the Beautiful, in the
instinctive caution with which, even so soon, his eyes turned away from
his hostess, and wandered to any quarter rather than come back. It was
Hepzibah's misfortune,--not Clifford's fault. How could he,--so yellow
as she was, so wrinkled, so sad of mien, with that odd uncouthness of a
turban on her head, and that most perverse of scowls contorting her
brow,--how could he love to gaze at her? But, did he owe her no
affection for so much as she had silently given? He owed her nothing.
A nature like Clifford's can contract no debts of that kind. It is--we
say it without censure, nor in diminution of the claim which it
indefeasibly possesses on beings of another mould--it is always selfish
in its essence; and we must give it leave to be so, and heap up our
heroic and disinterested love upon it so much the more, without a
recompense. Poor Hepzibah knew this truth, or, at least, acted on the
instinct of it. So long estranged from what was lovely as Clifford had
been, she rejoiced--rejoiced, though with a present sigh, and a secret
purpose to shed tears in her own chamber that he had brighter objects
now before his eyes than her aged and uncomely features. They never
possessed a charm; and if they had, the canker of her grief for him
would long since have destroyed it.
The guest leaned back in his chair. Mingled in his countenance with a
dreamy delight, there was a troubled look of effort and unrest. He was
seeking to make himself more fully sensible of the scene around him;
or, perhaps, dreading it to be a dream, or a play of imagination, was
vexing the fair moment with a struggle for some added brilliancy and
more durable illusion.
"How pleasant!--How delightful!" he murmured, but not as if addressing
any one. "Will it last? How balmy the atmosphere through that open
window! An open window! How beautiful that play of sunshine! Those
flowers, how very fragrant! That young girl's face, how cheerful, how
blooming!--a flower with the dew on it, and sunbeams in the dew-drops!
Ah! this must be all a dream! A dream! A dream! But it has quite
hidden the four stone walls!"
Then his face darkened, as if the shadow of a cavern or a dungeon had
come over it; there was no more light in its expression than might have
come through the iron grates of a prison-window--still lessening, too,
as if he were sinking farther into the depths. Phoebe (being of that
quickness and activity of temperament that she seldom long refrained
from taking a part, and generally a good one, in what was going
forward) now felt herself moved to address the stranger.
"Here is a new kind of rose, which I found this morning in the garden,"
said she, choosing a small crimson one from among the flowers in the
vase. "There will be but five or six on the bush this season. This is
the most perfect of them all; not a speck of blight or mildew in it.
And how sweet it is!--sweet like no other rose! One can never forget
that scent!"
"Ah!--let me see!--let me hold it!" cried the guest, eagerly seizing
the flower, which, by the spell peculiar to remembered odors, brought
innumerable associations along with the fragrance that it exhaled.
"Thank you! This has done me good. I remember how I used to prize this
flower,--long ago, I suppose, very long ago!--or was it only yesterday?
It makes me feel young again! Am I young? Either this remembrance is
singularly distinct, or this consciousness strangely dim! But how kind
of the fair young girl! Thank you! Thank you!"
The favorable excitement derived from this little crimson rose afforded
Clifford the brightest moment which he enjoyed at the breakfast-table.
It might have lasted longer, but that his eyes happened, soon
afterwards, to rest on the face of the old Puritan, who, out of his
dingy frame and lustreless canvas, was looking down on the scene like a
ghost, and a most ill-tempered and ungenial one. The guest made an
impatient gesture of the hand, and addressed Hepzibah with what might
easily be recognized as the licensed irritability of a petted member of
the family.
"Hepzibah!--Hepzibah!" cried he with no little force and distinctness,
"why do you keep that odious picture on the wall? Yes, yes!--that is
precisely your taste! I have told you, a thousand times, that it was
the evil genius of the house!--my evil genius particularly! Take it
down, at once!"
"Dear Clifford," said Hepzibah sadly, "you know it cannot be!"
"Then, at all events," continued he, still speaking with some energy,
"pray cover it with a crimson curtain, broad enough to hang in folds,
and with a golden border and tassels. I cannot bear it! It must not
stare me in the face!"
"Yes, dear Clifford, the picture shall be covered," said Hepzibah
soothingly. "There is a crimson curtain in a trunk above stairs,--a
little faded and moth-eaten, I'm afraid,--but Phoebe and I will do
wonders with it."
"This very day, remember" said he; and then added, in a low,
self-communing voice, "Why should we live in this dismal house at all?
Why not go to the South of France?--to Italy?--Paris, Naples, Venice,
Rome? Hepzibah will say we have not the means. A droll idea that!"
He smiled to himself, and threw a glance of fine sarcastic meaning
towards Hepzibah.
But the several moods of feeling, faintly as they were marked, through
which he had passed, occurring in so brief an interval of time, had
evidently wearied the stranger. He was probably accustomed to a sad
monotony of life, not so much flowing in a stream, however sluggish, as
stagnating in a pool around his feet. A slumberous veil diffused
itself over his countenance, and had an effect, morally speaking, on
its naturally delicate and elegant outline, like that which a brooding
mist, with no sunshine in it, throws over the features of a landscape.
He appeared to become grosser,--almost cloddish. If aught of interest
or beauty--even ruined beauty--had heretofore been visible in this man,
the beholder might now begin to doubt it, and to accuse his own
imagination of deluding him with whatever grace had flickered over that
visage, and whatever exquisite lustre had gleamed in those filmy eyes.
Before he had quite sunken away, however, the sharp and peevish tinkle
of the shop-bell made itself audible. Striking most disagreeably on
Clifford's auditory organs and the characteristic sensibility of his
nerves, it caused him to start upright out of his chair.
"Good heavens, Hepzibah! what horrible disturbance have we now in the
house?" cried he, wreaking his resentful impatience--as a matter of
course, and a custom of old--on the one person in the world that loved
him. "I have never heard such a hateful clamor! Why do you permit it?
In the name of all dissonance, what can it be?"
It was very remarkable into what prominent relief--even as if a dim
picture should leap suddenly from its canvas--Clifford's character was
thrown by this apparently trifling annoyance. The secret was, that an
individual of his temper can always be pricked more acutely through his
sense of the beautiful and harmonious than through his heart. It is
even possible--for similar cases have often happened--that if Clifford,
in his foregoing life, had enjoyed the means of cultivating his taste
to its utmost perfectibility, that subtile attribute might, before this
period, have completely eaten out or filed away his affections. Shall
we venture to pronounce, therefore, that his long and black calamity
may not have had a redeeming drop of mercy at the bottom?
"Dear Clifford, I wish I could keep the sound from your ears," said
Hepzibah, patiently, but reddening with a painful suffusion of shame.
"It is very disagreeable even to me. But, do you know, Clifford, I
have something to tell you? This ugly noise,--pray run, Phoebe, and see
who is there!--this naughty little tinkle is nothing but our shop-bell!"
"Shop-bell!" repeated Clifford, with a bewildered stare.
"Yes, our shop-bell," said Hepzibah, a certain natural dignity, mingled
with deep emotion, now asserting itself in her manner. "For you must
know, dearest Clifford, that we are very poor. And there was no other
resource, but either to accept assistance from a hand that I would push
aside (and so would you!) were it to offer bread when we were dying for
it,--no help, save from him, or else to earn our subsistence with my
own hands! Alone, I might have been content to starve. But you were to
be given back to me! Do you think, then, dear Clifford," added she,
with a wretched smile, "that I have brought an irretrievable disgrace
on the old house, by opening a little shop in the front gable? Our
great-great-grandfather did the same, when there was far less need! Are
you ashamed of me?"
"Shame! Disgrace! Do you speak these words to me, Hepzibah?" said
Clifford,--not angrily, however; for when a man's spirit has been
thoroughly crushed, he may be peevish at small offences, but never
resentful of great ones. So he spoke with only a grieved emotion. "It
was not kind to say so, Hepzibah! What shame can befall me now?"
And then the unnerved man--he that had been born for enjoyment, but had
met a doom so very wretched--burst into a woman's passion of tears. It
was but of brief continuance, however; soon leaving him in a quiescent,
and, to judge by his countenance, not an uncomfortable state. From
this mood, too, he partially rallied for an instant, and looked at
Hepzibah with a smile, the keen, half-derisory purport of which was a
puzzle to her.
"Are we so very poor, Hepzibah?" said he.
Finally, his chair being deep and softly cushioned, Clifford fell
asleep. Hearing the more regular rise and fall of his breath (which,
however, even then, instead of being strong and full, had a feeble kind
of tremor, corresponding with the lack of vigor in his
character),--hearing these tokens of settled slumber, Hepzibah seized
the opportunity to peruse his face more attentively than she had yet
dared to do. Her heart melted away in tears; her profoundest spirit
sent forth a moaning voice, low, gentle, but inexpressibly sad. In
this depth of grief and pity she felt that there was no irreverence in
gazing at his altered, aged, faded, ruined face. But no sooner was she
a little relieved than her conscience smote her for gazing curiously at
him, now that he was so changed; and, turning hastily away, Hepzibah
let down the curtain over the sunny window, and left Clifford to
slumber there.
| The Guest: Phoebe awoke and found Hepzibah already in the kitchen, preparing breakfast. She and Phoebe prepare food, despite Hepzibah's lack of a natural inclination for cookery. While they prepare food, there is a constant tremor in Hepzibah's frame, a powerful agitation that seemed an ecstasy of delight, but Hepzibah also shrank into sorrow at times. Hepzibah tells Phoebe that Clifford is coming, and that he will need the great joy that Phoebe can provide. That night, Clifford arrives at the house. He approaches it with the gait of a man who can barely walk. Hepzibah leads him into the house by the hand, and when Clifford sees Phoebe he becomes more cheerful. Phoebe realizes that this must be the person in Hepzibah's miniature. Clifford notices Hepzibah's furrowed brow and wonders whether she is angry at him, but when he hears her voice he realizes that she has nothing but love for him. To Hepzibah Clifford seemed to be by his nature a Sybarite. He had a love and a need for the beautiful, and having been jailed for so long, he rejoiced at any opportunity for beauty, such as visage of Phoebe. Clifford panics upon seeing the portrait of Colonel Pyncheon, and begs Hepzibah to cover it. He suggests to Hepzibah that they not live in the dismal house, but go to Europe. When Clifford learns that Hepzibah has opened a shop, he bursts into tears. He finally falls asleep in his chair. While he sleeps, Hepzibah peruses his face, but soon feels guilty for doing so. | summary |
WHEN Phoebe awoke,--which she did with the early twittering of the
conjugal couple of robins in the pear-tree,--she heard movements below
stairs, and, hastening down, found Hepzibah already in the kitchen.
She stood by a window, holding a book in close contiguity to her nose,
as if with the hope of gaining an olfactory acquaintance with its
contents, since her imperfect vision made it not very easy to read
them. If any volume could have manifested its essential wisdom in the
mode suggested, it would certainly have been the one now in Hepzibah's
hand; and the kitchen, in such an event, would forthwith have streamed
with the fragrance of venison, turkeys, capons, larded partridges,
puddings, cakes, and Christmas pies, in all manner of elaborate mixture
and concoction. It was a cookery book, full of innumerable old
fashions of English dishes, and illustrated with engravings, which
represented the arrangements of the table at such banquets as it might
have befitted a nobleman to give in the great hall of his castle. And,
amid these rich and potent devices of the culinary art (not one of
which, probably, had been tested, within the memory of any man's
grandfather), poor Hepzibah was seeking for some nimble little titbit,
which, with what skill she had, and such materials as were at hand, she
might toss up for breakfast.
Soon, with a deep sigh, she put aside the savory volume, and inquired
of Phoebe whether old Speckle, as she called one of the hens, had laid
an egg the preceding day. Phoebe ran to see, but returned without the
expected treasure in her hand. At that instant, however, the blast of
a fish-dealer's conch was heard, announcing his approach along the
street. With energetic raps at the shop-window, Hepzibah summoned the
man in, and made purchase of what he warranted as the finest mackerel
in his cart, and as fat a one as ever he felt with his finger so early
in the season. Requesting Phoebe to roast some coffee,--which she
casually observed was the real Mocha, and so long kept that each of the
small berries ought to be worth its weight in gold,--the maiden lady
heaped fuel into the vast receptacle of the ancient fireplace in such
quantity as soon to drive the lingering dusk out of the kitchen. The
country-girl, willing to give her utmost assistance, proposed to make
an Indian cake, after her mother's peculiar method, of easy
manufacture, and which she could vouch for as possessing a richness,
and, if rightly prepared, a delicacy, unequalled by any other mode of
breakfast-cake. Hepzibah gladly assenting, the kitchen was soon the
scene of savory preparation. Perchance, amid their proper element of
smoke, which eddied forth from the ill-constructed chimney, the ghosts
of departed cook-maids looked wonderingly on, or peeped down the great
breadth of the flue, despising the simplicity of the projected meal,
yet ineffectually pining to thrust their shadowy hands into each
inchoate dish. The half-starved rats, at any rate, stole visibly out
of their hiding-places, and sat on their hind-legs, snuffing the fumy
atmosphere, and wistfully awaiting an opportunity to nibble.
Hepzibah had no natural turn for cookery, and, to say the truth, had
fairly incurred her present meagreness by often choosing to go without
her dinner rather than be attendant on the rotation of the spit, or
ebullition of the pot. Her zeal over the fire, therefore, was quite an
heroic test of sentiment. It was touching, and positively worthy of
tears (if Phoebe, the only spectator, except the rats and ghosts
aforesaid, had not been better employed than in shedding them), to see
her rake out a bed of fresh and glowing coals, and proceed to broil the
mackerel. Her usually pale cheeks were all ablaze with heat and hurry.
She watched the fish with as much tender care and minuteness of
attention as if,--we know not how to express it otherwise,--as if her
own heart were on the gridiron, and her immortal happiness were
involved in its being done precisely to a turn!
Life, within doors, has few pleasanter prospects than a neatly arranged
and well-provisioned breakfast-table. We come to it freshly, in the
dewy youth of the day, and when our spiritual and sensual elements are
in better accord than at a later period; so that the material delights
of the morning meal are capable of being fully enjoyed, without any
very grievous reproaches, whether gastric or conscientious, for
yielding even a trifle overmuch to the animal department of our nature.
The thoughts, too, that run around the ring of familiar guests have a
piquancy and mirthfulness, and oftentimes a vivid truth, which more
rarely find their way into the elaborate intercourse of dinner.
Hepzibah's small and ancient table, supported on its slender and
graceful legs, and covered with a cloth of the richest damask, looked
worthy to be the scene and centre of one of the cheerfullest of
parties. The vapor of the broiled fish arose like incense from the
shrine of a barbarian idol, while the fragrance of the Mocha might have
gratified the nostrils of a tutelary Lar, or whatever power has scope
over a modern breakfast-table. Phoebe's Indian cakes were the sweetest
offering of all,--in their hue befitting the rustic altars of the
innocent and golden age,--or, so brightly yellow were they, resembling
some of the bread which was changed to glistening gold when Midas tried
to eat it. The butter must not be forgotten,--butter which Phoebe
herself had churned, in her own rural home, and brought it to her
cousin as a propitiatory gift,--smelling of clover-blossoms, and
diffusing the charm of pastoral scenery through the dark-panelled
parlor. All this, with the quaint gorgeousness of the old china cups
and saucers, and the crested spoons, and a silver cream-jug (Hepzibah's
only other article of plate, and shaped like the rudest porringer), set
out a board at which the stateliest of old Colonel Pyncheon's guests
need not have scorned to take his place. But the Puritan's face
scowled down out of the picture, as if nothing on the table pleased his
appetite.
By way of contributing what grace she could, Phoebe gathered some roses
and a few other flowers, possessing either scent or beauty, and
arranged them in a glass pitcher, which, having long ago lost its
handle, was so much the fitter for a flower-vase. The early
sunshine--as fresh as that which peeped into Eve's bower while she and
Adam sat at breakfast there--came twinkling through the branches of the
pear-tree, and fell quite across the table. All was now ready. There
were chairs and plates for three. A chair and plate for Hepzibah,--the
same for Phoebe,--but what other guest did her cousin look for?
Throughout this preparation there had been a constant tremor in
Hepzibah's frame; an agitation so powerful that Phoebe could see the
quivering of her gaunt shadow, as thrown by the firelight on the
kitchen wall, or by the sunshine on the parlor floor. Its
manifestations were so various, and agreed so little with one another,
that the girl knew not what to make of it. Sometimes it seemed an
ecstasy of delight and happiness. At such moments, Hepzibah would
fling out her arms, and infold Phoebe in them, and kiss her cheek as
tenderly as ever her mother had; she appeared to do so by an inevitable
impulse, and as if her bosom were oppressed with tenderness, of which
she must needs pour out a little, in order to gain breathing-room. The
next moment, without any visible cause for the change, her unwonted joy
shrank back, appalled, as it were, and clothed itself in mourning; or
it ran and hid itself, so to speak, in the dungeon of her heart, where
it had long lain chained, while a cold, spectral sorrow took the place
of the imprisoned joy, that was afraid to be enfranchised,--a sorrow as
black as that was bright. She often broke into a little, nervous,
hysteric laugh, more touching than any tears could be; and forthwith,
as if to try which was the most touching, a gush of tears would follow;
or perhaps the laughter and tears came both at once, and surrounded our
poor Hepzibah, in a moral sense, with a kind of pale, dim rainbow.
Towards Phoebe, as we have said, she was affectionate,--far tenderer
than ever before, in their brief acquaintance, except for that one kiss
on the preceding night,--yet with a continually recurring pettishness
and irritability. She would speak sharply to her; then, throwing aside
all the starched reserve of her ordinary manner, ask pardon, and the
next instant renew the just-forgiven injury.
At last, when their mutual labor was all finished, she took Phoebe's
hand in her own trembling one.
"Bear with me, my dear child," she cried; "for truly my heart is full
to the brim! Bear with me; for I love you, Phoebe, though I speak so
roughly. Think nothing of it, dearest child! By and by, I shall be
kind, and only kind!"
"My dearest cousin, cannot you tell me what has happened?" asked
Phoebe, with a sunny and tearful sympathy. "What is it that moves you
so?"
"Hush! hush! He is coming!" whispered Hepzibah, hastily wiping her
eyes. "Let him see you first, Phoebe; for you are young and rosy, and
cannot help letting a smile break out whether or no. He always liked
bright faces! And mine is old now, and the tears are hardly dry on it.
He never could abide tears. There; draw the curtain a little, so that
the shadow may fall across his side of the table! But let there be a
good deal of sunshine, too; for he never was fond of gloom, as some
people are. He has had but little sunshine in his life,--poor
Clifford,--and, oh, what a black shadow. Poor, poor Clifford!"
Thus murmuring in an undertone, as if speaking rather to her own heart
than to Phoebe, the old gentlewoman stepped on tiptoe about the room,
making such arrangements as suggested themselves at the crisis.
Meanwhile there was a step in the passage-way, above stairs. Phoebe
recognized it as the same which had passed upward, as through her
dream, in the night-time. The approaching guest, whoever it might be,
appeared to pause at the head of the staircase; he paused twice or
thrice in the descent; he paused again at the foot. Each time, the
delay seemed to be without purpose, but rather from a forgetfulness of
the purpose which had set him in motion, or as if the person's feet
came involuntarily to a stand-still because the motive-power was too
feeble to sustain his progress. Finally, he made a long pause at the
threshold of the parlor. He took hold of the knob of the door; then
loosened his grasp without opening it. Hepzibah, her hands
convulsively clasped, stood gazing at the entrance.
"Dear Cousin Hepzibah, pray don't look so!" said Phoebe, trembling; for
her cousin's emotion, and this mysteriously reluctant step, made her
feel as if a ghost were coming into the room. "You really frighten me!
Is something awful going to happen?"
"Hush!" whispered Hepzibah. "Be cheerful! whatever may happen, be
nothing but cheerful!"
The final pause at the threshold proved so long, that Hepzibah, unable
to endure the suspense, rushed forward, threw open the door, and led in
the stranger by the hand. At the first glance, Phoebe saw an elderly
personage, in an old-fashioned dressing-gown of faded damask, and
wearing his gray or almost white hair of an unusual length. It quite
overshadowed his forehead, except when he thrust it back, and stared
vaguely about the room. After a very brief inspection of his face, it
was easy to conceive that his footstep must necessarily be such an one
as that which, slowly and with as indefinite an aim as a child's first
journey across a floor, had just brought him hitherward. Yet there
were no tokens that his physical strength might not have sufficed for a
free and determined gait. It was the spirit of the man that could not
walk. The expression of his countenance--while, notwithstanding it had
the light of reason in it--seemed to waver, and glimmer, and nearly to
die away, and feebly to recover itself again. It was like a flame
which we see twinkling among half-extinguished embers; we gaze at it
more intently than if it were a positive blaze, gushing vividly
upward,--more intently, but with a certain impatience, as if it ought
either to kindle itself into satisfactory splendor, or be at once
extinguished.
For an instant after entering the room, the guest stood still,
retaining Hepzibah's hand instinctively, as a child does that of the
grown person who guides it. He saw Phoebe, however, and caught an
illumination from her youthful and pleasant aspect, which, indeed,
threw a cheerfulness about the parlor, like the circle of reflected
brilliancy around the glass vase of flowers that was standing in the
sunshine. He made a salutation, or, to speak nearer the truth, an
ill-defined, abortive attempt at curtsy. Imperfect as it was, however,
it conveyed an idea, or, at least, gave a hint, of indescribable grace,
such as no practised art of external manners could have attained. It
was too slight to seize upon at the instant; yet, as recollected
afterwards, seemed to transfigure the whole man.
"Dear Clifford," said Hepzibah, in the tone with which one soothes a
wayward infant, "this is our cousin Phoebe,--little Phoebe
Pyncheon,--Arthur's only child, you know. She has come from the
country to stay with us awhile; for our old house has grown to be very
lonely now."
"Phoebe--Phoebe Pyncheon?--Phoebe?" repeated the guest, with a strange,
sluggish, ill-defined utterance. "Arthur's child! Ah, I forget! No
matter. She is very welcome!"
"Come, dear Clifford, take this chair," said Hepzibah, leading him to
his place. "Pray, Phoebe, lower the curtain a very little more. Now
let us begin breakfast."
The guest seated himself in the place assigned him, and looked
strangely around. He was evidently trying to grapple with the present
scene, and bring it home to his mind with a more satisfactory
distinctness. He desired to be certain, at least, that he was here, in
the low-studded, cross-beamed, oaken-panelled parlor, and not in some
other spot, which had stereotyped itself into his senses. But the
effort was too great to be sustained with more than a fragmentary
success. Continually, as we may express it, he faded away out of his
place; or, in other words, his mind and consciousness took their
departure, leaving his wasted, gray, and melancholy figure--a
substantial emptiness, a material ghost--to occupy his seat at table.
Again, after a blank moment, there would be a flickering taper-gleam in
his eyeballs. It betokened that his spiritual part had returned, and
was doing its best to kindle the heart's household fire, and light up
intellectual lamps in the dark and ruinous mansion, where it was doomed
to be a forlorn inhabitant.
At one of these moments of less torpid, yet still imperfect animation,
Phoebe became convinced of what she had at first rejected as too
extravagant and startling an idea. She saw that the person before her
must have been the original of the beautiful miniature in her cousin
Hepzibah's possession. Indeed, with a feminine eye for costume, she
had at once identified the damask dressing-gown, which enveloped him,
as the same in figure, material, and fashion, with that so elaborately
represented in the picture. This old, faded garment, with all its
pristine brilliancy extinct, seemed, in some indescribable way, to
translate the wearer's untold misfortune, and make it perceptible to
the beholder's eye. It was the better to be discerned, by this
exterior type, how worn and old were the soul's more immediate
garments; that form and countenance, the beauty and grace of which had
almost transcended the skill of the most exquisite of artists. It
could the more adequately be known that the soul of the man must have
suffered some miserable wrong, from its earthly experience. There he
seemed to sit, with a dim veil of decay and ruin betwixt him and the
world, but through which, at flitting intervals, might be caught the
same expression, so refined, so softly imaginative, which
Malbone--venturing a happy touch, with suspended breath--had imparted
to the miniature! There had been something so innately characteristic
in this look, that all the dusky years, and the burden of unfit
calamity which had fallen upon him, did not suffice utterly to destroy
it.
Hepzibah had now poured out a cup of deliciously fragrant coffee, and
presented it to her guest. As his eyes met hers, he seemed bewildered
and disquieted.
"Is this you, Hepzibah?" he murmured sadly; then, more apart, and
perhaps unconscious that he was overheard, "How changed! how changed!
And is she angry with me? Why does she bend her brow so?"
Poor Hepzibah! It was that wretched scowl which time and her
near-sightedness, and the fret of inward discomfort, had rendered so
habitual that any vehemence of mood invariably evoked it. But at the
indistinct murmur of his words her whole face grew tender, and even
lovely, with sorrowful affection; the harshness of her features
disappeared, as it were, behind the warm and misty glow.
"Angry!" she repeated; "angry with you, Clifford!"
Her tone, as she uttered the exclamation, had a plaintive and really
exquisite melody thrilling through it, yet without subduing a certain
something which an obtuse auditor might still have mistaken for
asperity. It was as if some transcendent musician should draw a
soul-thrilling sweetness out of a cracked instrument, which makes its
physical imperfection heard in the midst of ethereal harmony,--so deep
was the sensibility that found an organ in Hepzibah's voice!
"There is nothing but love here, Clifford," she added,--"nothing but
love! You are at home!"
The guest responded to her tone by a smile, which did not half light up
his face. Feeble as it was, however, and gone in a moment, it had a
charm of wonderful beauty. It was followed by a coarser expression; or
one that had the effect of coarseness on the fine mould and outline of
his countenance, because there was nothing intellectual to temper it.
It was a look of appetite. He ate food with what might almost be
termed voracity; and seemed to forget himself, Hepzibah, the young
girl, and everything else around him, in the sensual enjoyment which
the bountifully spread table afforded. In his natural system, though
high-wrought and delicately refined, a sensibility to the delights of
the palate was probably inherent. It would have been kept in check,
however, and even converted into an accomplishment, and one of the
thousand modes of intellectual culture, had his more ethereal
characteristics retained their vigor. But as it existed now, the
effect was painful and made Phoebe droop her eyes.
In a little while the guest became sensible of the fragrance of the yet
untasted coffee. He quaffed it eagerly. The subtle essence acted on
him like a charmed draught, and caused the opaque substance of his
animal being to grow transparent, or, at least, translucent; so that a
spiritual gleam was transmitted through it, with a clearer lustre than
hitherto.
"More, more!" he cried, with nervous haste in his utterance, as if
anxious to retain his grasp of what sought to escape him. "This is
what I need! Give me more!"
Under this delicate and powerful influence he sat more erect, and
looked out from his eyes with a glance that took note of what it rested
on. It was not so much that his expression grew more intellectual;
this, though it had its share, was not the most peculiar effect.
Neither was what we call the moral nature so forcibly awakened as to
present itself in remarkable prominence. But a certain fine temper of
being was now not brought out in full relief, but changeably and
imperfectly betrayed, of which it was the function to deal with all
beautiful and enjoyable things. In a character where it should exist
as the chief attribute, it would bestow on its possessor an exquisite
taste, and an enviable susceptibility of happiness. Beauty would be
his life; his aspirations would all tend toward it; and, allowing his
frame and physical organs to be in consonance, his own developments
would likewise be beautiful. Such a man should have nothing to do with
sorrow; nothing with strife; nothing with the martyrdom which, in an
infinite variety of shapes, awaits those who have the heart, and will,
and conscience, to fight a battle with the world. To these heroic
tempers, such martyrdom is the richest meed in the world's gift. To
the individual before us, it could only be a grief, intense in due
proportion with the severity of the infliction. He had no right to be
a martyr; and, beholding him so fit to be happy and so feeble for all
other purposes, a generous, strong, and noble spirit would, methinks,
have been ready to sacrifice what little enjoyment it might have
planned for itself,--it would have flung down the hopes, so paltry in
its regard,--if thereby the wintry blasts of our rude sphere might come
tempered to such a man.
Not to speak it harshly or scornfully, it seemed Clifford's nature to
be a Sybarite. It was perceptible, even there, in the dark old parlor,
in the inevitable polarity with which his eyes were attracted towards
the quivering play of sunbeams through the shadowy foliage. It was
seen in his appreciating notice of the vase of flowers, the scent of
which he inhaled with a zest almost peculiar to a physical organization
so refined that spiritual ingredients are moulded in with it. It was
betrayed in the unconscious smile with which he regarded Phoebe, whose
fresh and maidenly figure was both sunshine and flowers,--their
essence, in a prettier and more agreeable mode of manifestation. Not
less evident was this love and necessity for the Beautiful, in the
instinctive caution with which, even so soon, his eyes turned away from
his hostess, and wandered to any quarter rather than come back. It was
Hepzibah's misfortune,--not Clifford's fault. How could he,--so yellow
as she was, so wrinkled, so sad of mien, with that odd uncouthness of a
turban on her head, and that most perverse of scowls contorting her
brow,--how could he love to gaze at her? But, did he owe her no
affection for so much as she had silently given? He owed her nothing.
A nature like Clifford's can contract no debts of that kind. It is--we
say it without censure, nor in diminution of the claim which it
indefeasibly possesses on beings of another mould--it is always selfish
in its essence; and we must give it leave to be so, and heap up our
heroic and disinterested love upon it so much the more, without a
recompense. Poor Hepzibah knew this truth, or, at least, acted on the
instinct of it. So long estranged from what was lovely as Clifford had
been, she rejoiced--rejoiced, though with a present sigh, and a secret
purpose to shed tears in her own chamber that he had brighter objects
now before his eyes than her aged and uncomely features. They never
possessed a charm; and if they had, the canker of her grief for him
would long since have destroyed it.
The guest leaned back in his chair. Mingled in his countenance with a
dreamy delight, there was a troubled look of effort and unrest. He was
seeking to make himself more fully sensible of the scene around him;
or, perhaps, dreading it to be a dream, or a play of imagination, was
vexing the fair moment with a struggle for some added brilliancy and
more durable illusion.
"How pleasant!--How delightful!" he murmured, but not as if addressing
any one. "Will it last? How balmy the atmosphere through that open
window! An open window! How beautiful that play of sunshine! Those
flowers, how very fragrant! That young girl's face, how cheerful, how
blooming!--a flower with the dew on it, and sunbeams in the dew-drops!
Ah! this must be all a dream! A dream! A dream! But it has quite
hidden the four stone walls!"
Then his face darkened, as if the shadow of a cavern or a dungeon had
come over it; there was no more light in its expression than might have
come through the iron grates of a prison-window--still lessening, too,
as if he were sinking farther into the depths. Phoebe (being of that
quickness and activity of temperament that she seldom long refrained
from taking a part, and generally a good one, in what was going
forward) now felt herself moved to address the stranger.
"Here is a new kind of rose, which I found this morning in the garden,"
said she, choosing a small crimson one from among the flowers in the
vase. "There will be but five or six on the bush this season. This is
the most perfect of them all; not a speck of blight or mildew in it.
And how sweet it is!--sweet like no other rose! One can never forget
that scent!"
"Ah!--let me see!--let me hold it!" cried the guest, eagerly seizing
the flower, which, by the spell peculiar to remembered odors, brought
innumerable associations along with the fragrance that it exhaled.
"Thank you! This has done me good. I remember how I used to prize this
flower,--long ago, I suppose, very long ago!--or was it only yesterday?
It makes me feel young again! Am I young? Either this remembrance is
singularly distinct, or this consciousness strangely dim! But how kind
of the fair young girl! Thank you! Thank you!"
The favorable excitement derived from this little crimson rose afforded
Clifford the brightest moment which he enjoyed at the breakfast-table.
It might have lasted longer, but that his eyes happened, soon
afterwards, to rest on the face of the old Puritan, who, out of his
dingy frame and lustreless canvas, was looking down on the scene like a
ghost, and a most ill-tempered and ungenial one. The guest made an
impatient gesture of the hand, and addressed Hepzibah with what might
easily be recognized as the licensed irritability of a petted member of
the family.
"Hepzibah!--Hepzibah!" cried he with no little force and distinctness,
"why do you keep that odious picture on the wall? Yes, yes!--that is
precisely your taste! I have told you, a thousand times, that it was
the evil genius of the house!--my evil genius particularly! Take it
down, at once!"
"Dear Clifford," said Hepzibah sadly, "you know it cannot be!"
"Then, at all events," continued he, still speaking with some energy,
"pray cover it with a crimson curtain, broad enough to hang in folds,
and with a golden border and tassels. I cannot bear it! It must not
stare me in the face!"
"Yes, dear Clifford, the picture shall be covered," said Hepzibah
soothingly. "There is a crimson curtain in a trunk above stairs,--a
little faded and moth-eaten, I'm afraid,--but Phoebe and I will do
wonders with it."
"This very day, remember" said he; and then added, in a low,
self-communing voice, "Why should we live in this dismal house at all?
Why not go to the South of France?--to Italy?--Paris, Naples, Venice,
Rome? Hepzibah will say we have not the means. A droll idea that!"
He smiled to himself, and threw a glance of fine sarcastic meaning
towards Hepzibah.
But the several moods of feeling, faintly as they were marked, through
which he had passed, occurring in so brief an interval of time, had
evidently wearied the stranger. He was probably accustomed to a sad
monotony of life, not so much flowing in a stream, however sluggish, as
stagnating in a pool around his feet. A slumberous veil diffused
itself over his countenance, and had an effect, morally speaking, on
its naturally delicate and elegant outline, like that which a brooding
mist, with no sunshine in it, throws over the features of a landscape.
He appeared to become grosser,--almost cloddish. If aught of interest
or beauty--even ruined beauty--had heretofore been visible in this man,
the beholder might now begin to doubt it, and to accuse his own
imagination of deluding him with whatever grace had flickered over that
visage, and whatever exquisite lustre had gleamed in those filmy eyes.
Before he had quite sunken away, however, the sharp and peevish tinkle
of the shop-bell made itself audible. Striking most disagreeably on
Clifford's auditory organs and the characteristic sensibility of his
nerves, it caused him to start upright out of his chair.
"Good heavens, Hepzibah! what horrible disturbance have we now in the
house?" cried he, wreaking his resentful impatience--as a matter of
course, and a custom of old--on the one person in the world that loved
him. "I have never heard such a hateful clamor! Why do you permit it?
In the name of all dissonance, what can it be?"
It was very remarkable into what prominent relief--even as if a dim
picture should leap suddenly from its canvas--Clifford's character was
thrown by this apparently trifling annoyance. The secret was, that an
individual of his temper can always be pricked more acutely through his
sense of the beautiful and harmonious than through his heart. It is
even possible--for similar cases have often happened--that if Clifford,
in his foregoing life, had enjoyed the means of cultivating his taste
to its utmost perfectibility, that subtile attribute might, before this
period, have completely eaten out or filed away his affections. Shall
we venture to pronounce, therefore, that his long and black calamity
may not have had a redeeming drop of mercy at the bottom?
"Dear Clifford, I wish I could keep the sound from your ears," said
Hepzibah, patiently, but reddening with a painful suffusion of shame.
"It is very disagreeable even to me. But, do you know, Clifford, I
have something to tell you? This ugly noise,--pray run, Phoebe, and see
who is there!--this naughty little tinkle is nothing but our shop-bell!"
"Shop-bell!" repeated Clifford, with a bewildered stare.
"Yes, our shop-bell," said Hepzibah, a certain natural dignity, mingled
with deep emotion, now asserting itself in her manner. "For you must
know, dearest Clifford, that we are very poor. And there was no other
resource, but either to accept assistance from a hand that I would push
aside (and so would you!) were it to offer bread when we were dying for
it,--no help, save from him, or else to earn our subsistence with my
own hands! Alone, I might have been content to starve. But you were to
be given back to me! Do you think, then, dear Clifford," added she,
with a wretched smile, "that I have brought an irretrievable disgrace
on the old house, by opening a little shop in the front gable? Our
great-great-grandfather did the same, when there was far less need! Are
you ashamed of me?"
"Shame! Disgrace! Do you speak these words to me, Hepzibah?" said
Clifford,--not angrily, however; for when a man's spirit has been
thoroughly crushed, he may be peevish at small offences, but never
resentful of great ones. So he spoke with only a grieved emotion. "It
was not kind to say so, Hepzibah! What shame can befall me now?"
And then the unnerved man--he that had been born for enjoyment, but had
met a doom so very wretched--burst into a woman's passion of tears. It
was but of brief continuance, however; soon leaving him in a quiescent,
and, to judge by his countenance, not an uncomfortable state. From
this mood, too, he partially rallied for an instant, and looked at
Hepzibah with a smile, the keen, half-derisory purport of which was a
puzzle to her.
"Are we so very poor, Hepzibah?" said he.
Finally, his chair being deep and softly cushioned, Clifford fell
asleep. Hearing the more regular rise and fall of his breath (which,
however, even then, instead of being strong and full, had a feeble kind
of tremor, corresponding with the lack of vigor in his
character),--hearing these tokens of settled slumber, Hepzibah seized
the opportunity to peruse his face more attentively than she had yet
dared to do. Her heart melted away in tears; her profoundest spirit
sent forth a moaning voice, low, gentle, but inexpressibly sad. In
this depth of grief and pity she felt that there was no irreverence in
gazing at his altered, aged, faded, ruined face. But no sooner was she
a little relieved than her conscience smote her for gazing curiously at
him, now that he was so changed; and, turning hastily away, Hepzibah
let down the curtain over the sunny window, and left Clifford to
slumber there.
| The beginning of this chapter establishes the routine within the House of the Seven Gables before Clifford's reappearance. Phoebe has made herself an integral part of the house, while even Hepzibah forces herself into the routine of a working woman, even though cooking and running a shop are against her nature. However, upon Clifford's impending arrival, Hepzibah becomes agitated, for she has waited for the moment for years and now fears that Clifford will be repulsed by her aged scowl and the state of disarray within the House of the Seven Gables. Hawthorne portrays Clifford as a man who barely exists, much like Hepzibah. He no longer is part of society and has no possessions. He returns to the House of the Seven Gables, which was to be his inheritance, as a guest, as the title of the chapter notes. When he approaches the door, it seems like he does not have the physical strength to walk, and his speech is perfunctory and ill-defined, as if he were merely going through the motions of interaction with Hepzibah and Phoebe. Just as poverty has taken its toll on Hepzibah, decades in prison have reduced Clifford to a fragile state. Yet Clifford demonstrates this fragility through extremes of emotion. While Hepzibah is now dulled by experience, Clifford can only have experiences that are great pains or great pleasures. Even a cup of coffee causes Clifford to enter a state of hysterical pleasure. Clifford responds most intensely to beauty, whether in a vase of flowers or in his cousin Phoebe. Hawthorne demonstrates the other extremes of emotion that Clifford feels when he sees the portrait of Colonel Pyncheon. The portrait induces a feeling of near physical pain, and he demands to have it hidden. This aversion to the portrait of Colonel Pyncheon also serves as a reminder of the Pyncheon past. Before he was sent to prison, it was Clifford who best realized the sins of Colonel Pyncheon and who attempted to make amends to the descendants of Matthew Maule. This therefore sets the stage for a confrontation between Clifford, who wishes to make reparations for the family's checkered history, and other Pyncheons who represent Colonel Pyncheon's point of view | analysis |
PHOEBE, on entering the shop, beheld there the already familiar face of
the little devourer--if we can reckon his mighty deeds aright--of Jim
Crow, the elephant, the camel, the dromedaries, and the locomotive.
Having expended his private fortune, on the two preceding days, in the
purchase of the above unheard-of luxuries, the young gentleman's
present errand was on the part of his mother, in quest of three eggs
and half a pound of raisins. These articles Phoebe accordingly
supplied, and, as a mark of gratitude for his previous patronage, and a
slight super-added morsel after breakfast, put likewise into his hand a
whale! The great fish, reversing his experience with the prophet of
Nineveh, immediately began his progress down the same red pathway of
fate whither so varied a caravan had preceded him. This remarkable
urchin, in truth, was the very emblem of old Father Time, both in
respect of his all-devouring appetite for men and things, and because
he, as well as Time, after ingulfing thus much of creation, looked
almost as youthful as if he had been just that moment made.
After partly closing the door, the child turned back, and mumbled
something to Phoebe, which, as the whale was but half disposed of, she
could not perfectly understand.
"What did you say, my little fellow?" asked she.
"Mother wants to know" repeated Ned Higgins more distinctly, "how Old
Maid Pyncheon's brother does? Folks say he has got home."
"My cousin Hepzibah's brother?" exclaimed Phoebe, surprised at this
sudden explanation of the relationship between Hepzibah and her guest.
"Her brother! And where can he have been?"
The little boy only put his thumb to his broad snub-nose, with that
look of shrewdness which a child, spending much of his time in the
street, so soon learns to throw over his features, however
unintelligent in themselves. Then as Phoebe continued to gaze at him,
without answering his mother's message, he took his departure.
As the child went down the steps, a gentleman ascended them, and made
his entrance into the shop. It was the portly, and, had it possessed
the advantage of a little more height, would have been the stately
figure of a man considerably in the decline of life, dressed in a black
suit of some thin stuff, resembling broadcloth as closely as possible.
A gold-headed cane, of rare Oriental wood, added materially to the high
respectability of his aspect, as did also a neckcloth of the utmost
snowy purity, and the conscientious polish of his boots. His dark,
square countenance, with its almost shaggy depth of eyebrows, was
naturally impressive, and would, perhaps, have been rather stern, had
not the gentleman considerately taken upon himself to mitigate the
harsh effect by a look of exceeding good-humor and benevolence. Owing,
however, to a somewhat massive accumulation of animal substance about
the lower region of his face, the look was, perhaps, unctuous rather
than spiritual, and had, so to speak, a kind of fleshly effulgence, not
altogether so satisfactory as he doubtless intended it to be. A
susceptible observer, at any rate, might have regarded it as affording
very little evidence of the general benignity of soul whereof it
purported to be the outward reflection. And if the observer chanced to
be ill-natured, as well as acute and susceptible, he would probably
suspect that the smile on the gentleman's face was a good deal akin to
the shine on his boots, and that each must have cost him and his
boot-black, respectively, a good deal of hard labor to bring out and
preserve them.
As the stranger entered the little shop, where the projection of the
second story and the thick foliage of the elm-tree, as well as the
commodities at the window, created a sort of gray medium, his smile
grew as intense as if he had set his heart on counteracting the whole
gloom of the atmosphere (besides any moral gloom pertaining to Hepzibah
and her inmates) by the unassisted light of his countenance. On
perceiving a young rose-bud of a girl, instead of the gaunt presence of
the old maid, a look of surprise was manifest. He at first knit his
brows; then smiled with more unctuous benignity than ever.
"Ah, I see how it is!" said he in a deep voice,--a voice which, had it
come from the throat of an uncultivated man, would have been gruff,
but, by dint of careful training, was now sufficiently agreeable,--"I
was not aware that Miss Hepzibah Pyncheon had commenced business under
such favorable auspices. You are her assistant, I suppose?"
"I certainly am," answered Phoebe, and added, with a little air of
lady-like assumption (for, civil as the gentleman was, he evidently
took her to be a young person serving for wages), "I am a cousin of
Miss Hepzibah, on a visit to her."
"Her cousin?--and from the country? Pray pardon me, then," said the
gentleman, bowing and smiling, as Phoebe never had been bowed to nor
smiled on before; "in that case, we must be better acquainted; for,
unless I am sadly mistaken, you are my own little kinswoman likewise!
Let me see,--Mary?--Dolly?--Phoebe?--yes, Phoebe is the name! Is it
possible that you are Phoebe Pyncheon, only child of my dear cousin and
classmate, Arthur? Ah, I see your father now, about your mouth! Yes,
yes! we must be better acquainted! I am your kinsman, my dear. Surely
you must have heard of Judge Pyncheon?"
As Phoebe curtsied in reply, the Judge bent forward, with the
pardonable and even praiseworthy purpose--considering the nearness of
blood and the difference of age--of bestowing on his young relative a
kiss of acknowledged kindred and natural affection. Unfortunately
(without design, or only with such instinctive design as gives no
account of itself to the intellect) Phoebe, just at the critical
moment, drew back; so that her highly respectable kinsman, with his
body bent over the counter and his lips protruded, was betrayed into
the rather absurd predicament of kissing the empty air. It was a
modern parallel to the case of Ixion embracing a cloud, and was so much
the more ridiculous as the Judge prided himself on eschewing all airy
matter, and never mistaking a shadow for a substance. The truth
was,--and it is Phoebe's only excuse,--that, although Judge Pyncheon's
glowing benignity might not be absolutely unpleasant to the feminine
beholder, with the width of a street, or even an ordinary-sized room,
interposed between, yet it became quite too intense, when this dark,
full-fed physiognomy (so roughly bearded, too, that no razor could ever
make it smooth) sought to bring itself into actual contact with the
object of its regards. The man, the sex, somehow or other, was
entirely too prominent in the Judge's demonstrations of that sort.
Phoebe's eyes sank, and, without knowing why, she felt herself blushing
deeply under his look. Yet she had been kissed before, and without
any particular squeamishness, by perhaps half a dozen different
cousins, younger as well as older than this dark-browned,
grisly-bearded, white-neck-clothed, and unctuously-benevolent Judge!
Then, why not by him?
On raising her eyes, Phoebe was startled by the change in Judge
Pyncheon's face. It was quite as striking, allowing for the difference
of scale, as that betwixt a landscape under a broad sunshine and just
before a thunder-storm; not that it had the passionate intensity of the
latter aspect, but was cold, hard, immitigable, like a day-long
brooding cloud.
"Dear me! what is to be done now?" thought the country-girl to herself.
"He looks as if there were nothing softer in him than a rock, nor
milder than the east wind! I meant no harm! Since he is really my
cousin, I would have let him kiss me, if I could!"
Then, all at once, it struck Phoebe that this very Judge Pyncheon was
the original of the miniature which the daguerreotypist had shown her
in the garden, and that the hard, stern, relentless look, now on his
face, was the same that the sun had so inflexibly persisted in bringing
out. Was it, therefore, no momentary mood, but, however skilfully
concealed, the settled temper of his life? And not merely so, but was
it hereditary in him, and transmitted down, as a precious heirloom,
from that bearded ancestor, in whose picture both the expression and,
to a singular degree, the features of the modern Judge were shown as by
a kind of prophecy? A deeper philosopher than Phoebe might have found
something very terrible in this idea. It implied that the weaknesses
and defects, the bad passions, the mean tendencies, and the moral
diseases which lead to crime are handed down from one generation to
another, by a far surer process of transmission than human law has been
able to establish in respect to the riches and honors which it seeks to
entail upon posterity.
But, as it happened, scarcely had Phoebe's eyes rested again on the
Judge's countenance than all its ugly sternness vanished; and she found
herself quite overpowered by the sultry, dog-day heat, as it were, of
benevolence, which this excellent man diffused out of his great heart
into the surrounding atmosphere,--very much like a serpent, which, as a
preliminary to fascination, is said to fill the air with his peculiar
odor.
"I like that, Cousin Phoebe!" cried he, with an emphatic nod of
approbation. "I like it much, my little cousin! You are a good child,
and know how to take care of yourself. A young girl--especially if she
be a very pretty one--can never be too chary of her lips."
"Indeed, sir," said Phoebe, trying to laugh the matter off, "I did not
mean to be unkind."
Nevertheless, whether or no it were entirely owing to the inauspicious
commencement of their acquaintance, she still acted under a certain
reserve, which was by no means customary to her frank and genial
nature. The fantasy would not quit her, that the original Puritan, of
whom she had heard so many sombre traditions,--the progenitor of the
whole race of New England Pyncheons, the founder of the House of the
Seven Gables, and who had died so strangely in it,--had now stept into
the shop. In these days of off-hand equipment, the matter was easily
enough arranged. On his arrival from the other world, he had merely
found it necessary to spend a quarter of an hour at a barber's, who had
trimmed down the Puritan's full beard into a pair of grizzled whiskers,
then, patronizing a ready-made clothing establishment, he had exchanged
his velvet doublet and sable cloak, with the richly worked band under
his chin, for a white collar and cravat, coat, vest, and pantaloons;
and lastly, putting aside his steel-hilted broadsword to take up a
gold-headed cane, the Colonel Pyncheon of two centuries ago steps
forward as the Judge of the passing moment!
Of course, Phoebe was far too sensible a girl to entertain this idea in
any other way than as matter for a smile. Possibly, also, could the
two personages have stood together before her eye, many points of
difference would have been perceptible, and perhaps only a general
resemblance. The long lapse of intervening years, in a climate so
unlike that which had fostered the ancestral Englishman, must
inevitably have wrought important changes in the physical system of his
descendant. The Judge's volume of muscle could hardly be the same as
the Colonel's; there was undoubtedly less beef in him. Though looked
upon as a weighty man among his contemporaries in respect of animal
substance, and as favored with a remarkable degree of fundamental
development, well adapting him for the judicial bench, we conceive that
the modern Judge Pyncheon, if weighed in the same balance with his
ancestor, would have required at least an old-fashioned fifty-six to
keep the scale in equilibrio. Then the Judge's face had lost the ruddy
English hue that showed its warmth through all the duskiness of the
Colonel's weather-beaten cheek, and had taken a sallow shade, the
established complexion of his countrymen. If we mistake not, moreover,
a certain quality of nervousness had become more or less manifest, even
in so solid a specimen of Puritan descent as the gentleman now under
discussion. As one of its effects, it bestowed on his countenance a
quicker mobility than the old Englishman's had possessed, and keener
vivacity, but at the expense of a sturdier something, on which these
acute endowments seemed to act like dissolving acids. This process,
for aught we know, may belong to the great system of human progress,
which, with every ascending footstep, as it diminishes the necessity
for animal force, may be destined gradually to spiritualize us, by
refining away our grosser attributes of body. If so, Judge Pyncheon
could endure a century or two more of such refinement as well as most
other men.
The similarity, intellectual and moral, between the Judge and his
ancestor appears to have been at least as strong as the resemblance of
mien and feature would afford reason to anticipate. In old Colonel
Pyncheon's funeral discourse the clergyman absolutely canonized his
deceased parishioner, and opening, as it were, a vista through the roof
of the church, and thence through the firmament above, showed him
seated, harp in hand, among the crowned choristers of the spiritual
world. On his tombstone, too, the record is highly eulogistic; nor
does history, so far as he holds a place upon its page, assail the
consistency and uprightness of his character. So also, as regards the
Judge Pyncheon of to-day, neither clergyman, nor legal critic, nor
inscriber of tombstones, nor historian of general or local politics,
would venture a word against this eminent person's sincerity as a
Christian, or respectability as a man, or integrity as a judge, or
courage and faithfulness as the often-tried representative of his
political party. But, besides these cold, formal, and empty words of
the chisel that inscribes, the voice that speaks, and the pen that
writes, for the public eye and for distant time,--and which inevitably
lose much of their truth and freedom by the fatal consciousness of so
doing,--there were traditions about the ancestor, and private diurnal
gossip about the Judge, remarkably accordant in their testimony. It is
often instructive to take the woman's, the private and domestic, view
of a public man; nor can anything be more curious than the vast
discrepancy between portraits intended for engraving and the
pencil-sketches that pass from hand to hand behind the original's back.
For example: tradition affirmed that the Puritan had been greedy of
wealth; the Judge, too, with all the show of liberal expenditure, was
said to be as close-fisted as if his gripe were of iron. The ancestor
had clothed himself in a grim assumption of kindliness, a rough
heartiness of word and manner, which most people took to be the genuine
warmth of nature, making its way through the thick and inflexible hide
of a manly character. His descendant, in compliance with the
requirements of a nicer age, had etherealized this rude benevolence
into that broad benignity of smile wherewith he shone like a noonday
sun along the streets, or glowed like a household fire in the
drawing-rooms of his private acquaintance. The Puritan--if not belied
by some singular stories, murmured, even at this day, under the
narrator's breath--had fallen into certain transgressions to which men
of his great animal development, whatever their faith or principles,
must continue liable, until they put off impurity, along with the gross
earthly substance that involves it. We must not stain our page with
any contemporary scandal, to a similar purport, that may have been
whispered against the Judge. The Puritan, again, an autocrat in his
own household, had worn out three wives, and, merely by the remorseless
weight and hardness of his character in the conjugal relation, had sent
them, one after another, broken-hearted, to their graves. Here the
parallel, in some sort, fails. The Judge had wedded but a single wife,
and lost her in the third or fourth year of their marriage. There was
a fable, however,--for such we choose to consider it, though, not
impossibly, typical of Judge Pyncheon's marital deportment,--that the
lady got her death-blow in the honeymoon, and never smiled again,
because her husband compelled her to serve him with coffee every
morning at his bedside, in token of fealty to her liege-lord and master.
But it is too fruitful a subject, this of hereditary resemblances,--the
frequent recurrence of which, in a direct line, is truly unaccountable,
when we consider how large an accumulation of ancestry lies behind
every man at the distance of one or two centuries. We shall only add,
therefore, that the Puritan--so, at least, says chimney-corner
tradition, which often preserves traits of character with marvellous
fidelity--was bold, imperious, relentless, crafty; laying his purposes
deep, and following them out with an inveteracy of pursuit that knew
neither rest nor conscience; trampling on the weak, and, when essential
to his ends, doing his utmost to beat down the strong. Whether the
Judge in any degree resembled him, the further progress of our
narrative may show.
Scarcely any of the items in the above-drawn parallel occurred to
Phoebe, whose country birth and residence, in truth, had left her
pitifully ignorant of most of the family traditions, which lingered,
like cobwebs and incrustations of smoke, about the rooms and
chimney-corners of the House of the Seven Gables. Yet there was a
circumstance, very trifling in itself, which impressed her with an odd
degree of horror. She had heard of the anathema flung by Maule, the
executed wizard, against Colonel Pyncheon and his posterity,--that God
would give them blood to drink,--and likewise of the popular notion,
that this miraculous blood might now and then be heard gurgling in
their throats. The latter scandal--as became a person of sense, and,
more especially, a member of the Pyncheon family--Phoebe had set down
for the absurdity which it unquestionably was. But ancient
superstitions, after being steeped in human hearts and embodied in
human breath, and passing from lip to ear in manifold repetition,
through a series of generations, become imbued with an effect of homely
truth. The smoke of the domestic hearth has scented them through and
through. By long transmission among household facts, they grow to look
like them, and have such a familiar way of making themselves at home
that their influence is usually greater than we suspect. Thus it
happened, that when Phoebe heard a certain noise in Judge Pyncheon's
throat,--rather habitual with him, not altogether voluntary, yet
indicative of nothing, unless it were a slight bronchial complaint, or,
as some people hinted, an apoplectic symptom,--when the girl heard this
queer and awkward ingurgitation (which the writer never did hear, and
therefore cannot describe), she very foolishly started, and clasped her
hands.
Of course, it was exceedingly ridiculous in Phoebe to be discomposed by
such a trifle, and still more unpardonable to show her discomposure to
the individual most concerned in it. But the incident chimed in so
oddly with her previous fancies about the Colonel and the Judge, that,
for the moment, it seemed quite to mingle their identity.
"What is the matter with you, young woman?" said Judge Pyncheon, giving
her one of his harsh looks. "Are you afraid of anything?"
"Oh, nothing, sir--nothing in the world!" answered Phoebe, with a
little laugh of vexation at herself. "But perhaps you wish to speak
with my cousin Hepzibah. Shall I call her?"
"Stay a moment, if you please," said the Judge, again beaming sunshine
out of his face. "You seem to be a little nervous this morning. The
town air, Cousin Phoebe, does not agree with your good, wholesome
country habits. Or has anything happened to disturb you?--anything
remarkable in Cousin Hepzibah's family?-- An arrival, eh? I thought
so! No wonder you are out of sorts, my little cousin. To be an inmate
with such a guest may well startle an innocent young girl!"
"You quite puzzle me, sir," replied Phoebe, gazing inquiringly at the
Judge. "There is no frightful guest in the house, but only a poor,
gentle, childlike man, whom I believe to be Cousin Hepzibah's brother.
I am afraid (but you, sir, will know better than I) that he is not
quite in his sound senses; but so mild and quiet he seems to be, that a
mother might trust her baby with him; and I think he would play with
the baby as if he were only a few years older than itself. He startle
me!--Oh, no indeed!"
"I rejoice to hear so favorable and so ingenuous an account of my
cousin Clifford," said the benevolent Judge. "Many years ago, when we
were boys and young men together, I had a great affection for him, and
still feel a tender interest in all his concerns. You say, Cousin
Phoebe, he appears to be weak minded. Heaven grant him at least enough
of intellect to repent of his past sins!"
"Nobody, I fancy," observed Phoebe, "can have fewer to repent of."
"And is it possible, my dear," rejoined the Judge, with a commiserating
look, "that you have never heard of Clifford Pyncheon?--that you know
nothing of his history? Well, it is all right; and your mother has
shown a very proper regard for the good name of the family with which
she connected herself. Believe the best you can of this unfortunate
person, and hope the best! It is a rule which Christians should always
follow, in their judgments of one another; and especially is it right
and wise among near relatives, whose characters have necessarily a
degree of mutual dependence. But is Clifford in the parlor? I will
just step in and see."
"Perhaps, sir, I had better call my cousin Hepzibah," said Phoebe;
hardly knowing, however, whether she ought to obstruct the entrance of
so affectionate a kinsman into the private regions of the house. "Her
brother seemed to be just falling asleep after breakfast; and I am sure
she would not like him to be disturbed. Pray, sir, let me give her
notice!"
But the Judge showed a singular determination to enter unannounced; and
as Phoebe, with the vivacity of a person whose movements unconsciously
answer to her thoughts, had stepped towards the door, he used little or
no ceremony in putting her aside.
"No, no, Miss Phoebe!" said Judge Pyncheon in a voice as deep as a
thunder-growl, and with a frown as black as the cloud whence it issues.
"Stay you here! I know the house, and know my cousin Hepzibah, and know
her brother Clifford likewise.--nor need my little country cousin put
herself to the trouble of announcing me!"--in these latter words, by
the bye, there were symptoms of a change from his sudden harshness into
his previous benignity of manner. "I am at home here, Phoebe, you must
recollect, and you are the stranger. I will just step in, therefore,
and see for myself how Clifford is, and assure him and Hepzibah of my
kindly feelings and best wishes. It is right, at this juncture, that
they should both hear from my own lips how much I desire to serve them.
Ha! here is Hepzibah herself!"
Such was the case. The vibrations of the Judge's voice had reached the
old gentlewoman in the parlor, where she sat, with face averted,
waiting on her brother's slumber. She now issued forth, as would
appear, to defend the entrance, looking, we must needs say, amazingly
like the dragon which, in fairy tales, is wont to be the guardian over
an enchanted beauty. The habitual scowl of her brow was undeniably too
fierce, at this moment, to pass itself off on the innocent score of
near-sightedness; and it was bent on Judge Pyncheon in a way that
seemed to confound, if not alarm him, so inadequately had he estimated
the moral force of a deeply grounded antipathy. She made a repelling
gesture with her hand, and stood a perfect picture of prohibition, at
full length, in the dark frame of the doorway. But we must betray
Hepzibah's secret, and confess that the native timorousness of her
character even now developed itself in a quick tremor, which, to her
own perception, set each of her joints at variance with its fellows.
Possibly, the Judge was aware how little true hardihood lay behind
Hepzibah's formidable front. At any rate, being a gentleman of steady
nerves, he soon recovered himself, and failed not to approach his
cousin with outstretched hand; adopting the sensible precaution,
however, to cover his advance with a smile, so broad and sultry, that,
had it been only half as warm as it looked, a trellis of grapes might
at once have turned purple under its summer-like exposure. It may have
been his purpose, indeed, to melt poor Hepzibah on the spot, as if she
were a figure of yellow wax.
"Hepzibah, my beloved cousin, I am rejoiced!" exclaimed the Judge most
emphatically. "Now, at length, you have something to live for. Yes,
and all of us, let me say, your friends and kindred, have more to live
for than we had yesterday. I have lost no time in hastening to offer
any assistance in my power towards making Clifford comfortable. He
belongs to us all. I know how much he requires,--how much he used to
require,--with his delicate taste, and his love of the beautiful.
Anything in my house,--pictures, books, wine, luxuries of the
table,--he may command them all! It would afford me most heartfelt
gratification to see him! Shall I step in, this moment?"
"No," replied Hepzibah, her voice quivering too painfully to allow of
many words. "He cannot see visitors!"
"A visitor, my dear cousin!--do you call me so?" cried the Judge, whose
sensibility, it seems, was hurt by the coldness of the phrase. "Nay,
then, let me be Clifford's host, and your own likewise. Come at once
to my house. The country air, and all the conveniences,--I may say
luxuries,--that I have gathered about me, will do wonders for him. And
you and I, dear Hepzibah, will consult together, and watch together,
and labor together, to make our dear Clifford happy. Come! why should
we make more words about what is both a duty and a pleasure on my part?
Come to me at once!"
On hearing these so hospitable offers, and such generous recognition of
the claims of kindred, Phoebe felt very much in the mood of running up
to Judge Pyncheon, and giving him, of her own accord, the kiss from
which she had so recently shrunk away. It was quite otherwise with
Hepzibah; the Judge's smile seemed to operate on her acerbity of heart
like sunshine upon vinegar, making it ten times sourer than ever.
"Clifford," said she,--still too agitated to utter more than an abrupt
sentence,--"Clifford has a home here!"
"May Heaven forgive you, Hepzibah," said Judge Pyncheon,--reverently
lifting his eyes towards that high court of equity to which he
appealed,--"if you suffer any ancient prejudice or animosity to weigh
with you in this matter. I stand here with an open heart, willing and
anxious to receive yourself and Clifford into it. Do not refuse my
good offices,--my earnest propositions for your welfare! They are such,
in all respects, as it behooves your nearest kinsman to make. It will
be a heavy responsibility, cousin, if you confine your brother to this
dismal house and stifled air, when the delightful freedom of my
country-seat is at his command."
"It would never suit Clifford," said Hepzibah, as briefly as before.
"Woman!" broke forth the Judge, giving way to his resentment, "what is
the meaning of all this? Have you other resources? Nay, I suspected as
much! Take care, Hepzibah, take care! Clifford is on the brink of as
black a ruin as ever befell him yet! But why do I talk with you, woman
as you are? Make way!--I must see Clifford!"
Hepzibah spread out her gaunt figure across the door, and seemed really
to increase in bulk; looking the more terrible, also, because there was
so much terror and agitation in her heart. But Judge Pyncheon's
evident purpose of forcing a passage was interrupted by a voice from
the inner room; a weak, tremulous, wailing voice, indicating helpless
alarm, with no more energy for self-defence than belongs to a
frightened infant.
"Hepzibah, Hepzibah!" cried the voice; "go down on your knees to him!
Kiss his feet! Entreat him not to come in! Oh, let him have mercy on
me! Mercy! mercy!"
For the instant, it appeared doubtful whether it were not the Judge's
resolute purpose to set Hepzibah aside, and step across the threshold
into the parlor, whence issued that broken and miserable murmur of
entreaty. It was not pity that restrained him, for, at the first sound
of the enfeebled voice, a red fire kindled in his eyes, and he made a
quick pace forward, with something inexpressibly fierce and grim
darkening forth, as it were, out of the whole man. To know Judge
Pyncheon was to see him at that moment. After such a revelation, let
him smile with what sultriness he would, he could much sooner turn
grapes purple, or pumpkins yellow, than melt the iron-branded
impression out of the beholder's memory. And it rendered his aspect
not the less, but more frightful, that it seemed not to express wrath
or hatred, but a certain hot fellness of purpose, which annihilated
everything but itself.
Yet, after all, are we not slandering an excellent and amiable man?
Look at the Judge now! He is apparently conscious of having erred, in
too energetically pressing his deeds of loving-kindness on persons
unable to appreciate them. He will await their better mood, and hold
himself as ready to assist them then as at this moment. As he draws
back from the door, an all-comprehensive benignity blazes from his
visage, indicating that he gathers Hepzibah, little Phoebe, and the
invisible Clifford, all three, together with the whole world besides,
into his immense heart, and gives them a warm bath in its flood of
affection.
"You do me great wrong, dear Cousin Hepzibah!" said he, first kindly
offering her his hand, and then drawing on his glove preparatory to
departure. "Very great wrong! But I forgive it, and will study to make
you think better of me. Of course, our poor Clifford being in so
unhappy a state of mind, I cannot think of urging an interview at
present. But I shall watch over his welfare as if he were my own
beloved brother; nor do I at all despair, my dear cousin, of
constraining both him and you to acknowledge your injustice. When that
shall happen, I desire no other revenge than your acceptance of the
best offices in my power to do you."
With a bow to Hepzibah, and a degree of paternal benevolence in his
parting nod to Phoebe, the Judge left the shop, and went smiling along
the street. As is customary with the rich, when they aim at the honors
of a republic, he apologized, as it were, to the people, for his
wealth, prosperity, and elevated station, by a free and hearty manner
towards those who knew him; putting off the more of his dignity in due
proportion with the humbleness of the man whom he saluted, and thereby
proving a haughty consciousness of his advantages as irrefragably as if
he had marched forth preceded by a troop of lackeys to clear the way.
On this particular forenoon, so excessive was the warmth of Judge
Pyncheon's kindly aspect, that (such, at least, was the rumor about
town) an extra passage of the water-carts was found essential, in order
to lay the dust occasioned by so much extra sunshine!
No sooner had he disappeared than Hepzibah grew deadly white, and,
staggering towards Phoebe, let her head fall on the young girl's
shoulder.
"O Phoebe!" murmured she, "that man has been the horror of my life!
Shall I never, never have the courage,--will my voice never cease from
trembling long enough to let me tell him what he is?"
"Is he so very wicked?" asked Phoebe. "Yet his offers were surely
kind!"
"Do not speak of them,--he has a heart of iron!" rejoined Hepzibah.
"Go, now, and talk to Clifford! Amuse and keep him quiet! It would
disturb him wretchedly to see me so agitated as I am. There, go, dear
child, and I will try to look after the shop."
Phoebe went accordingly, but perplexed herself, meanwhile, with queries
as to the purport of the scene which she had just witnessed, and also
whether judges, clergymen, and other characters of that eminent stamp
and respectability, could really, in any single instance, be otherwise
than just and upright men. A doubt of this nature has a most
disturbing influence, and, if shown to be a fact, comes with fearful
and startling effect on minds of the trim, orderly, and limit-loving
class, in which we find our little country-girl. Dispositions more
boldly speculative may derive a stern enjoyment from the discovery,
since there must be evil in the world, that a high man is as likely to
grasp his share of it as a low one. A wider scope of view, and a
deeper insight, may see rank, dignity, and station, all proved
illusory, so far as regards their claim to human reverence, and yet not
feel as if the universe were thereby tumbled headlong into chaos. But
Phoebe, in order to keep the universe in its old place, was fain to
smother, in some degree, her own intuitions as to Judge Pyncheon's
character. And as for her cousin's testimony in disparagement of it,
she concluded that Hepzibah's judgment was embittered by one of those
family feuds which render hatred the more deadly by the dead and
corrupted love that they intermingle with its native poison.
| The Pyncheon of To-Day: The little boy who had bought gingerbread from Hepzibah on the first day returns on an errand for his mother. This little urchin was the very emblem of Father Time, in his all-devouring appetite for gingerbread men and things and because he looked almost as youthful as if he had just been made. The boy, whose name is Ned Higgins, asks for his mother how Old Maid Pyncheon's brother is doing. Phoebe tells him nothing. Judge Jaffrey Pyncheon enters the store and introduces himself to Phoebe. Judge Jaffrey attempts to kiss her but Phoebe draws back from him. His face hardens at her refusal, and Phoebe realizes that this is the stern man in Holgrave's daguerreotype. Phoebe, seeing the Colonel Pyncheon in his descendant the Judge, wonders whether the weaknesses and defects of the Colonel and his crime had been passed down through the generations. Yet Judge Pyncheon almost immediately less stern, and even compliments her. Phoebe finds important comparisons between rumors about Colonel Pyncheon and facts about the Judge. Phoebe tells Judge Pyncheon that a poor, gentle, childlike man has arrived at the house. Judge Pyncheon realizes that Phoebe knows little of Clifford's history. Phoebe wants to fetch Hepzibah, but Judge Pyncheon is determined to go in the house himself unannounced. He does so and finds Hepzibah, her scowl greater than ever. Judge Pyncheon tells Hepzibah that Clifford belongs to all of them and that he knows how much Clifford requires with his delicate taste and love of the beautiful. He offers to take Clifford off of Hepzibah's hands, but Hepzibah claims that leaving the house would never suit Clifford. Judge Pyncheon demands to see Clifford. Judge Pyncheon appears to be an intimidating man, but he has a resolute sense of purpose and errs mostly in energetically pressing his deeds of kindness on others. When the Judge leaves, Hepzibah grows deadly white and laments her condition to Phoebe. When Phoebe claims that Judge Pyncheon does not have a wicked purpose, Hepzibah says that he has a heart of iron. | summary |
PHOEBE, on entering the shop, beheld there the already familiar face of
the little devourer--if we can reckon his mighty deeds aright--of Jim
Crow, the elephant, the camel, the dromedaries, and the locomotive.
Having expended his private fortune, on the two preceding days, in the
purchase of the above unheard-of luxuries, the young gentleman's
present errand was on the part of his mother, in quest of three eggs
and half a pound of raisins. These articles Phoebe accordingly
supplied, and, as a mark of gratitude for his previous patronage, and a
slight super-added morsel after breakfast, put likewise into his hand a
whale! The great fish, reversing his experience with the prophet of
Nineveh, immediately began his progress down the same red pathway of
fate whither so varied a caravan had preceded him. This remarkable
urchin, in truth, was the very emblem of old Father Time, both in
respect of his all-devouring appetite for men and things, and because
he, as well as Time, after ingulfing thus much of creation, looked
almost as youthful as if he had been just that moment made.
After partly closing the door, the child turned back, and mumbled
something to Phoebe, which, as the whale was but half disposed of, she
could not perfectly understand.
"What did you say, my little fellow?" asked she.
"Mother wants to know" repeated Ned Higgins more distinctly, "how Old
Maid Pyncheon's brother does? Folks say he has got home."
"My cousin Hepzibah's brother?" exclaimed Phoebe, surprised at this
sudden explanation of the relationship between Hepzibah and her guest.
"Her brother! And where can he have been?"
The little boy only put his thumb to his broad snub-nose, with that
look of shrewdness which a child, spending much of his time in the
street, so soon learns to throw over his features, however
unintelligent in themselves. Then as Phoebe continued to gaze at him,
without answering his mother's message, he took his departure.
As the child went down the steps, a gentleman ascended them, and made
his entrance into the shop. It was the portly, and, had it possessed
the advantage of a little more height, would have been the stately
figure of a man considerably in the decline of life, dressed in a black
suit of some thin stuff, resembling broadcloth as closely as possible.
A gold-headed cane, of rare Oriental wood, added materially to the high
respectability of his aspect, as did also a neckcloth of the utmost
snowy purity, and the conscientious polish of his boots. His dark,
square countenance, with its almost shaggy depth of eyebrows, was
naturally impressive, and would, perhaps, have been rather stern, had
not the gentleman considerately taken upon himself to mitigate the
harsh effect by a look of exceeding good-humor and benevolence. Owing,
however, to a somewhat massive accumulation of animal substance about
the lower region of his face, the look was, perhaps, unctuous rather
than spiritual, and had, so to speak, a kind of fleshly effulgence, not
altogether so satisfactory as he doubtless intended it to be. A
susceptible observer, at any rate, might have regarded it as affording
very little evidence of the general benignity of soul whereof it
purported to be the outward reflection. And if the observer chanced to
be ill-natured, as well as acute and susceptible, he would probably
suspect that the smile on the gentleman's face was a good deal akin to
the shine on his boots, and that each must have cost him and his
boot-black, respectively, a good deal of hard labor to bring out and
preserve them.
As the stranger entered the little shop, where the projection of the
second story and the thick foliage of the elm-tree, as well as the
commodities at the window, created a sort of gray medium, his smile
grew as intense as if he had set his heart on counteracting the whole
gloom of the atmosphere (besides any moral gloom pertaining to Hepzibah
and her inmates) by the unassisted light of his countenance. On
perceiving a young rose-bud of a girl, instead of the gaunt presence of
the old maid, a look of surprise was manifest. He at first knit his
brows; then smiled with more unctuous benignity than ever.
"Ah, I see how it is!" said he in a deep voice,--a voice which, had it
come from the throat of an uncultivated man, would have been gruff,
but, by dint of careful training, was now sufficiently agreeable,--"I
was not aware that Miss Hepzibah Pyncheon had commenced business under
such favorable auspices. You are her assistant, I suppose?"
"I certainly am," answered Phoebe, and added, with a little air of
lady-like assumption (for, civil as the gentleman was, he evidently
took her to be a young person serving for wages), "I am a cousin of
Miss Hepzibah, on a visit to her."
"Her cousin?--and from the country? Pray pardon me, then," said the
gentleman, bowing and smiling, as Phoebe never had been bowed to nor
smiled on before; "in that case, we must be better acquainted; for,
unless I am sadly mistaken, you are my own little kinswoman likewise!
Let me see,--Mary?--Dolly?--Phoebe?--yes, Phoebe is the name! Is it
possible that you are Phoebe Pyncheon, only child of my dear cousin and
classmate, Arthur? Ah, I see your father now, about your mouth! Yes,
yes! we must be better acquainted! I am your kinsman, my dear. Surely
you must have heard of Judge Pyncheon?"
As Phoebe curtsied in reply, the Judge bent forward, with the
pardonable and even praiseworthy purpose--considering the nearness of
blood and the difference of age--of bestowing on his young relative a
kiss of acknowledged kindred and natural affection. Unfortunately
(without design, or only with such instinctive design as gives no
account of itself to the intellect) Phoebe, just at the critical
moment, drew back; so that her highly respectable kinsman, with his
body bent over the counter and his lips protruded, was betrayed into
the rather absurd predicament of kissing the empty air. It was a
modern parallel to the case of Ixion embracing a cloud, and was so much
the more ridiculous as the Judge prided himself on eschewing all airy
matter, and never mistaking a shadow for a substance. The truth
was,--and it is Phoebe's only excuse,--that, although Judge Pyncheon's
glowing benignity might not be absolutely unpleasant to the feminine
beholder, with the width of a street, or even an ordinary-sized room,
interposed between, yet it became quite too intense, when this dark,
full-fed physiognomy (so roughly bearded, too, that no razor could ever
make it smooth) sought to bring itself into actual contact with the
object of its regards. The man, the sex, somehow or other, was
entirely too prominent in the Judge's demonstrations of that sort.
Phoebe's eyes sank, and, without knowing why, she felt herself blushing
deeply under his look. Yet she had been kissed before, and without
any particular squeamishness, by perhaps half a dozen different
cousins, younger as well as older than this dark-browned,
grisly-bearded, white-neck-clothed, and unctuously-benevolent Judge!
Then, why not by him?
On raising her eyes, Phoebe was startled by the change in Judge
Pyncheon's face. It was quite as striking, allowing for the difference
of scale, as that betwixt a landscape under a broad sunshine and just
before a thunder-storm; not that it had the passionate intensity of the
latter aspect, but was cold, hard, immitigable, like a day-long
brooding cloud.
"Dear me! what is to be done now?" thought the country-girl to herself.
"He looks as if there were nothing softer in him than a rock, nor
milder than the east wind! I meant no harm! Since he is really my
cousin, I would have let him kiss me, if I could!"
Then, all at once, it struck Phoebe that this very Judge Pyncheon was
the original of the miniature which the daguerreotypist had shown her
in the garden, and that the hard, stern, relentless look, now on his
face, was the same that the sun had so inflexibly persisted in bringing
out. Was it, therefore, no momentary mood, but, however skilfully
concealed, the settled temper of his life? And not merely so, but was
it hereditary in him, and transmitted down, as a precious heirloom,
from that bearded ancestor, in whose picture both the expression and,
to a singular degree, the features of the modern Judge were shown as by
a kind of prophecy? A deeper philosopher than Phoebe might have found
something very terrible in this idea. It implied that the weaknesses
and defects, the bad passions, the mean tendencies, and the moral
diseases which lead to crime are handed down from one generation to
another, by a far surer process of transmission than human law has been
able to establish in respect to the riches and honors which it seeks to
entail upon posterity.
But, as it happened, scarcely had Phoebe's eyes rested again on the
Judge's countenance than all its ugly sternness vanished; and she found
herself quite overpowered by the sultry, dog-day heat, as it were, of
benevolence, which this excellent man diffused out of his great heart
into the surrounding atmosphere,--very much like a serpent, which, as a
preliminary to fascination, is said to fill the air with his peculiar
odor.
"I like that, Cousin Phoebe!" cried he, with an emphatic nod of
approbation. "I like it much, my little cousin! You are a good child,
and know how to take care of yourself. A young girl--especially if she
be a very pretty one--can never be too chary of her lips."
"Indeed, sir," said Phoebe, trying to laugh the matter off, "I did not
mean to be unkind."
Nevertheless, whether or no it were entirely owing to the inauspicious
commencement of their acquaintance, she still acted under a certain
reserve, which was by no means customary to her frank and genial
nature. The fantasy would not quit her, that the original Puritan, of
whom she had heard so many sombre traditions,--the progenitor of the
whole race of New England Pyncheons, the founder of the House of the
Seven Gables, and who had died so strangely in it,--had now stept into
the shop. In these days of off-hand equipment, the matter was easily
enough arranged. On his arrival from the other world, he had merely
found it necessary to spend a quarter of an hour at a barber's, who had
trimmed down the Puritan's full beard into a pair of grizzled whiskers,
then, patronizing a ready-made clothing establishment, he had exchanged
his velvet doublet and sable cloak, with the richly worked band under
his chin, for a white collar and cravat, coat, vest, and pantaloons;
and lastly, putting aside his steel-hilted broadsword to take up a
gold-headed cane, the Colonel Pyncheon of two centuries ago steps
forward as the Judge of the passing moment!
Of course, Phoebe was far too sensible a girl to entertain this idea in
any other way than as matter for a smile. Possibly, also, could the
two personages have stood together before her eye, many points of
difference would have been perceptible, and perhaps only a general
resemblance. The long lapse of intervening years, in a climate so
unlike that which had fostered the ancestral Englishman, must
inevitably have wrought important changes in the physical system of his
descendant. The Judge's volume of muscle could hardly be the same as
the Colonel's; there was undoubtedly less beef in him. Though looked
upon as a weighty man among his contemporaries in respect of animal
substance, and as favored with a remarkable degree of fundamental
development, well adapting him for the judicial bench, we conceive that
the modern Judge Pyncheon, if weighed in the same balance with his
ancestor, would have required at least an old-fashioned fifty-six to
keep the scale in equilibrio. Then the Judge's face had lost the ruddy
English hue that showed its warmth through all the duskiness of the
Colonel's weather-beaten cheek, and had taken a sallow shade, the
established complexion of his countrymen. If we mistake not, moreover,
a certain quality of nervousness had become more or less manifest, even
in so solid a specimen of Puritan descent as the gentleman now under
discussion. As one of its effects, it bestowed on his countenance a
quicker mobility than the old Englishman's had possessed, and keener
vivacity, but at the expense of a sturdier something, on which these
acute endowments seemed to act like dissolving acids. This process,
for aught we know, may belong to the great system of human progress,
which, with every ascending footstep, as it diminishes the necessity
for animal force, may be destined gradually to spiritualize us, by
refining away our grosser attributes of body. If so, Judge Pyncheon
could endure a century or two more of such refinement as well as most
other men.
The similarity, intellectual and moral, between the Judge and his
ancestor appears to have been at least as strong as the resemblance of
mien and feature would afford reason to anticipate. In old Colonel
Pyncheon's funeral discourse the clergyman absolutely canonized his
deceased parishioner, and opening, as it were, a vista through the roof
of the church, and thence through the firmament above, showed him
seated, harp in hand, among the crowned choristers of the spiritual
world. On his tombstone, too, the record is highly eulogistic; nor
does history, so far as he holds a place upon its page, assail the
consistency and uprightness of his character. So also, as regards the
Judge Pyncheon of to-day, neither clergyman, nor legal critic, nor
inscriber of tombstones, nor historian of general or local politics,
would venture a word against this eminent person's sincerity as a
Christian, or respectability as a man, or integrity as a judge, or
courage and faithfulness as the often-tried representative of his
political party. But, besides these cold, formal, and empty words of
the chisel that inscribes, the voice that speaks, and the pen that
writes, for the public eye and for distant time,--and which inevitably
lose much of their truth and freedom by the fatal consciousness of so
doing,--there were traditions about the ancestor, and private diurnal
gossip about the Judge, remarkably accordant in their testimony. It is
often instructive to take the woman's, the private and domestic, view
of a public man; nor can anything be more curious than the vast
discrepancy between portraits intended for engraving and the
pencil-sketches that pass from hand to hand behind the original's back.
For example: tradition affirmed that the Puritan had been greedy of
wealth; the Judge, too, with all the show of liberal expenditure, was
said to be as close-fisted as if his gripe were of iron. The ancestor
had clothed himself in a grim assumption of kindliness, a rough
heartiness of word and manner, which most people took to be the genuine
warmth of nature, making its way through the thick and inflexible hide
of a manly character. His descendant, in compliance with the
requirements of a nicer age, had etherealized this rude benevolence
into that broad benignity of smile wherewith he shone like a noonday
sun along the streets, or glowed like a household fire in the
drawing-rooms of his private acquaintance. The Puritan--if not belied
by some singular stories, murmured, even at this day, under the
narrator's breath--had fallen into certain transgressions to which men
of his great animal development, whatever their faith or principles,
must continue liable, until they put off impurity, along with the gross
earthly substance that involves it. We must not stain our page with
any contemporary scandal, to a similar purport, that may have been
whispered against the Judge. The Puritan, again, an autocrat in his
own household, had worn out three wives, and, merely by the remorseless
weight and hardness of his character in the conjugal relation, had sent
them, one after another, broken-hearted, to their graves. Here the
parallel, in some sort, fails. The Judge had wedded but a single wife,
and lost her in the third or fourth year of their marriage. There was
a fable, however,--for such we choose to consider it, though, not
impossibly, typical of Judge Pyncheon's marital deportment,--that the
lady got her death-blow in the honeymoon, and never smiled again,
because her husband compelled her to serve him with coffee every
morning at his bedside, in token of fealty to her liege-lord and master.
But it is too fruitful a subject, this of hereditary resemblances,--the
frequent recurrence of which, in a direct line, is truly unaccountable,
when we consider how large an accumulation of ancestry lies behind
every man at the distance of one or two centuries. We shall only add,
therefore, that the Puritan--so, at least, says chimney-corner
tradition, which often preserves traits of character with marvellous
fidelity--was bold, imperious, relentless, crafty; laying his purposes
deep, and following them out with an inveteracy of pursuit that knew
neither rest nor conscience; trampling on the weak, and, when essential
to his ends, doing his utmost to beat down the strong. Whether the
Judge in any degree resembled him, the further progress of our
narrative may show.
Scarcely any of the items in the above-drawn parallel occurred to
Phoebe, whose country birth and residence, in truth, had left her
pitifully ignorant of most of the family traditions, which lingered,
like cobwebs and incrustations of smoke, about the rooms and
chimney-corners of the House of the Seven Gables. Yet there was a
circumstance, very trifling in itself, which impressed her with an odd
degree of horror. She had heard of the anathema flung by Maule, the
executed wizard, against Colonel Pyncheon and his posterity,--that God
would give them blood to drink,--and likewise of the popular notion,
that this miraculous blood might now and then be heard gurgling in
their throats. The latter scandal--as became a person of sense, and,
more especially, a member of the Pyncheon family--Phoebe had set down
for the absurdity which it unquestionably was. But ancient
superstitions, after being steeped in human hearts and embodied in
human breath, and passing from lip to ear in manifold repetition,
through a series of generations, become imbued with an effect of homely
truth. The smoke of the domestic hearth has scented them through and
through. By long transmission among household facts, they grow to look
like them, and have such a familiar way of making themselves at home
that their influence is usually greater than we suspect. Thus it
happened, that when Phoebe heard a certain noise in Judge Pyncheon's
throat,--rather habitual with him, not altogether voluntary, yet
indicative of nothing, unless it were a slight bronchial complaint, or,
as some people hinted, an apoplectic symptom,--when the girl heard this
queer and awkward ingurgitation (which the writer never did hear, and
therefore cannot describe), she very foolishly started, and clasped her
hands.
Of course, it was exceedingly ridiculous in Phoebe to be discomposed by
such a trifle, and still more unpardonable to show her discomposure to
the individual most concerned in it. But the incident chimed in so
oddly with her previous fancies about the Colonel and the Judge, that,
for the moment, it seemed quite to mingle their identity.
"What is the matter with you, young woman?" said Judge Pyncheon, giving
her one of his harsh looks. "Are you afraid of anything?"
"Oh, nothing, sir--nothing in the world!" answered Phoebe, with a
little laugh of vexation at herself. "But perhaps you wish to speak
with my cousin Hepzibah. Shall I call her?"
"Stay a moment, if you please," said the Judge, again beaming sunshine
out of his face. "You seem to be a little nervous this morning. The
town air, Cousin Phoebe, does not agree with your good, wholesome
country habits. Or has anything happened to disturb you?--anything
remarkable in Cousin Hepzibah's family?-- An arrival, eh? I thought
so! No wonder you are out of sorts, my little cousin. To be an inmate
with such a guest may well startle an innocent young girl!"
"You quite puzzle me, sir," replied Phoebe, gazing inquiringly at the
Judge. "There is no frightful guest in the house, but only a poor,
gentle, childlike man, whom I believe to be Cousin Hepzibah's brother.
I am afraid (but you, sir, will know better than I) that he is not
quite in his sound senses; but so mild and quiet he seems to be, that a
mother might trust her baby with him; and I think he would play with
the baby as if he were only a few years older than itself. He startle
me!--Oh, no indeed!"
"I rejoice to hear so favorable and so ingenuous an account of my
cousin Clifford," said the benevolent Judge. "Many years ago, when we
were boys and young men together, I had a great affection for him, and
still feel a tender interest in all his concerns. You say, Cousin
Phoebe, he appears to be weak minded. Heaven grant him at least enough
of intellect to repent of his past sins!"
"Nobody, I fancy," observed Phoebe, "can have fewer to repent of."
"And is it possible, my dear," rejoined the Judge, with a commiserating
look, "that you have never heard of Clifford Pyncheon?--that you know
nothing of his history? Well, it is all right; and your mother has
shown a very proper regard for the good name of the family with which
she connected herself. Believe the best you can of this unfortunate
person, and hope the best! It is a rule which Christians should always
follow, in their judgments of one another; and especially is it right
and wise among near relatives, whose characters have necessarily a
degree of mutual dependence. But is Clifford in the parlor? I will
just step in and see."
"Perhaps, sir, I had better call my cousin Hepzibah," said Phoebe;
hardly knowing, however, whether she ought to obstruct the entrance of
so affectionate a kinsman into the private regions of the house. "Her
brother seemed to be just falling asleep after breakfast; and I am sure
she would not like him to be disturbed. Pray, sir, let me give her
notice!"
But the Judge showed a singular determination to enter unannounced; and
as Phoebe, with the vivacity of a person whose movements unconsciously
answer to her thoughts, had stepped towards the door, he used little or
no ceremony in putting her aside.
"No, no, Miss Phoebe!" said Judge Pyncheon in a voice as deep as a
thunder-growl, and with a frown as black as the cloud whence it issues.
"Stay you here! I know the house, and know my cousin Hepzibah, and know
her brother Clifford likewise.--nor need my little country cousin put
herself to the trouble of announcing me!"--in these latter words, by
the bye, there were symptoms of a change from his sudden harshness into
his previous benignity of manner. "I am at home here, Phoebe, you must
recollect, and you are the stranger. I will just step in, therefore,
and see for myself how Clifford is, and assure him and Hepzibah of my
kindly feelings and best wishes. It is right, at this juncture, that
they should both hear from my own lips how much I desire to serve them.
Ha! here is Hepzibah herself!"
Such was the case. The vibrations of the Judge's voice had reached the
old gentlewoman in the parlor, where she sat, with face averted,
waiting on her brother's slumber. She now issued forth, as would
appear, to defend the entrance, looking, we must needs say, amazingly
like the dragon which, in fairy tales, is wont to be the guardian over
an enchanted beauty. The habitual scowl of her brow was undeniably too
fierce, at this moment, to pass itself off on the innocent score of
near-sightedness; and it was bent on Judge Pyncheon in a way that
seemed to confound, if not alarm him, so inadequately had he estimated
the moral force of a deeply grounded antipathy. She made a repelling
gesture with her hand, and stood a perfect picture of prohibition, at
full length, in the dark frame of the doorway. But we must betray
Hepzibah's secret, and confess that the native timorousness of her
character even now developed itself in a quick tremor, which, to her
own perception, set each of her joints at variance with its fellows.
Possibly, the Judge was aware how little true hardihood lay behind
Hepzibah's formidable front. At any rate, being a gentleman of steady
nerves, he soon recovered himself, and failed not to approach his
cousin with outstretched hand; adopting the sensible precaution,
however, to cover his advance with a smile, so broad and sultry, that,
had it been only half as warm as it looked, a trellis of grapes might
at once have turned purple under its summer-like exposure. It may have
been his purpose, indeed, to melt poor Hepzibah on the spot, as if she
were a figure of yellow wax.
"Hepzibah, my beloved cousin, I am rejoiced!" exclaimed the Judge most
emphatically. "Now, at length, you have something to live for. Yes,
and all of us, let me say, your friends and kindred, have more to live
for than we had yesterday. I have lost no time in hastening to offer
any assistance in my power towards making Clifford comfortable. He
belongs to us all. I know how much he requires,--how much he used to
require,--with his delicate taste, and his love of the beautiful.
Anything in my house,--pictures, books, wine, luxuries of the
table,--he may command them all! It would afford me most heartfelt
gratification to see him! Shall I step in, this moment?"
"No," replied Hepzibah, her voice quivering too painfully to allow of
many words. "He cannot see visitors!"
"A visitor, my dear cousin!--do you call me so?" cried the Judge, whose
sensibility, it seems, was hurt by the coldness of the phrase. "Nay,
then, let me be Clifford's host, and your own likewise. Come at once
to my house. The country air, and all the conveniences,--I may say
luxuries,--that I have gathered about me, will do wonders for him. And
you and I, dear Hepzibah, will consult together, and watch together,
and labor together, to make our dear Clifford happy. Come! why should
we make more words about what is both a duty and a pleasure on my part?
Come to me at once!"
On hearing these so hospitable offers, and such generous recognition of
the claims of kindred, Phoebe felt very much in the mood of running up
to Judge Pyncheon, and giving him, of her own accord, the kiss from
which she had so recently shrunk away. It was quite otherwise with
Hepzibah; the Judge's smile seemed to operate on her acerbity of heart
like sunshine upon vinegar, making it ten times sourer than ever.
"Clifford," said she,--still too agitated to utter more than an abrupt
sentence,--"Clifford has a home here!"
"May Heaven forgive you, Hepzibah," said Judge Pyncheon,--reverently
lifting his eyes towards that high court of equity to which he
appealed,--"if you suffer any ancient prejudice or animosity to weigh
with you in this matter. I stand here with an open heart, willing and
anxious to receive yourself and Clifford into it. Do not refuse my
good offices,--my earnest propositions for your welfare! They are such,
in all respects, as it behooves your nearest kinsman to make. It will
be a heavy responsibility, cousin, if you confine your brother to this
dismal house and stifled air, when the delightful freedom of my
country-seat is at his command."
"It would never suit Clifford," said Hepzibah, as briefly as before.
"Woman!" broke forth the Judge, giving way to his resentment, "what is
the meaning of all this? Have you other resources? Nay, I suspected as
much! Take care, Hepzibah, take care! Clifford is on the brink of as
black a ruin as ever befell him yet! But why do I talk with you, woman
as you are? Make way!--I must see Clifford!"
Hepzibah spread out her gaunt figure across the door, and seemed really
to increase in bulk; looking the more terrible, also, because there was
so much terror and agitation in her heart. But Judge Pyncheon's
evident purpose of forcing a passage was interrupted by a voice from
the inner room; a weak, tremulous, wailing voice, indicating helpless
alarm, with no more energy for self-defence than belongs to a
frightened infant.
"Hepzibah, Hepzibah!" cried the voice; "go down on your knees to him!
Kiss his feet! Entreat him not to come in! Oh, let him have mercy on
me! Mercy! mercy!"
For the instant, it appeared doubtful whether it were not the Judge's
resolute purpose to set Hepzibah aside, and step across the threshold
into the parlor, whence issued that broken and miserable murmur of
entreaty. It was not pity that restrained him, for, at the first sound
of the enfeebled voice, a red fire kindled in his eyes, and he made a
quick pace forward, with something inexpressibly fierce and grim
darkening forth, as it were, out of the whole man. To know Judge
Pyncheon was to see him at that moment. After such a revelation, let
him smile with what sultriness he would, he could much sooner turn
grapes purple, or pumpkins yellow, than melt the iron-branded
impression out of the beholder's memory. And it rendered his aspect
not the less, but more frightful, that it seemed not to express wrath
or hatred, but a certain hot fellness of purpose, which annihilated
everything but itself.
Yet, after all, are we not slandering an excellent and amiable man?
Look at the Judge now! He is apparently conscious of having erred, in
too energetically pressing his deeds of loving-kindness on persons
unable to appreciate them. He will await their better mood, and hold
himself as ready to assist them then as at this moment. As he draws
back from the door, an all-comprehensive benignity blazes from his
visage, indicating that he gathers Hepzibah, little Phoebe, and the
invisible Clifford, all three, together with the whole world besides,
into his immense heart, and gives them a warm bath in its flood of
affection.
"You do me great wrong, dear Cousin Hepzibah!" said he, first kindly
offering her his hand, and then drawing on his glove preparatory to
departure. "Very great wrong! But I forgive it, and will study to make
you think better of me. Of course, our poor Clifford being in so
unhappy a state of mind, I cannot think of urging an interview at
present. But I shall watch over his welfare as if he were my own
beloved brother; nor do I at all despair, my dear cousin, of
constraining both him and you to acknowledge your injustice. When that
shall happen, I desire no other revenge than your acceptance of the
best offices in my power to do you."
With a bow to Hepzibah, and a degree of paternal benevolence in his
parting nod to Phoebe, the Judge left the shop, and went smiling along
the street. As is customary with the rich, when they aim at the honors
of a republic, he apologized, as it were, to the people, for his
wealth, prosperity, and elevated station, by a free and hearty manner
towards those who knew him; putting off the more of his dignity in due
proportion with the humbleness of the man whom he saluted, and thereby
proving a haughty consciousness of his advantages as irrefragably as if
he had marched forth preceded by a troop of lackeys to clear the way.
On this particular forenoon, so excessive was the warmth of Judge
Pyncheon's kindly aspect, that (such, at least, was the rumor about
town) an extra passage of the water-carts was found essential, in order
to lay the dust occasioned by so much extra sunshine!
No sooner had he disappeared than Hepzibah grew deadly white, and,
staggering towards Phoebe, let her head fall on the young girl's
shoulder.
"O Phoebe!" murmured she, "that man has been the horror of my life!
Shall I never, never have the courage,--will my voice never cease from
trembling long enough to let me tell him what he is?"
"Is he so very wicked?" asked Phoebe. "Yet his offers were surely
kind!"
"Do not speak of them,--he has a heart of iron!" rejoined Hepzibah.
"Go, now, and talk to Clifford! Amuse and keep him quiet! It would
disturb him wretchedly to see me so agitated as I am. There, go, dear
child, and I will try to look after the shop."
Phoebe went accordingly, but perplexed herself, meanwhile, with queries
as to the purport of the scene which she had just witnessed, and also
whether judges, clergymen, and other characters of that eminent stamp
and respectability, could really, in any single instance, be otherwise
than just and upright men. A doubt of this nature has a most
disturbing influence, and, if shown to be a fact, comes with fearful
and startling effect on minds of the trim, orderly, and limit-loving
class, in which we find our little country-girl. Dispositions more
boldly speculative may derive a stern enjoyment from the discovery,
since there must be evil in the world, that a high man is as likely to
grasp his share of it as a low one. A wider scope of view, and a
deeper insight, may see rank, dignity, and station, all proved
illusory, so far as regards their claim to human reverence, and yet not
feel as if the universe were thereby tumbled headlong into chaos. But
Phoebe, in order to keep the universe in its old place, was fain to
smother, in some degree, her own intuitions as to Judge Pyncheon's
character. And as for her cousin's testimony in disparagement of it,
she concluded that Hepzibah's judgment was embittered by one of those
family feuds which render hatred the more deadly by the dead and
corrupted love that they intermingle with its native poison.
| Judge Pyncheon is certainly a sinister figure in The House of the Seven Gables, but in this encounter with Phoebe he moves from threatening to more ambiguous to even perhaps benign. Jaffrey is most threatening when he attempts to appear friendly, for it is here where he lays most bare his threatening character and seemingly malevolent intentions. When he smiles at Phoebe to soften his imposing appearance, this smile appears insincere, the attempt of a man to produce an appearance of cordiality where none exists. Phoebe instinctually draws away from the Judge when he approaches to kiss her. This kiss should appear as the most offensive action that the Judge undertakes toward Phoebe, presumptuous and inappropriate, yet it is here that Hawthorne presents the Judge at his most sympathetic. He explicitly states that this was an action of "acknowledged kindred and natural affection," essentially excusing the Judge for this action. The proud man even appears absurd; it is this embarrassment that makes him for the first time a recognizable human. In response to the kiss, the Judge subverts both Phoebe's and the reader's expectations. He becomes stern once more, but soon becomes amiable. When Jaffrey first appears offended by Phoebe's refusal to kiss him, he manifests those qualities of Colonel Pyncheon. Phoebe recognizes that the daguerreotype that she mistook for Colonel Pyncheon in modern dress was actually Judge Pyncheon, creating another link between the two generations. This connection between Judge Pyncheon and the Colonel leads Hawthorne to develop the idea of recurring familial qualities. He finds that the connection between the two men implies that weaknesses and moral diseases can be passed from one generation to another. Judge Pyncheon therefore represents the sins of his ancestor, a claim that Hawthorne bolsters with his extended list of qualities that Judge Pyncheon and Colonel Pyncheon share. The suspicion that Phoebe shows of Judge Pyncheon when she refuses to kiss him soon becomes justifiable when he demands to see Clifford. Although he claims to have an affection for his cousin, his insistence that he must see Clifford becomes threatening. Although he does not yet explain the reason for this aversion, Hawthorne establishes that Hepzibah and Clifford fear the Judge. Hawthorne often refers to Jaffrey as an "honorable" or "excellent man," bestowing positive characteristics on the Judge. However, these qualities do not refer to the Judge's personal qualities, but rather the perception that the public has of Judge Pyncheon. The praise that Hawthorne lavishes on Judge Pyncheon relates only to external perceptions and reputation, rather than to the actual qualities of the man | analysis |
TRULY was there something high, generous, and noble in the native
composition of our poor old Hepzibah! Or else,--and it was quite as
probably the case,--she had been enriched by poverty, developed by
sorrow, elevated by the strong and solitary affection of her life, and
thus endowed with heroism, which never could have characterized her in
what are called happier circumstances. Through dreary years Hepzibah
had looked forward--for the most part despairingly, never with any
confidence of hope, but always with the feeling that it was her
brightest possibility--to the very position in which she now found
herself. In her own behalf, she had asked nothing of Providence but
the opportunity of devoting herself to this brother, whom she had so
loved,--so admired for what he was, or might have been,--and to whom
she had kept her faith, alone of all the world, wholly, unfalteringly,
at every instant, and throughout life. And here, in his late decline,
the lost one had come back out of his long and strange misfortune, and
was thrown on her sympathy, as it seemed, not merely for the bread of
his physical existence, but for everything that should keep him morally
alive. She had responded to the call. She had come forward,--our
poor, gaunt Hepzibah, in her rusty silks, with her rigid joints, and
the sad perversity of her scowl,--ready to do her utmost; and with
affection enough, if that were all, to do a hundred times as much!
There could be few more tearful sights,--and Heaven forgive us if a
smile insist on mingling with our conception of it!--few sights with
truer pathos in them, than Hepzibah presented on that first afternoon.
How patiently did she endeavor to wrap Clifford up in her great, warm
love, and make it all the world to him, so that he should retain no
torturing sense of the coldness and dreariness without! Her little
efforts to amuse him! How pitiful, yet magnanimous, they were!
Remembering his early love of poetry and fiction, she unlocked a
bookcase, and took down several books that had been excellent reading
in their day. There was a volume of Pope, with the Rape of the Lock in
it, and another of the Tatler, and an odd one of Dryden's Miscellanies,
all with tarnished gilding on their covers, and thoughts of tarnished
brilliancy inside. They had no success with Clifford. These, and all
such writers of society, whose new works glow like the rich texture of
a just-woven carpet, must be content to relinquish their charm, for
every reader, after an age or two, and could hardly be supposed to
retain any portion of it for a mind that had utterly lost its estimate
of modes and manners. Hepzibah then took up Rasselas, and began to
read of the Happy Valley, with a vague idea that some secret of a
contented life had there been elaborated, which might at least serve
Clifford and herself for this one day. But the Happy Valley had a
cloud over it. Hepzibah troubled her auditor, moreover, by innumerable
sins of emphasis, which he seemed to detect, without any reference to
the meaning; nor, in fact, did he appear to take much note of the sense
of what she read, but evidently felt the tedium of the lecture, without
harvesting its profit. His sister's voice, too, naturally harsh, had,
in the course of her sorrowful lifetime, contracted a kind of croak,
which, when it once gets into the human throat, is as ineradicable as
sin. In both sexes, occasionally, this lifelong croak, accompanying
each word of joy or sorrow, is one of the symptoms of a settled
melancholy; and wherever it occurs, the whole history of misfortune is
conveyed in its slightest accent. The effect is as if the voice had
been dyed black; or,--if we must use a more moderate simile,--this
miserable croak, running through all the variations of the voice, is
like a black silken thread, on which the crystal beads of speech are
strung, and whence they take their hue. Such voices have put on
mourning for dead hopes; and they ought to die and be buried along with
them!
Discerning that Clifford was not gladdened by her efforts, Hepzibah
searched about the house for the means of more exhilarating pastime.
At one time, her eyes chanced to rest on Alice Pyncheon's harpsichord.
It was a moment of great peril; for,--despite the traditionary awe that
had gathered over this instrument of music, and the dirges which
spiritual fingers were said to play on it,--the devoted sister had
solemn thoughts of thrumming on its chords for Clifford's benefit, and
accompanying the performance with her voice. Poor Clifford! Poor
Hepzibah! Poor harpsichord! All three would have been miserable
together. By some good agency,--possibly, by the unrecognized
interposition of the long-buried Alice herself,--the threatening
calamity was averted.
But the worst of all--the hardest stroke of fate for Hepzibah to
endure, and perhaps for Clifford, too was his invincible distaste for
her appearance. Her features, never the most agreeable, and now harsh
with age and grief, and resentment against the world for his sake; her
dress, and especially her turban; the queer and quaint manners, which
had unconsciously grown upon her in solitude,--such being the poor
gentlewoman's outward characteristics, it is no great marvel, although
the mournfullest of pities, that the instinctive lover of the Beautiful
was fain to turn away his eyes. There was no help for it. It would be
the latest impulse to die within him. In his last extremity, the
expiring breath stealing faintly through Clifford's lips, he would
doubtless press Hepzibah's hand, in fervent recognition of all her
lavished love, and close his eyes,--but not so much to die, as to be
constrained to look no longer on her face! Poor Hepzibah! She took
counsel with herself what might be done, and thought of putting ribbons
on her turban; but, by the instant rush of several guardian angels, was
withheld from an experiment that could hardly have proved less than
fatal to the beloved object of her anxiety.
To be brief, besides Hepzibah's disadvantages of person, there was an
uncouthness pervading all her deeds; a clumsy something, that could but
ill adapt itself for use, and not at all for ornament. She was a grief
to Clifford, and she knew it. In this extremity, the antiquated virgin
turned to Phoebe. No grovelling jealousy was in her heart. Had it
pleased Heaven to crown the heroic fidelity of her life by making her
personally the medium of Clifford's happiness, it would have rewarded
her for all the past, by a joy with no bright tints, indeed, but deep
and true, and worth a thousand gayer ecstasies. This could not be.
She therefore turned to Phoebe, and resigned the task into the young
girl's hands. The latter took it up cheerfully, as she did everything,
but with no sense of a mission to perform, and succeeding all the
better for that same simplicity.
By the involuntary effect of a genial temperament, Phoebe soon grew to
be absolutely essential to the daily comfort, if not the daily life, of
her two forlorn companions. The grime and sordidness of the House of
the Seven Gables seemed to have vanished since her appearance there;
the gnawing tooth of the dry-rot was stayed among the old timbers of
its skeleton frame; the dust had ceased to settle down so densely, from
the antique ceilings, upon the floors and furniture of the rooms
below,--or, at any rate, there was a little housewife, as light-footed
as the breeze that sweeps a garden walk, gliding hither and thither to
brush it all away. The shadows of gloomy events that haunted the else
lonely and desolate apartments; the heavy, breathless scent which death
had left in more than one of the bedchambers, ever since his visits of
long ago,--these were less powerful than the purifying influence
scattered throughout the atmosphere of the household by the presence of
one youthful, fresh, and thoroughly wholesome heart. There was no
morbidness in Phoebe; if there had been, the old Pyncheon House was the
very locality to ripen it into incurable disease. But now her spirit
resembled, in its potency, a minute quantity of ottar of rose in one of
Hepzibah's huge, iron-bound trunks, diffusing its fragrance through the
various articles of linen and wrought-lace, kerchiefs, caps, stockings,
folded dresses, gloves, and whatever else was treasured there. As
every article in the great trunk was the sweeter for the rose-scent, so
did all the thoughts and emotions of Hepzibah and Clifford, sombre as
they might seem, acquire a subtle attribute of happiness from Phoebe's
intermixture with them. Her activity of body, intellect, and heart
impelled her continually to perform the ordinary little toils that
offered themselves around her, and to think the thought proper for the
moment, and to sympathize,--now with the twittering gayety of the
robins in the pear-tree, and now to such a depth as she could with
Hepzibah's dark anxiety, or the vague moan of her brother. This facile
adaptation was at once the symptom of perfect health and its best
preservative.
A nature like Phoebe's has invariably its due influence, but is seldom
regarded with due honor. Its spiritual force, however, may be
partially estimated by the fact of her having found a place for
herself, amid circumstances so stern as those which surrounded the
mistress of the house; and also by the effect which she produced on a
character of so much more mass than her own. For the gaunt, bony
frame and limbs of Hepzibah, as compared with the tiny lightsomeness of
Phoebe's figure, were perhaps in some fit proportion with the moral
weight and substance, respectively, of the woman and the girl.
To the guest,--to Hepzibah's brother,--or Cousin Clifford, as Phoebe
now began to call him,--she was especially necessary. Not that he could
ever be said to converse with her, or often manifest, in any other very
definite mode, his sense of a charm in her society. But if she were a
long while absent he became pettish and nervously restless, pacing the
room to and fro with the uncertainty that characterized all his
movements; or else would sit broodingly in his great chair, resting his
head on his hands, and evincing life only by an electric sparkle of
ill-humor, whenever Hepzibah endeavored to arouse him. Phoebe's
presence, and the contiguity of her fresh life to his blighted one, was
usually all that he required. Indeed, such was the native gush and play
of her spirit, that she was seldom perfectly quiet and undemonstrative,
any more than a fountain ever ceases to dimple and warble with its
flow. She possessed the gift of song, and that, too, so naturally, that
you would as little think of inquiring whence she had caught it, or
what master had taught her, as of asking the same questions about a
bird, in whose small strain of music we recognize the voice of the
Creator as distinctly as in the loudest accents of his thunder. So long
as Phoebe sang, she might stray at her own will about the house.
Clifford was content, whether the sweet, airy homeliness of her tones
came down from the upper chambers, or along the passageway from the
shop, or was sprinkled through the foliage of the pear-tree, inward
from the garden, with the twinkling sunbeams. He would sit quietly,
with a gentle pleasure gleaming over his face, brighter now, and now a
little dimmer, as the song happened to float near him, or was more
remotely heard. It pleased him best, however, when she sat on a low
footstool at his knee.
It is perhaps remarkable, considering her temperament, that Phoebe
oftener chose a strain of pathos than of gayety. But the young and
happy are not ill pleased to temper their life with a transparent
shadow. The deepest pathos of Phoebe's voice and song, moreover, came
sifted through the golden texture of a cheery spirit, and was somehow
so interfused with the quality thence acquired, that one's heart felt
all the lighter for having wept at it. Broad mirth, in the sacred
presence of dark misfortune, would have jarred harshly and irreverently
with the solemn symphony that rolled its undertone through Hepzibah's
and her brother's life. Therefore, it was well that Phoebe so often
chose sad themes, and not amiss that they ceased to be so sad while she
was singing them.
Becoming habituated to her companionship, Clifford readily showed how
capable of imbibing pleasant tints and gleams of cheerful light from
all quarters his nature must originally have been. He grew youthful
while she sat by him. A beauty,--not precisely real, even in its
utmost manifestation, and which a painter would have watched long to
seize and fix upon his canvas, and, after all, in vain,--beauty,
nevertheless, that was not a mere dream, would sometimes play upon and
illuminate his face. It did more than to illuminate; it transfigured
him with an expression that could only be interpreted as the glow of an
exquisite and happy spirit. That gray hair, and those furrows,--with
their record of infinite sorrow so deeply written across his brow, and
so compressed, as with a futile effort to crowd in all the tale, that
the whole inscription was made illegible,--these, for the moment,
vanished. An eye at once tender and acute might have beheld in the man
some shadow of what he was meant to be. Anon, as age came stealing,
like a sad twilight, back over his figure, you would have felt tempted
to hold an argument with Destiny, and affirm, that either this being
should not have been made mortal, or mortal existence should have been
tempered to his qualities. There seemed no necessity for his having
drawn breath at all; the world never wanted him; but, as he had
breathed, it ought always to have been the balmiest of summer air. The
same perplexity will invariably haunt us with regard to natures that
tend to feed exclusively upon the Beautiful, let their earthly fate be
as lenient as it may.
Phoebe, it is probable, had but a very imperfect comprehension of the
character over which she had thrown so beneficent a spell. Nor was it
necessary. The fire upon the hearth can gladden a whole semicircle of
faces round about it, but need not know the individuality of one among
them all. Indeed, there was something too fine and delicate in
Clifford's traits to be perfectly appreciated by one whose sphere lay
so much in the Actual as Phoebe's did. For Clifford, however, the
reality, and simplicity, and thorough homeliness of the girl's nature
were as powerful a charm as any that she possessed. Beauty, it is
true, and beauty almost perfect in its own style, was indispensable.
Had Phoebe been coarse in feature, shaped clumsily, of a harsh voice,
and uncouthly mannered, she might have been rich with all good gifts,
beneath this unfortunate exterior, and still, so long as she wore the
guise of woman, she would have shocked Clifford, and depressed him by
her lack of beauty. But nothing more beautiful--nothing prettier, at
least--was ever made than Phoebe. And, therefore, to this man,--whose
whole poor and impalpable enjoyment of existence heretofore, and until
both his heart and fancy died within him, had been a dream,--whose
images of women had more and more lost their warmth and substance, and
been frozen, like the pictures of secluded artists, into the chillest
ideality,--to him, this little figure of the cheeriest household life
was just what he required to bring him back into the breathing world.
Persons who have wandered, or been expelled, out of the common track of
things, even were it for a better system, desire nothing so much as to
be led back. They shiver in their loneliness, be it on a mountain-top
or in a dungeon. Now, Phoebe's presence made a home about her,--that
very sphere which the outcast, the prisoner, the potentate,--the wretch
beneath mankind, the wretch aside from it, or the wretch above
it,--instinctively pines after,--a home! She was real! Holding her
hand, you felt something; a tender something; a substance, and a warm
one: and so long as you should feel its grasp, soft as it was, you
might be certain that your place was good in the whole sympathetic
chain of human nature. The world was no longer a delusion.
By looking a little further in this direction, we might suggest an
explanation of an often-suggested mystery. Why are poets so apt to
choose their mates, not for any similarity of poetic endowment, but for
qualities which might make the happiness of the rudest handicraftsman
as well as that of the ideal craftsman of the spirit? Because,
probably, at his highest elevation, the poet needs no human
intercourse; but he finds it dreary to descend, and be a stranger.
There was something very beautiful in the relation that grew up between
this pair, so closely and constantly linked together, yet with such a
waste of gloomy and mysterious years from his birthday to hers. On
Clifford's part it was the feeling of a man naturally endowed with the
liveliest sensibility to feminine influence, but who had never quaffed
the cup of passionate love, and knew that it was now too late. He knew
it, with the instinctive delicacy that had survived his intellectual
decay. Thus, his sentiment for Phoebe, without being paternal, was not
less chaste than if she had been his daughter. He was a man, it is
true, and recognized her as a woman. She was his only representative
of womankind. He took unfailing note of every charm that appertained
to her sex, and saw the ripeness of her lips, and the virginal
development of her bosom. All her little womanly ways, budding out of
her like blossoms on a young fruit-tree, had their effect on him, and
sometimes caused his very heart to tingle with the keenest thrills of
pleasure. At such moments,--for the effect was seldom more than
momentary,--the half-torpid man would be full of harmonious life, just
as a long-silent harp is full of sound, when the musician's fingers
sweep across it. But, after all, it seemed rather a perception, or a
sympathy, than a sentiment belonging to himself as an individual. He
read Phoebe as he would a sweet and simple story; he listened to her as
if she were a verse of household poetry, which God, in requital of his
bleak and dismal lot, had permitted some angel, that most pitied him,
to warble through the house. She was not an actual fact for him, but
the interpretation of all that he lacked on earth brought warmly home
to his conception; so that this mere symbol, or life-like picture, had
almost the comfort of reality.
But we strive in vain to put the idea into words. No adequate
expression of the beauty and profound pathos with which it impresses us
is attainable. This being, made only for happiness, and heretofore so
miserably failing to be happy,--his tendencies so hideously thwarted,
that, some unknown time ago, the delicate springs of his character,
never morally or intellectually strong, had given way, and he was now
imbecile,--this poor, forlorn voyager from the Islands of the Blest, in
a frail bark, on a tempestuous sea, had been flung, by the last
mountain-wave of his shipwreck, into a quiet harbor. There, as he lay
more than half lifeless on the strand, the fragrance of an earthly
rose-bud had come to his nostrils, and, as odors will, had summoned up
reminiscences or visions of all the living and breathing beauty amid
which he should have had his home. With his native susceptibility of
happy influences, he inhales the slight, ethereal rapture into his
soul, and expires!
And how did Phoebe regard Clifford? The girl's was not one of those
natures which are most attracted by what is strange and exceptional in
human character. The path which would best have suited her was the
well-worn track of ordinary life; the companions in whom she would most
have delighted were such as one encounters at every turn. The mystery
which enveloped Clifford, so far as it affected her at all, was an
annoyance, rather than the piquant charm which many women might have
found in it. Still, her native kindliness was brought strongly into
play, not by what was darkly picturesque in his situation, nor so much,
even, by the finer graces of his character, as by the simple appeal of
a heart so forlorn as his to one so full of genuine sympathy as hers.
She gave him an affectionate regard, because he needed so much love,
and seemed to have received so little. With a ready tact, the result
of ever-active and wholesome sensibility, she discerned what was good
for him, and did it. Whatever was morbid in his mind and experience
she ignored; and thereby kept their intercourse healthy, by the
incautious, but, as it were, heaven-directed freedom of her whole
conduct. The sick in mind, and, perhaps, in body, are rendered more
darkly and hopelessly so by the manifold reflection of their disease,
mirrored back from all quarters in the deportment of those about them;
they are compelled to inhale the poison of their own breath, in
infinite repetition. But Phoebe afforded her poor patient a supply of
purer air. She impregnated it, too, not with a wild-flower scent,--for
wildness was no trait of hers,--but with the perfume of garden-roses,
pinks, and other blossoms of much sweetness, which nature and man have
consented together in making grow from summer to summer, and from
century to century. Such a flower was Phoebe in her relation with
Clifford, and such the delight that he inhaled from her.
Yet, it must be said, her petals sometimes drooped a little, in
consequence of the heavy atmosphere about her. She grew more
thoughtful than heretofore. Looking aside at Clifford's face, and
seeing the dim, unsatisfactory elegance and the intellect almost
quenched, she would try to inquire what had been his life. Was he
always thus? Had this veil been over him from his birth?--this veil,
under which far more of his spirit was hidden than revealed, and
through which he so imperfectly discerned the actual world,--or was its
gray texture woven of some dark calamity? Phoebe loved no riddles, and
would have been glad to escape the perplexity of this one.
Nevertheless, there was so far a good result of her meditations on
Clifford's character, that, when her involuntary conjectures, together
with the tendency of every strange circumstance to tell its own story,
had gradually taught her the fact, it had no terrible effect upon her.
Let the world have done him what vast wrong it might, she knew Cousin
Clifford too well--or fancied so--ever to shudder at the touch of his
thin, delicate fingers.
Within a few days after the appearance of this remarkable inmate, the
routine of life had established itself with a good deal of uniformity
in the old house of our narrative. In the morning, very shortly after
breakfast, it was Clifford's custom to fall asleep in his chair; nor,
unless accidentally disturbed, would he emerge from a dense cloud of
slumber or the thinner mists that flitted to and fro, until well
towards noonday. These hours of drowsihead were the season of the old
gentlewoman's attendance on her brother, while Phoebe took charge of
the shop; an arrangement which the public speedily understood, and
evinced their decided preference of the younger shopwoman by the
multiplicity of their calls during her administration of affairs.
Dinner over, Hepzibah took her knitting-work,--a long stocking of gray
yarn, for her brother's winter wear,--and with a sigh, and a scowl of
affectionate farewell to Clifford, and a gesture enjoining watchfulness
on Phoebe, went to take her seat behind the counter. It was now the
young girl's turn to be the nurse,--the guardian, the playmate,--or
whatever is the fitter phrase,--of the gray-haired man.
| Clifford and Phoebe: For years Hepzibah had looked forward to the point at which she now found herself. She had asked for nothing but the opportunity to devote herself to the brother she so loved. She adored giving attention to Clifford, but she also troubled Clifford through innumerable sins of emphasis. The worst burden that she faced from Clifford was his distaste for her appearance. She was a grief to Clifford and she knew it. Phoebe did not quite know the effect that she had on Clifford. For Clifford, Phoebe was the only representative of womankind, yet this sentiment was chaste. He read Phoebe as he would a simple story; she was not an actual fact for him, but the interpretation of all that he had lacked. Phoebe gave him an affectionate regard because he needed so much love and seemed to have received so little. | summary |
TRULY was there something high, generous, and noble in the native
composition of our poor old Hepzibah! Or else,--and it was quite as
probably the case,--she had been enriched by poverty, developed by
sorrow, elevated by the strong and solitary affection of her life, and
thus endowed with heroism, which never could have characterized her in
what are called happier circumstances. Through dreary years Hepzibah
had looked forward--for the most part despairingly, never with any
confidence of hope, but always with the feeling that it was her
brightest possibility--to the very position in which she now found
herself. In her own behalf, she had asked nothing of Providence but
the opportunity of devoting herself to this brother, whom she had so
loved,--so admired for what he was, or might have been,--and to whom
she had kept her faith, alone of all the world, wholly, unfalteringly,
at every instant, and throughout life. And here, in his late decline,
the lost one had come back out of his long and strange misfortune, and
was thrown on her sympathy, as it seemed, not merely for the bread of
his physical existence, but for everything that should keep him morally
alive. She had responded to the call. She had come forward,--our
poor, gaunt Hepzibah, in her rusty silks, with her rigid joints, and
the sad perversity of her scowl,--ready to do her utmost; and with
affection enough, if that were all, to do a hundred times as much!
There could be few more tearful sights,--and Heaven forgive us if a
smile insist on mingling with our conception of it!--few sights with
truer pathos in them, than Hepzibah presented on that first afternoon.
How patiently did she endeavor to wrap Clifford up in her great, warm
love, and make it all the world to him, so that he should retain no
torturing sense of the coldness and dreariness without! Her little
efforts to amuse him! How pitiful, yet magnanimous, they were!
Remembering his early love of poetry and fiction, she unlocked a
bookcase, and took down several books that had been excellent reading
in their day. There was a volume of Pope, with the Rape of the Lock in
it, and another of the Tatler, and an odd one of Dryden's Miscellanies,
all with tarnished gilding on their covers, and thoughts of tarnished
brilliancy inside. They had no success with Clifford. These, and all
such writers of society, whose new works glow like the rich texture of
a just-woven carpet, must be content to relinquish their charm, for
every reader, after an age or two, and could hardly be supposed to
retain any portion of it for a mind that had utterly lost its estimate
of modes and manners. Hepzibah then took up Rasselas, and began to
read of the Happy Valley, with a vague idea that some secret of a
contented life had there been elaborated, which might at least serve
Clifford and herself for this one day. But the Happy Valley had a
cloud over it. Hepzibah troubled her auditor, moreover, by innumerable
sins of emphasis, which he seemed to detect, without any reference to
the meaning; nor, in fact, did he appear to take much note of the sense
of what she read, but evidently felt the tedium of the lecture, without
harvesting its profit. His sister's voice, too, naturally harsh, had,
in the course of her sorrowful lifetime, contracted a kind of croak,
which, when it once gets into the human throat, is as ineradicable as
sin. In both sexes, occasionally, this lifelong croak, accompanying
each word of joy or sorrow, is one of the symptoms of a settled
melancholy; and wherever it occurs, the whole history of misfortune is
conveyed in its slightest accent. The effect is as if the voice had
been dyed black; or,--if we must use a more moderate simile,--this
miserable croak, running through all the variations of the voice, is
like a black silken thread, on which the crystal beads of speech are
strung, and whence they take their hue. Such voices have put on
mourning for dead hopes; and they ought to die and be buried along with
them!
Discerning that Clifford was not gladdened by her efforts, Hepzibah
searched about the house for the means of more exhilarating pastime.
At one time, her eyes chanced to rest on Alice Pyncheon's harpsichord.
It was a moment of great peril; for,--despite the traditionary awe that
had gathered over this instrument of music, and the dirges which
spiritual fingers were said to play on it,--the devoted sister had
solemn thoughts of thrumming on its chords for Clifford's benefit, and
accompanying the performance with her voice. Poor Clifford! Poor
Hepzibah! Poor harpsichord! All three would have been miserable
together. By some good agency,--possibly, by the unrecognized
interposition of the long-buried Alice herself,--the threatening
calamity was averted.
But the worst of all--the hardest stroke of fate for Hepzibah to
endure, and perhaps for Clifford, too was his invincible distaste for
her appearance. Her features, never the most agreeable, and now harsh
with age and grief, and resentment against the world for his sake; her
dress, and especially her turban; the queer and quaint manners, which
had unconsciously grown upon her in solitude,--such being the poor
gentlewoman's outward characteristics, it is no great marvel, although
the mournfullest of pities, that the instinctive lover of the Beautiful
was fain to turn away his eyes. There was no help for it. It would be
the latest impulse to die within him. In his last extremity, the
expiring breath stealing faintly through Clifford's lips, he would
doubtless press Hepzibah's hand, in fervent recognition of all her
lavished love, and close his eyes,--but not so much to die, as to be
constrained to look no longer on her face! Poor Hepzibah! She took
counsel with herself what might be done, and thought of putting ribbons
on her turban; but, by the instant rush of several guardian angels, was
withheld from an experiment that could hardly have proved less than
fatal to the beloved object of her anxiety.
To be brief, besides Hepzibah's disadvantages of person, there was an
uncouthness pervading all her deeds; a clumsy something, that could but
ill adapt itself for use, and not at all for ornament. She was a grief
to Clifford, and she knew it. In this extremity, the antiquated virgin
turned to Phoebe. No grovelling jealousy was in her heart. Had it
pleased Heaven to crown the heroic fidelity of her life by making her
personally the medium of Clifford's happiness, it would have rewarded
her for all the past, by a joy with no bright tints, indeed, but deep
and true, and worth a thousand gayer ecstasies. This could not be.
She therefore turned to Phoebe, and resigned the task into the young
girl's hands. The latter took it up cheerfully, as she did everything,
but with no sense of a mission to perform, and succeeding all the
better for that same simplicity.
By the involuntary effect of a genial temperament, Phoebe soon grew to
be absolutely essential to the daily comfort, if not the daily life, of
her two forlorn companions. The grime and sordidness of the House of
the Seven Gables seemed to have vanished since her appearance there;
the gnawing tooth of the dry-rot was stayed among the old timbers of
its skeleton frame; the dust had ceased to settle down so densely, from
the antique ceilings, upon the floors and furniture of the rooms
below,--or, at any rate, there was a little housewife, as light-footed
as the breeze that sweeps a garden walk, gliding hither and thither to
brush it all away. The shadows of gloomy events that haunted the else
lonely and desolate apartments; the heavy, breathless scent which death
had left in more than one of the bedchambers, ever since his visits of
long ago,--these were less powerful than the purifying influence
scattered throughout the atmosphere of the household by the presence of
one youthful, fresh, and thoroughly wholesome heart. There was no
morbidness in Phoebe; if there had been, the old Pyncheon House was the
very locality to ripen it into incurable disease. But now her spirit
resembled, in its potency, a minute quantity of ottar of rose in one of
Hepzibah's huge, iron-bound trunks, diffusing its fragrance through the
various articles of linen and wrought-lace, kerchiefs, caps, stockings,
folded dresses, gloves, and whatever else was treasured there. As
every article in the great trunk was the sweeter for the rose-scent, so
did all the thoughts and emotions of Hepzibah and Clifford, sombre as
they might seem, acquire a subtle attribute of happiness from Phoebe's
intermixture with them. Her activity of body, intellect, and heart
impelled her continually to perform the ordinary little toils that
offered themselves around her, and to think the thought proper for the
moment, and to sympathize,--now with the twittering gayety of the
robins in the pear-tree, and now to such a depth as she could with
Hepzibah's dark anxiety, or the vague moan of her brother. This facile
adaptation was at once the symptom of perfect health and its best
preservative.
A nature like Phoebe's has invariably its due influence, but is seldom
regarded with due honor. Its spiritual force, however, may be
partially estimated by the fact of her having found a place for
herself, amid circumstances so stern as those which surrounded the
mistress of the house; and also by the effect which she produced on a
character of so much more mass than her own. For the gaunt, bony
frame and limbs of Hepzibah, as compared with the tiny lightsomeness of
Phoebe's figure, were perhaps in some fit proportion with the moral
weight and substance, respectively, of the woman and the girl.
To the guest,--to Hepzibah's brother,--or Cousin Clifford, as Phoebe
now began to call him,--she was especially necessary. Not that he could
ever be said to converse with her, or often manifest, in any other very
definite mode, his sense of a charm in her society. But if she were a
long while absent he became pettish and nervously restless, pacing the
room to and fro with the uncertainty that characterized all his
movements; or else would sit broodingly in his great chair, resting his
head on his hands, and evincing life only by an electric sparkle of
ill-humor, whenever Hepzibah endeavored to arouse him. Phoebe's
presence, and the contiguity of her fresh life to his blighted one, was
usually all that he required. Indeed, such was the native gush and play
of her spirit, that she was seldom perfectly quiet and undemonstrative,
any more than a fountain ever ceases to dimple and warble with its
flow. She possessed the gift of song, and that, too, so naturally, that
you would as little think of inquiring whence she had caught it, or
what master had taught her, as of asking the same questions about a
bird, in whose small strain of music we recognize the voice of the
Creator as distinctly as in the loudest accents of his thunder. So long
as Phoebe sang, she might stray at her own will about the house.
Clifford was content, whether the sweet, airy homeliness of her tones
came down from the upper chambers, or along the passageway from the
shop, or was sprinkled through the foliage of the pear-tree, inward
from the garden, with the twinkling sunbeams. He would sit quietly,
with a gentle pleasure gleaming over his face, brighter now, and now a
little dimmer, as the song happened to float near him, or was more
remotely heard. It pleased him best, however, when she sat on a low
footstool at his knee.
It is perhaps remarkable, considering her temperament, that Phoebe
oftener chose a strain of pathos than of gayety. But the young and
happy are not ill pleased to temper their life with a transparent
shadow. The deepest pathos of Phoebe's voice and song, moreover, came
sifted through the golden texture of a cheery spirit, and was somehow
so interfused with the quality thence acquired, that one's heart felt
all the lighter for having wept at it. Broad mirth, in the sacred
presence of dark misfortune, would have jarred harshly and irreverently
with the solemn symphony that rolled its undertone through Hepzibah's
and her brother's life. Therefore, it was well that Phoebe so often
chose sad themes, and not amiss that they ceased to be so sad while she
was singing them.
Becoming habituated to her companionship, Clifford readily showed how
capable of imbibing pleasant tints and gleams of cheerful light from
all quarters his nature must originally have been. He grew youthful
while she sat by him. A beauty,--not precisely real, even in its
utmost manifestation, and which a painter would have watched long to
seize and fix upon his canvas, and, after all, in vain,--beauty,
nevertheless, that was not a mere dream, would sometimes play upon and
illuminate his face. It did more than to illuminate; it transfigured
him with an expression that could only be interpreted as the glow of an
exquisite and happy spirit. That gray hair, and those furrows,--with
their record of infinite sorrow so deeply written across his brow, and
so compressed, as with a futile effort to crowd in all the tale, that
the whole inscription was made illegible,--these, for the moment,
vanished. An eye at once tender and acute might have beheld in the man
some shadow of what he was meant to be. Anon, as age came stealing,
like a sad twilight, back over his figure, you would have felt tempted
to hold an argument with Destiny, and affirm, that either this being
should not have been made mortal, or mortal existence should have been
tempered to his qualities. There seemed no necessity for his having
drawn breath at all; the world never wanted him; but, as he had
breathed, it ought always to have been the balmiest of summer air. The
same perplexity will invariably haunt us with regard to natures that
tend to feed exclusively upon the Beautiful, let their earthly fate be
as lenient as it may.
Phoebe, it is probable, had but a very imperfect comprehension of the
character over which she had thrown so beneficent a spell. Nor was it
necessary. The fire upon the hearth can gladden a whole semicircle of
faces round about it, but need not know the individuality of one among
them all. Indeed, there was something too fine and delicate in
Clifford's traits to be perfectly appreciated by one whose sphere lay
so much in the Actual as Phoebe's did. For Clifford, however, the
reality, and simplicity, and thorough homeliness of the girl's nature
were as powerful a charm as any that she possessed. Beauty, it is
true, and beauty almost perfect in its own style, was indispensable.
Had Phoebe been coarse in feature, shaped clumsily, of a harsh voice,
and uncouthly mannered, she might have been rich with all good gifts,
beneath this unfortunate exterior, and still, so long as she wore the
guise of woman, she would have shocked Clifford, and depressed him by
her lack of beauty. But nothing more beautiful--nothing prettier, at
least--was ever made than Phoebe. And, therefore, to this man,--whose
whole poor and impalpable enjoyment of existence heretofore, and until
both his heart and fancy died within him, had been a dream,--whose
images of women had more and more lost their warmth and substance, and
been frozen, like the pictures of secluded artists, into the chillest
ideality,--to him, this little figure of the cheeriest household life
was just what he required to bring him back into the breathing world.
Persons who have wandered, or been expelled, out of the common track of
things, even were it for a better system, desire nothing so much as to
be led back. They shiver in their loneliness, be it on a mountain-top
or in a dungeon. Now, Phoebe's presence made a home about her,--that
very sphere which the outcast, the prisoner, the potentate,--the wretch
beneath mankind, the wretch aside from it, or the wretch above
it,--instinctively pines after,--a home! She was real! Holding her
hand, you felt something; a tender something; a substance, and a warm
one: and so long as you should feel its grasp, soft as it was, you
might be certain that your place was good in the whole sympathetic
chain of human nature. The world was no longer a delusion.
By looking a little further in this direction, we might suggest an
explanation of an often-suggested mystery. Why are poets so apt to
choose their mates, not for any similarity of poetic endowment, but for
qualities which might make the happiness of the rudest handicraftsman
as well as that of the ideal craftsman of the spirit? Because,
probably, at his highest elevation, the poet needs no human
intercourse; but he finds it dreary to descend, and be a stranger.
There was something very beautiful in the relation that grew up between
this pair, so closely and constantly linked together, yet with such a
waste of gloomy and mysterious years from his birthday to hers. On
Clifford's part it was the feeling of a man naturally endowed with the
liveliest sensibility to feminine influence, but who had never quaffed
the cup of passionate love, and knew that it was now too late. He knew
it, with the instinctive delicacy that had survived his intellectual
decay. Thus, his sentiment for Phoebe, without being paternal, was not
less chaste than if she had been his daughter. He was a man, it is
true, and recognized her as a woman. She was his only representative
of womankind. He took unfailing note of every charm that appertained
to her sex, and saw the ripeness of her lips, and the virginal
development of her bosom. All her little womanly ways, budding out of
her like blossoms on a young fruit-tree, had their effect on him, and
sometimes caused his very heart to tingle with the keenest thrills of
pleasure. At such moments,--for the effect was seldom more than
momentary,--the half-torpid man would be full of harmonious life, just
as a long-silent harp is full of sound, when the musician's fingers
sweep across it. But, after all, it seemed rather a perception, or a
sympathy, than a sentiment belonging to himself as an individual. He
read Phoebe as he would a sweet and simple story; he listened to her as
if she were a verse of household poetry, which God, in requital of his
bleak and dismal lot, had permitted some angel, that most pitied him,
to warble through the house. She was not an actual fact for him, but
the interpretation of all that he lacked on earth brought warmly home
to his conception; so that this mere symbol, or life-like picture, had
almost the comfort of reality.
But we strive in vain to put the idea into words. No adequate
expression of the beauty and profound pathos with which it impresses us
is attainable. This being, made only for happiness, and heretofore so
miserably failing to be happy,--his tendencies so hideously thwarted,
that, some unknown time ago, the delicate springs of his character,
never morally or intellectually strong, had given way, and he was now
imbecile,--this poor, forlorn voyager from the Islands of the Blest, in
a frail bark, on a tempestuous sea, had been flung, by the last
mountain-wave of his shipwreck, into a quiet harbor. There, as he lay
more than half lifeless on the strand, the fragrance of an earthly
rose-bud had come to his nostrils, and, as odors will, had summoned up
reminiscences or visions of all the living and breathing beauty amid
which he should have had his home. With his native susceptibility of
happy influences, he inhales the slight, ethereal rapture into his
soul, and expires!
And how did Phoebe regard Clifford? The girl's was not one of those
natures which are most attracted by what is strange and exceptional in
human character. The path which would best have suited her was the
well-worn track of ordinary life; the companions in whom she would most
have delighted were such as one encounters at every turn. The mystery
which enveloped Clifford, so far as it affected her at all, was an
annoyance, rather than the piquant charm which many women might have
found in it. Still, her native kindliness was brought strongly into
play, not by what was darkly picturesque in his situation, nor so much,
even, by the finer graces of his character, as by the simple appeal of
a heart so forlorn as his to one so full of genuine sympathy as hers.
She gave him an affectionate regard, because he needed so much love,
and seemed to have received so little. With a ready tact, the result
of ever-active and wholesome sensibility, she discerned what was good
for him, and did it. Whatever was morbid in his mind and experience
she ignored; and thereby kept their intercourse healthy, by the
incautious, but, as it were, heaven-directed freedom of her whole
conduct. The sick in mind, and, perhaps, in body, are rendered more
darkly and hopelessly so by the manifold reflection of their disease,
mirrored back from all quarters in the deportment of those about them;
they are compelled to inhale the poison of their own breath, in
infinite repetition. But Phoebe afforded her poor patient a supply of
purer air. She impregnated it, too, not with a wild-flower scent,--for
wildness was no trait of hers,--but with the perfume of garden-roses,
pinks, and other blossoms of much sweetness, which nature and man have
consented together in making grow from summer to summer, and from
century to century. Such a flower was Phoebe in her relation with
Clifford, and such the delight that he inhaled from her.
Yet, it must be said, her petals sometimes drooped a little, in
consequence of the heavy atmosphere about her. She grew more
thoughtful than heretofore. Looking aside at Clifford's face, and
seeing the dim, unsatisfactory elegance and the intellect almost
quenched, she would try to inquire what had been his life. Was he
always thus? Had this veil been over him from his birth?--this veil,
under which far more of his spirit was hidden than revealed, and
through which he so imperfectly discerned the actual world,--or was its
gray texture woven of some dark calamity? Phoebe loved no riddles, and
would have been glad to escape the perplexity of this one.
Nevertheless, there was so far a good result of her meditations on
Clifford's character, that, when her involuntary conjectures, together
with the tendency of every strange circumstance to tell its own story,
had gradually taught her the fact, it had no terrible effect upon her.
Let the world have done him what vast wrong it might, she knew Cousin
Clifford too well--or fancied so--ever to shudder at the touch of his
thin, delicate fingers.
Within a few days after the appearance of this remarkable inmate, the
routine of life had established itself with a good deal of uniformity
in the old house of our narrative. In the morning, very shortly after
breakfast, it was Clifford's custom to fall asleep in his chair; nor,
unless accidentally disturbed, would he emerge from a dense cloud of
slumber or the thinner mists that flitted to and fro, until well
towards noonday. These hours of drowsihead were the season of the old
gentlewoman's attendance on her brother, while Phoebe took charge of
the shop; an arrangement which the public speedily understood, and
evinced their decided preference of the younger shopwoman by the
multiplicity of their calls during her administration of affairs.
Dinner over, Hepzibah took her knitting-work,--a long stocking of gray
yarn, for her brother's winter wear,--and with a sigh, and a scowl of
affectionate farewell to Clifford, and a gesture enjoining watchfulness
on Phoebe, went to take her seat behind the counter. It was now the
young girl's turn to be the nurse,--the guardian, the playmate,--or
whatever is the fitter phrase,--of the gray-haired man.
| At the beginning of this chapter, Hawthorne returns the focus of the novel to Hepzibah Pyncheon, whose story had been displaced by the arrivals of Phoebe and Clifford. The return of Clifford had been the only event in Hepzibah's life that she anticipated; with his arrival, Hepzibah actually becomes more bereft, for she now has lost any real hope for the future. She now must toil as a shopkeeper indefinitely. She cannot even please her brother, for her dreaded scowl makes her appearance distasteful for a man so obsessed with beauty. Even those small gestures that she makes for Clifford are met with indifference, such as bringing him reading. As part of a larger household, Hepzibah becomes even more marginalized from the rest of society. Since Clifford has such a distaste for his sister's appearance, Phoebe becomes the person with whom Clifford spends the most time. Just as she brought life back to the House of the Seven Gables, Phoebe restores Clifford, who responds to her beauty and innocence. Clifford comes to depend on Phoebe, who cannot leave the House of the Seven Gables without Clifford becoming anxious and upset. This is no burden on Phoebe, who remains unaware of her cousin's dependence upon her, but still places her in an uncomfortable situation. Clifford ceases to view Phoebe as an actual person, viewing her instead as a symbol and exemplar of femininity. The relationship between Clifford, Phoebe and Hepzibah demonstrates Clifford's fragile and essentially superficial character. He is in most respects a child who responds only to simplistic pleasures and pains. Phoebe even serves as Clifford's "guardian" and "playmate," reinforcing the His treatment of both Phoebe and Hepzibah is not commendable, for he depends too greatly on Phoebe while not responding to Hepzibah's desire to aid him, but the only repercussion from this is that Hepzibah remains as dejected as she was before his arrival. Hawthorne thus illustrates the dynamic between the three characters as a means to show how ill-prepared Clifford is to deal with the rest of society, which foreshadows the later problems that Clifford will have in dealing with others outside of his narrow familial arrangement | analysis |
CLIFFORD, except for Phoebe's More active instigation would ordinarily
have yielded to the torpor which had crept through all his modes of
being, and which sluggishly counselled him to sit in his morning chair
till eventide. But the girl seldom failed to propose a removal to the
garden, where Uncle Venner and the daguerreotypist had made such
repairs on the roof of the ruinous arbor, or summer-house, that it was
now a sufficient shelter from sunshine and casual showers. The
hop-vine, too, had begun to grow luxuriantly over the sides of the
little edifice, and made an interior of verdant seclusion, with
innumerable peeps and glimpses into the wider solitude of the garden.
Here, sometimes, in this green play-place of flickering light, Phoebe
read to Clifford. Her acquaintance, the artist, who appeared to have a
literary turn, had supplied her with works of fiction, in pamphlet
form,--and a few volumes of poetry, in altogether a different style and
taste from those which Hepzibah selected for his amusement. Small
thanks were due to the books, however, if the girl's readings were in
any degree more successful than her elderly cousin's. Phoebe's voice
had always a pretty music in it, and could either enliven Clifford by
its sparkle and gayety of tone, or soothe him by a continued flow of
pebbly and brook-like cadences. But the fictions--in which the
country-girl, unused to works of that nature, often became deeply
absorbed--interested her strange auditor very little, or not at all.
Pictures of life, scenes of passion or sentiment, wit, humor, and
pathos, were all thrown away, or worse than thrown away, on Clifford;
either because he lacked an experience by which to test their truth, or
because his own griefs were a touch-stone of reality that few feigned
emotions could withstand. When Phoebe broke into a peal of merry
laughter at what she read, he would now and then laugh for sympathy,
but oftener respond with a troubled, questioning look. If a tear--a
maiden's sunshiny tear over imaginary woe--dropped upon some melancholy
page, Clifford either took it as a token of actual calamity, or else
grew peevish, and angrily motioned her to close the volume. And wisely
too! Is not the world sad enough, in genuine earnest, without making a
pastime of mock sorrows?
With poetry it was rather better. He delighted in the swell and
subsidence of the rhythm, and the happily recurring rhyme. Nor was
Clifford incapable of feeling the sentiment of poetry,--not, perhaps,
where it was highest or deepest, but where it was most flitting and
ethereal. It was impossible to foretell in what exquisite verse the
awakening spell might lurk; but, on raising her eyes from the page to
Clifford's face, Phoebe would be made aware, by the light breaking
through it, that a more delicate intelligence than her own had caught a
lambent flame from what she read. One glow of this kind, however, was
often the precursor of gloom for many hours afterward; because, when
the glow left him, he seemed conscious of a missing sense and power,
and groped about for them, as if a blind man should go seeking his lost
eyesight.
It pleased him more, and was better for his inward welfare, that Phoebe
should talk, and make passing occurrences vivid to his mind by her
accompanying description and remarks. The life of the garden offered
topics enough for such discourse as suited Clifford best. He never
failed to inquire what flowers had bloomed since yesterday. His
feeling for flowers was very exquisite, and seemed not so much a taste
as an emotion; he was fond of sitting with one in his hand, intently
observing it, and looking from its petals into Phoebe's face, as if the
garden flower were the sister of the household maiden. Not merely was
there a delight in the flower's perfume, or pleasure in its beautiful
form, and the delicacy or brightness of its hue; but Clifford's
enjoyment was accompanied with a perception of life, character, and
individuality, that made him love these blossoms of the garden, as if
they were endowed with sentiment and intelligence. This affection and
sympathy for flowers is almost exclusively a woman's trait. Men, if
endowed with it by nature, soon lose, forget, and learn to despise it,
in their contact with coarser things than flowers. Clifford, too, had
long forgotten it; but found it again now, as he slowly revived from
the chill torpor of his life.
It is wonderful how many pleasant incidents continually came to pass in
that secluded garden-spot when once Phoebe had set herself to look for
them. She had seen or heard a bee there, on the first day of her
acquaintance with the place. And often,--almost continually,
indeed,--since then, the bees kept coming thither, Heaven knows why, or
by what pertinacious desire, for far-fetched sweets, when, no doubt,
there were broad clover-fields, and all kinds of garden growth, much
nearer home than this. Thither the bees came, however, and plunged
into the squash-blossoms, as if there were no other squash-vines within
a long day's flight, or as if the soil of Hepzibah's garden gave its
productions just the very quality which these laborious little wizards
wanted, in order to impart the Hymettus odor to their whole hive of New
England honey. When Clifford heard their sunny, buzzing murmur, in the
heart of the great yellow blossoms, he looked about him with a joyful
sense of warmth, and blue sky, and green grass, and of God's free air
in the whole height from earth to heaven. After all, there need be no
question why the bees came to that one green nook in the dusty town.
God sent them thither to gladden our poor Clifford. They brought the
rich summer with them, in requital of a little honey.
When the bean-vines began to flower on the poles, there was one
particular variety which bore a vivid scarlet blossom. The
daguerreotypist had found these beans in a garret, over one of the
seven gables, treasured up in an old chest of drawers by some
horticultural Pyncheon of days gone by, who doubtless meant to sow them
the next summer, but was himself first sown in Death's garden-ground.
By way of testing whether there were still a living germ in such
ancient seeds, Holgrave had planted some of them; and the result of his
experiment was a splendid row of bean-vines, clambering, early, to the
full height of the poles, and arraying them, from top to bottom, in a
spiral profusion of red blossoms. And, ever since the unfolding of the
first bud, a multitude of humming-birds had been attracted thither. At
times, it seemed as if for every one of the hundred blossoms there was
one of these tiniest fowls of the air,--a thumb's bigness of burnished
plumage, hovering and vibrating about the bean-poles. It was with
indescribable interest, and even more than childish delight, that
Clifford watched the humming-birds. He used to thrust his head softly
out of the arbor to see them the better; all the while, too, motioning
Phoebe to be quiet, and snatching glimpses of the smile upon her face,
so as to heap his enjoyment up the higher with her sympathy. He had
not merely grown young;--he was a child again.
Hepzibah, whenever she happened to witness one of these fits of
miniature enthusiasm, would shake her head, with a strange mingling of
the mother and sister, and of pleasure and sadness, in her aspect. She
said that it had always been thus with Clifford when the humming-birds
came,--always, from his babyhood,--and that his delight in them had
been one of the earliest tokens by which he showed his love for
beautiful things. And it was a wonderful coincidence, the good lady
thought, that the artist should have planted these scarlet-flowering
beans--which the humming-birds sought far and wide, and which had not
grown in the Pyncheon garden before for forty years--on the very summer
of Clifford's return.
Then would the tears stand in poor Hepzibah's eyes, or overflow them
with a too abundant gush, so that she was fain to betake herself into
some corner, lest Clifford should espy her agitation. Indeed, all the
enjoyments of this period were provocative of tears. Coming so late as
it did, it was a kind of Indian summer, with a mist in its balmiest
sunshine, and decay and death in its gaudiest delight. The more
Clifford seemed to taste the happiness of a child, the sadder was the
difference to be recognized. With a mysterious and terrible Past,
which had annihilated his memory, and a blank Future before him, he had
only this visionary and impalpable Now, which, if you once look closely
at it, is nothing. He himself, as was perceptible by many symptoms,
lay darkly behind his pleasure, and knew it to be a baby-play, which he
was to toy and trifle with, instead of thoroughly believing. Clifford
saw, it may be, in the mirror of his deeper consciousness, that he was
an example and representative of that great class of people whom an
inexplicable Providence is continually putting at cross-purposes with
the world: breaking what seems its own promise in their nature;
withholding their proper food, and setting poison before them for a
banquet; and thus--when it might so easily, as one would think, have
been adjusted otherwise--making their existence a strangeness, a
solitude, and torment. All his life long, he had been learning how to
be wretched, as one learns a foreign tongue; and now, with the lesson
thoroughly by heart, he could with difficulty comprehend his little
airy happiness. Frequently there was a dim shadow of doubt in his
eyes. "Take my hand, Phoebe," he would say, "and pinch it hard with
your little fingers! Give me a rose, that I may press its thorns, and
prove myself awake by the sharp touch of pain!" Evidently, he desired
this prick of a trifling anguish, in order to assure himself, by that
quality which he best knew to be real, that the garden, and the seven
weather-beaten gables, and Hepzibah's scowl, and Phoebe's smile, were
real likewise. Without this signet in his flesh, he could have
attributed no more substance to them than to the empty confusion of
imaginary scenes with which he had fed his spirit, until even that poor
sustenance was exhausted.
The author needs great faith in his reader's sympathy; else he must
hesitate to give details so minute, and incidents apparently so
trifling, as are essential to make up the idea of this garden-life. It
was the Eden of a thunder-smitten Adam, who had fled for refuge thither
out of the same dreary and perilous wilderness into which the original
Adam was expelled.
One of the available means of amusement, of which Phoebe made the most
in Clifford's behalf, was that feathered society, the hens, a breed of
whom, as we have already said, was an immemorial heirloom in the
Pyncheon family. In compliance with a whim of Clifford, as it troubled
him to see them in confinement, they had been set at liberty, and now
roamed at will about the garden; doing some little mischief, but
hindered from escape by buildings on three sides, and the difficult
peaks of a wooden fence on the other. They spent much of their
abundant leisure on the margin of Maule's well, which was haunted by a
kind of snail, evidently a titbit to their palates; and the brackish
water itself, however nauseous to the rest of the world, was so greatly
esteemed by these fowls, that they might be seen tasting, turning up
their heads, and smacking their bills, with precisely the air of
wine-bibbers round a probationary cask. Their generally quiet, yet
often brisk, and constantly diversified talk, one to another, or
sometimes in soliloquy,--as they scratched worms out of the rich, black
soil, or pecked at such plants as suited their taste,--had such a
domestic tone, that it was almost a wonder why you could not establish
a regular interchange of ideas about household matters, human and
gallinaceous. All hens are well worth studying for the piquancy and
rich variety of their manners; but by no possibility can there have
been other fowls of such odd appearance and deportment as these
ancestral ones. They probably embodied the traditionary peculiarities
of their whole line of progenitors, derived through an unbroken
succession of eggs; or else this individual Chanticleer and his two
wives had grown to be humorists, and a little crack-brained withal, on
account of their solitary way of life, and out of sympathy for
Hepzibah, their lady-patroness.
Queer, indeed, they looked! Chanticleer himself, though stalking on two
stilt-like legs, with the dignity of interminable descent in all his
gestures, was hardly bigger than an ordinary partridge; his two wives
were about the size of quails; and as for the one chicken, it looked
small enough to be still in the egg, and, at the same time,
sufficiently old, withered, wizened, and experienced, to have been
founder of the antiquated race. Instead of being the youngest of the
family, it rather seemed to have aggregated into itself the ages, not
only of these living specimens of the breed, but of all its forefathers
and foremothers, whose united excellences and oddities were squeezed
into its little body. Its mother evidently regarded it as the one
chicken of the world, and as necessary, in fact, to the world's
continuance, or, at any rate, to the equilibrium of the present system
of affairs, whether in church or state. No lesser sense of the infant
fowl's importance could have justified, even in a mother's eyes, the
perseverance with which she watched over its safety, ruffling her small
person to twice its proper size, and flying in everybody's face that so
much as looked towards her hopeful progeny. No lower estimate could
have vindicated the indefatigable zeal with which she scratched, and
her unscrupulousness in digging up the choicest flower or vegetable,
for the sake of the fat earthworm at its root. Her nervous cluck, when
the chicken happened to be hidden in the long grass or under the
squash-leaves; her gentle croak of satisfaction, while sure of it
beneath her wing; her note of ill-concealed fear and obstreperous
defiance, when she saw her arch-enemy, a neighbor's cat, on the top of
the high fence,--one or other of these sounds was to be heard at almost
every moment of the day. By degrees, the observer came to feel nearly
as much interest in this chicken of illustrious race as the mother-hen
did.
Phoebe, after getting well acquainted with the old hen, was sometimes
permitted to take the chicken in her hand, which was quite capable of
grasping its cubic inch or two of body. While she curiously examined
its hereditary marks,--the peculiar speckle of its plumage, the funny
tuft on its head, and a knob on each of its legs,--the little biped, as
she insisted, kept giving her a sagacious wink. The daguerreotypist
once whispered her that these marks betokened the oddities of the
Pyncheon family, and that the chicken itself was a symbol of the life
of the old house, embodying its interpretation, likewise, although an
unintelligible one, as such clews generally are. It was a feathered
riddle; a mystery hatched out of an egg, and just as mysterious as if
the egg had been addle!
The second of Chanticleer's two wives, ever since Phoebe's arrival, had
been in a state of heavy despondency, caused, as it afterwards
appeared, by her inability to lay an egg. One day, however, by her
self-important gait, the sideways turn of her head, and the cock of her
eye, as she pried into one and another nook of the garden,--croaking to
herself, all the while, with inexpressible complacency,--it was made
evident that this identical hen, much as mankind undervalued her,
carried something about her person the worth of which was not to be
estimated either in gold or precious stones. Shortly after, there was
a prodigious cackling and gratulation of Chanticleer and all his
family, including the wizened chicken, who appeared to understand the
matter quite as well as did his sire, his mother, or his aunt. That
afternoon Phoebe found a diminutive egg,--not in the regular nest, it
was far too precious to be trusted there,--but cunningly hidden under
the currant-bushes, on some dry stalks of last year's grass. Hepzibah,
on learning the fact, took possession of the egg and appropriated it to
Clifford's breakfast, on account of a certain delicacy of flavor, for
which, as she affirmed, these eggs had always been famous. Thus
unscrupulously did the old gentlewoman sacrifice the continuance,
perhaps, of an ancient feathered race, with no better end than to
supply her brother with a dainty that hardly filled the bowl of a
tea-spoon! It must have been in reference to this outrage that
Chanticleer, the next day, accompanied by the bereaved mother of the
egg, took his post in front of Phoebe and Clifford, and delivered
himself of a harangue that might have proved as long as his own
pedigree, but for a fit of merriment on Phoebe's part. Hereupon, the
offended fowl stalked away on his long stilts, and utterly withdrew his
notice from Phoebe and the rest of human nature, until she made her
peace with an offering of spice-cake, which, next to snails, was the
delicacy most in favor with his aristocratic taste.
We linger too long, no doubt, beside this paltry rivulet of life that
flowed through the garden of the Pyncheon House. But we deem it
pardonable to record these mean incidents and poor delights, because
they proved so greatly to Clifford's benefit. They had the earth-smell
in them, and contributed to give him health and substance. Some of his
occupations wrought less desirably upon him. He had a singular
propensity, for example, to hang over Maule's well, and look at the
constantly shifting phantasmagoria of figures produced by the agitation
of the water over the mosaic-work of colored pebbles at the bottom. He
said that faces looked upward to him there,--beautiful faces, arrayed
in bewitching smiles,--each momentary face so fair and rosy, and every
smile so sunny, that he felt wronged at its departure, until the same
flitting witchcraft made a new one. But sometimes he would suddenly
cry out, "The dark face gazes at me!" and be miserable the whole day
afterwards. Phoebe, when she hung over the fountain by Clifford's
side, could see nothing of all this,--neither the beauty nor the
ugliness,--but only the colored pebbles, looking as if the gush of the
waters shook and disarranged them. And the dark face, that so troubled
Clifford, was no more than the shadow thrown from a branch of one of
the damson-trees, and breaking the inner light of Maule's well. The
truth was, however, that his fancy--reviving faster than his will and
judgment, and always stronger than they--created shapes of loveliness
that were symbolic of his native character, and now and then a stern
and dreadful shape that typified his fate.
On Sundays, after Phoebe had been at church,--for the girl had a
church-going conscience, and would hardly have been at ease had she
missed either prayer, singing, sermon, or benediction,--after
church-time, therefore, there was, ordinarily, a sober little festival
in the garden. In addition to Clifford, Hepzibah, and Phoebe, two
guests made up the company. One was the artist Holgrave, who, in spite
of his consociation with reformers, and his other queer and
questionable traits, continued to hold an elevated place in Hepzibah's
regard. The other, we are almost ashamed to say, was the venerable
Uncle Venner, in a clean shirt, and a broadcloth coat, more respectable
than his ordinary wear, inasmuch as it was neatly patched on each
elbow, and might be called an entire garment, except for a slight
inequality in the length of its skirts. Clifford, on several
occasions, had seemed to enjoy the old man's intercourse, for the sake
of his mellow, cheerful vein, which was like the sweet flavor of a
frost-bitten apple, such as one picks up under the tree in December. A
man at the very lowest point of the social scale was easier and more
agreeable for the fallen gentleman to encounter than a person at any of
the intermediate degrees; and, moreover, as Clifford's young manhood
had been lost, he was fond of feeling himself comparatively youthful,
now, in apposition with the patriarchal age of Uncle Venner. In fact,
it was sometimes observable that Clifford half wilfully hid from
himself the consciousness of being stricken in years, and cherished
visions of an earthly future still before him; visions, however, too
indistinctly drawn to be followed by disappointment--though, doubtless,
by depression--when any casual incident or recollection made him
sensible of the withered leaf.
So this oddly composed little social party used to assemble under the
ruinous arbor. Hepzibah--stately as ever at heart, and yielding not an
inch of her old gentility, but resting upon it so much the more, as
justifying a princess-like condescension--exhibited a not ungraceful
hospitality. She talked kindly to the vagrant artist, and took sage
counsel--lady as she was--with the wood-sawyer, the messenger of
everybody's petty errands, the patched philosopher. And Uncle Venner,
who had studied the world at street-corners, and other posts equally
well adapted for just observation, was as ready to give out his wisdom
as a town-pump to give water.
"Miss Hepzibah, ma'am," said he once, after they had all been cheerful
together, "I really enjoy these quiet little meetings of a Sabbath
afternoon. They are very much like what I expect to have after I
retire to my farm!"
"Uncle Venner" observed Clifford in a drowsy, inward tone, "is always
talking about his farm. But I have a better scheme for him, by and by.
We shall see!"
"Ah, Mr. Clifford Pyncheon!" said the man of patches, "you may scheme
for me as much as you please; but I'm not going to give up this one
scheme of my own, even if I never bring it really to pass. It does
seem to me that men make a wonderful mistake in trying to heap up
property upon property. If I had done so, I should feel as if
Providence was not bound to take care of me; and, at all events, the
city wouldn't be! I'm one of those people who think that infinity is
big enough for us all--and eternity long enough."
"Why, so they are, Uncle Venner," remarked Phoebe after a pause; for
she had been trying to fathom the profundity and appositeness of this
concluding apothegm. "But for this short life of ours, one would like
a house and a moderate garden-spot of one's own."
"It appears to me," said the daguerreotypist, smiling, "that Uncle
Venner has the principles of Fourier at the bottom of his wisdom; only
they have not quite so much distinctness in his mind as in that of the
systematizing Frenchman."
"Come, Phoebe," said Hepzibah, "it is time to bring the currants."
And then, while the yellow richness of the declining sunshine still
fell into the open space of the garden, Phoebe brought out a loaf of
bread and a china bowl of currants, freshly gathered from the bushes,
and crushed with sugar. These, with water,--but not from the fountain
of ill omen, close at hand,--constituted all the entertainment.
Meanwhile, Holgrave took some pains to establish an intercourse with
Clifford, actuated, it might seem, entirely by an impulse of
kindliness, in order that the present hour might be cheerfuller than
most which the poor recluse had spent, or was destined yet to spend.
Nevertheless, in the artist's deep, thoughtful, all-observant eyes,
there was, now and then, an expression, not sinister, but questionable;
as if he had some other interest in the scene than a stranger, a
youthful and unconnected adventurer, might be supposed to have. With
great mobility of outward mood, however, he applied himself to the task
of enlivening the party; and with so much success, that even dark-hued
Hepzibah threw off one tint of melancholy, and made what shift she
could with the remaining portion. Phoebe said to herself,--"How
pleasant he can be!" As for Uncle Venner, as a mark of friendship and
approbation, he readily consented to afford the young man his
countenance in the way of his profession,--not metaphorically, be it
understood, but literally, by allowing a daguerreotype of his face, so
familiar to the town, to be exhibited at the entrance of Holgrave's
studio.
Clifford, as the company partook of their little banquet, grew to be
the gayest of them all. Either it was one of those up-quivering
flashes of the spirit, to which minds in an abnormal state are liable,
or else the artist had subtly touched some chord that made musical
vibration. Indeed, what with the pleasant summer evening, and the
sympathy of this little circle of not unkindly souls, it was perhaps
natural that a character so susceptible as Clifford's should become
animated, and show itself readily responsive to what was said around
him. But he gave out his own thoughts, likewise, with an airy and
fanciful glow; so that they glistened, as it were, through the arbor,
and made their escape among the interstices of the foliage. He had
been as cheerful, no doubt, while alone with Phoebe, but never with
such tokens of acute, although partial intelligence.
But, as the sunlight left the peaks of the Seven Gables, so did the
excitement fade out of Clifford's eyes. He gazed vaguely and
mournfully about him, as if he missed something precious, and missed it
the more drearily for not knowing precisely what it was.
"I want my happiness!" at last he murmured hoarsely and indistinctly,
hardly shaping out the words. "Many, many years have I waited for it!
It is late! It is late! I want my happiness!"
Alas, poor Clifford! You are old, and worn with troubles that ought
never to have befallen you. You are partly crazy and partly imbecile;
a ruin, a failure, as almost everybody is,--though some in less degree,
or less perceptibly, than their fellows. Fate has no happiness in
store for you; unless your quiet home in the old family residence with
the faithful Hepzibah, and your long summer afternoons with Phoebe, and
these Sabbath festivals with Uncle Venner and the daguerreotypist,
deserve to be called happiness! Why not? If not the thing itself, it
is marvellously like it, and the more so for that ethereal and
intangible quality which causes it all to vanish at too close an
introspection. Take it, therefore, while you may. Murmur
not,--question not,--but make the most of it!
| The Pyncheon Garden: Phoebe would often read to Clifford in the garden. Holgrave would supply her works of fiction and poetry; the fiction did not interest Clifford, either because he lacked experience to test the fiction or because his grief was a touchstone of reality that few feigned emotions could withstand. He preferred poetry to fiction, and even more than reading preferred to discuss the flowers and life in the garden. As Clifford tasted more happiness, he became more sad: with a mysterious and terrible past and a blank future, he had only this visionary and impalpable now. For Clifford the garden was an Eden. The small hens amused Clifford. They were an immemorial heirloom in the Pyncheon family, tiny and queer looking. On Sundays after church there was ordinarily a little festival in the garden attended by Clifford, Hepzibah, Phoebe, Holgrave and Uncle Venner. Holgrave took pains to establish an intercourse with Clifford, but there was something questionable about his actions. | summary |
CLIFFORD, except for Phoebe's More active instigation would ordinarily
have yielded to the torpor which had crept through all his modes of
being, and which sluggishly counselled him to sit in his morning chair
till eventide. But the girl seldom failed to propose a removal to the
garden, where Uncle Venner and the daguerreotypist had made such
repairs on the roof of the ruinous arbor, or summer-house, that it was
now a sufficient shelter from sunshine and casual showers. The
hop-vine, too, had begun to grow luxuriantly over the sides of the
little edifice, and made an interior of verdant seclusion, with
innumerable peeps and glimpses into the wider solitude of the garden.
Here, sometimes, in this green play-place of flickering light, Phoebe
read to Clifford. Her acquaintance, the artist, who appeared to have a
literary turn, had supplied her with works of fiction, in pamphlet
form,--and a few volumes of poetry, in altogether a different style and
taste from those which Hepzibah selected for his amusement. Small
thanks were due to the books, however, if the girl's readings were in
any degree more successful than her elderly cousin's. Phoebe's voice
had always a pretty music in it, and could either enliven Clifford by
its sparkle and gayety of tone, or soothe him by a continued flow of
pebbly and brook-like cadences. But the fictions--in which the
country-girl, unused to works of that nature, often became deeply
absorbed--interested her strange auditor very little, or not at all.
Pictures of life, scenes of passion or sentiment, wit, humor, and
pathos, were all thrown away, or worse than thrown away, on Clifford;
either because he lacked an experience by which to test their truth, or
because his own griefs were a touch-stone of reality that few feigned
emotions could withstand. When Phoebe broke into a peal of merry
laughter at what she read, he would now and then laugh for sympathy,
but oftener respond with a troubled, questioning look. If a tear--a
maiden's sunshiny tear over imaginary woe--dropped upon some melancholy
page, Clifford either took it as a token of actual calamity, or else
grew peevish, and angrily motioned her to close the volume. And wisely
too! Is not the world sad enough, in genuine earnest, without making a
pastime of mock sorrows?
With poetry it was rather better. He delighted in the swell and
subsidence of the rhythm, and the happily recurring rhyme. Nor was
Clifford incapable of feeling the sentiment of poetry,--not, perhaps,
where it was highest or deepest, but where it was most flitting and
ethereal. It was impossible to foretell in what exquisite verse the
awakening spell might lurk; but, on raising her eyes from the page to
Clifford's face, Phoebe would be made aware, by the light breaking
through it, that a more delicate intelligence than her own had caught a
lambent flame from what she read. One glow of this kind, however, was
often the precursor of gloom for many hours afterward; because, when
the glow left him, he seemed conscious of a missing sense and power,
and groped about for them, as if a blind man should go seeking his lost
eyesight.
It pleased him more, and was better for his inward welfare, that Phoebe
should talk, and make passing occurrences vivid to his mind by her
accompanying description and remarks. The life of the garden offered
topics enough for such discourse as suited Clifford best. He never
failed to inquire what flowers had bloomed since yesterday. His
feeling for flowers was very exquisite, and seemed not so much a taste
as an emotion; he was fond of sitting with one in his hand, intently
observing it, and looking from its petals into Phoebe's face, as if the
garden flower were the sister of the household maiden. Not merely was
there a delight in the flower's perfume, or pleasure in its beautiful
form, and the delicacy or brightness of its hue; but Clifford's
enjoyment was accompanied with a perception of life, character, and
individuality, that made him love these blossoms of the garden, as if
they were endowed with sentiment and intelligence. This affection and
sympathy for flowers is almost exclusively a woman's trait. Men, if
endowed with it by nature, soon lose, forget, and learn to despise it,
in their contact with coarser things than flowers. Clifford, too, had
long forgotten it; but found it again now, as he slowly revived from
the chill torpor of his life.
It is wonderful how many pleasant incidents continually came to pass in
that secluded garden-spot when once Phoebe had set herself to look for
them. She had seen or heard a bee there, on the first day of her
acquaintance with the place. And often,--almost continually,
indeed,--since then, the bees kept coming thither, Heaven knows why, or
by what pertinacious desire, for far-fetched sweets, when, no doubt,
there were broad clover-fields, and all kinds of garden growth, much
nearer home than this. Thither the bees came, however, and plunged
into the squash-blossoms, as if there were no other squash-vines within
a long day's flight, or as if the soil of Hepzibah's garden gave its
productions just the very quality which these laborious little wizards
wanted, in order to impart the Hymettus odor to their whole hive of New
England honey. When Clifford heard their sunny, buzzing murmur, in the
heart of the great yellow blossoms, he looked about him with a joyful
sense of warmth, and blue sky, and green grass, and of God's free air
in the whole height from earth to heaven. After all, there need be no
question why the bees came to that one green nook in the dusty town.
God sent them thither to gladden our poor Clifford. They brought the
rich summer with them, in requital of a little honey.
When the bean-vines began to flower on the poles, there was one
particular variety which bore a vivid scarlet blossom. The
daguerreotypist had found these beans in a garret, over one of the
seven gables, treasured up in an old chest of drawers by some
horticultural Pyncheon of days gone by, who doubtless meant to sow them
the next summer, but was himself first sown in Death's garden-ground.
By way of testing whether there were still a living germ in such
ancient seeds, Holgrave had planted some of them; and the result of his
experiment was a splendid row of bean-vines, clambering, early, to the
full height of the poles, and arraying them, from top to bottom, in a
spiral profusion of red blossoms. And, ever since the unfolding of the
first bud, a multitude of humming-birds had been attracted thither. At
times, it seemed as if for every one of the hundred blossoms there was
one of these tiniest fowls of the air,--a thumb's bigness of burnished
plumage, hovering and vibrating about the bean-poles. It was with
indescribable interest, and even more than childish delight, that
Clifford watched the humming-birds. He used to thrust his head softly
out of the arbor to see them the better; all the while, too, motioning
Phoebe to be quiet, and snatching glimpses of the smile upon her face,
so as to heap his enjoyment up the higher with her sympathy. He had
not merely grown young;--he was a child again.
Hepzibah, whenever she happened to witness one of these fits of
miniature enthusiasm, would shake her head, with a strange mingling of
the mother and sister, and of pleasure and sadness, in her aspect. She
said that it had always been thus with Clifford when the humming-birds
came,--always, from his babyhood,--and that his delight in them had
been one of the earliest tokens by which he showed his love for
beautiful things. And it was a wonderful coincidence, the good lady
thought, that the artist should have planted these scarlet-flowering
beans--which the humming-birds sought far and wide, and which had not
grown in the Pyncheon garden before for forty years--on the very summer
of Clifford's return.
Then would the tears stand in poor Hepzibah's eyes, or overflow them
with a too abundant gush, so that she was fain to betake herself into
some corner, lest Clifford should espy her agitation. Indeed, all the
enjoyments of this period were provocative of tears. Coming so late as
it did, it was a kind of Indian summer, with a mist in its balmiest
sunshine, and decay and death in its gaudiest delight. The more
Clifford seemed to taste the happiness of a child, the sadder was the
difference to be recognized. With a mysterious and terrible Past,
which had annihilated his memory, and a blank Future before him, he had
only this visionary and impalpable Now, which, if you once look closely
at it, is nothing. He himself, as was perceptible by many symptoms,
lay darkly behind his pleasure, and knew it to be a baby-play, which he
was to toy and trifle with, instead of thoroughly believing. Clifford
saw, it may be, in the mirror of his deeper consciousness, that he was
an example and representative of that great class of people whom an
inexplicable Providence is continually putting at cross-purposes with
the world: breaking what seems its own promise in their nature;
withholding their proper food, and setting poison before them for a
banquet; and thus--when it might so easily, as one would think, have
been adjusted otherwise--making their existence a strangeness, a
solitude, and torment. All his life long, he had been learning how to
be wretched, as one learns a foreign tongue; and now, with the lesson
thoroughly by heart, he could with difficulty comprehend his little
airy happiness. Frequently there was a dim shadow of doubt in his
eyes. "Take my hand, Phoebe," he would say, "and pinch it hard with
your little fingers! Give me a rose, that I may press its thorns, and
prove myself awake by the sharp touch of pain!" Evidently, he desired
this prick of a trifling anguish, in order to assure himself, by that
quality which he best knew to be real, that the garden, and the seven
weather-beaten gables, and Hepzibah's scowl, and Phoebe's smile, were
real likewise. Without this signet in his flesh, he could have
attributed no more substance to them than to the empty confusion of
imaginary scenes with which he had fed his spirit, until even that poor
sustenance was exhausted.
The author needs great faith in his reader's sympathy; else he must
hesitate to give details so minute, and incidents apparently so
trifling, as are essential to make up the idea of this garden-life. It
was the Eden of a thunder-smitten Adam, who had fled for refuge thither
out of the same dreary and perilous wilderness into which the original
Adam was expelled.
One of the available means of amusement, of which Phoebe made the most
in Clifford's behalf, was that feathered society, the hens, a breed of
whom, as we have already said, was an immemorial heirloom in the
Pyncheon family. In compliance with a whim of Clifford, as it troubled
him to see them in confinement, they had been set at liberty, and now
roamed at will about the garden; doing some little mischief, but
hindered from escape by buildings on three sides, and the difficult
peaks of a wooden fence on the other. They spent much of their
abundant leisure on the margin of Maule's well, which was haunted by a
kind of snail, evidently a titbit to their palates; and the brackish
water itself, however nauseous to the rest of the world, was so greatly
esteemed by these fowls, that they might be seen tasting, turning up
their heads, and smacking their bills, with precisely the air of
wine-bibbers round a probationary cask. Their generally quiet, yet
often brisk, and constantly diversified talk, one to another, or
sometimes in soliloquy,--as they scratched worms out of the rich, black
soil, or pecked at such plants as suited their taste,--had such a
domestic tone, that it was almost a wonder why you could not establish
a regular interchange of ideas about household matters, human and
gallinaceous. All hens are well worth studying for the piquancy and
rich variety of their manners; but by no possibility can there have
been other fowls of such odd appearance and deportment as these
ancestral ones. They probably embodied the traditionary peculiarities
of their whole line of progenitors, derived through an unbroken
succession of eggs; or else this individual Chanticleer and his two
wives had grown to be humorists, and a little crack-brained withal, on
account of their solitary way of life, and out of sympathy for
Hepzibah, their lady-patroness.
Queer, indeed, they looked! Chanticleer himself, though stalking on two
stilt-like legs, with the dignity of interminable descent in all his
gestures, was hardly bigger than an ordinary partridge; his two wives
were about the size of quails; and as for the one chicken, it looked
small enough to be still in the egg, and, at the same time,
sufficiently old, withered, wizened, and experienced, to have been
founder of the antiquated race. Instead of being the youngest of the
family, it rather seemed to have aggregated into itself the ages, not
only of these living specimens of the breed, but of all its forefathers
and foremothers, whose united excellences and oddities were squeezed
into its little body. Its mother evidently regarded it as the one
chicken of the world, and as necessary, in fact, to the world's
continuance, or, at any rate, to the equilibrium of the present system
of affairs, whether in church or state. No lesser sense of the infant
fowl's importance could have justified, even in a mother's eyes, the
perseverance with which she watched over its safety, ruffling her small
person to twice its proper size, and flying in everybody's face that so
much as looked towards her hopeful progeny. No lower estimate could
have vindicated the indefatigable zeal with which she scratched, and
her unscrupulousness in digging up the choicest flower or vegetable,
for the sake of the fat earthworm at its root. Her nervous cluck, when
the chicken happened to be hidden in the long grass or under the
squash-leaves; her gentle croak of satisfaction, while sure of it
beneath her wing; her note of ill-concealed fear and obstreperous
defiance, when she saw her arch-enemy, a neighbor's cat, on the top of
the high fence,--one or other of these sounds was to be heard at almost
every moment of the day. By degrees, the observer came to feel nearly
as much interest in this chicken of illustrious race as the mother-hen
did.
Phoebe, after getting well acquainted with the old hen, was sometimes
permitted to take the chicken in her hand, which was quite capable of
grasping its cubic inch or two of body. While she curiously examined
its hereditary marks,--the peculiar speckle of its plumage, the funny
tuft on its head, and a knob on each of its legs,--the little biped, as
she insisted, kept giving her a sagacious wink. The daguerreotypist
once whispered her that these marks betokened the oddities of the
Pyncheon family, and that the chicken itself was a symbol of the life
of the old house, embodying its interpretation, likewise, although an
unintelligible one, as such clews generally are. It was a feathered
riddle; a mystery hatched out of an egg, and just as mysterious as if
the egg had been addle!
The second of Chanticleer's two wives, ever since Phoebe's arrival, had
been in a state of heavy despondency, caused, as it afterwards
appeared, by her inability to lay an egg. One day, however, by her
self-important gait, the sideways turn of her head, and the cock of her
eye, as she pried into one and another nook of the garden,--croaking to
herself, all the while, with inexpressible complacency,--it was made
evident that this identical hen, much as mankind undervalued her,
carried something about her person the worth of which was not to be
estimated either in gold or precious stones. Shortly after, there was
a prodigious cackling and gratulation of Chanticleer and all his
family, including the wizened chicken, who appeared to understand the
matter quite as well as did his sire, his mother, or his aunt. That
afternoon Phoebe found a diminutive egg,--not in the regular nest, it
was far too precious to be trusted there,--but cunningly hidden under
the currant-bushes, on some dry stalks of last year's grass. Hepzibah,
on learning the fact, took possession of the egg and appropriated it to
Clifford's breakfast, on account of a certain delicacy of flavor, for
which, as she affirmed, these eggs had always been famous. Thus
unscrupulously did the old gentlewoman sacrifice the continuance,
perhaps, of an ancient feathered race, with no better end than to
supply her brother with a dainty that hardly filled the bowl of a
tea-spoon! It must have been in reference to this outrage that
Chanticleer, the next day, accompanied by the bereaved mother of the
egg, took his post in front of Phoebe and Clifford, and delivered
himself of a harangue that might have proved as long as his own
pedigree, but for a fit of merriment on Phoebe's part. Hereupon, the
offended fowl stalked away on his long stilts, and utterly withdrew his
notice from Phoebe and the rest of human nature, until she made her
peace with an offering of spice-cake, which, next to snails, was the
delicacy most in favor with his aristocratic taste.
We linger too long, no doubt, beside this paltry rivulet of life that
flowed through the garden of the Pyncheon House. But we deem it
pardonable to record these mean incidents and poor delights, because
they proved so greatly to Clifford's benefit. They had the earth-smell
in them, and contributed to give him health and substance. Some of his
occupations wrought less desirably upon him. He had a singular
propensity, for example, to hang over Maule's well, and look at the
constantly shifting phantasmagoria of figures produced by the agitation
of the water over the mosaic-work of colored pebbles at the bottom. He
said that faces looked upward to him there,--beautiful faces, arrayed
in bewitching smiles,--each momentary face so fair and rosy, and every
smile so sunny, that he felt wronged at its departure, until the same
flitting witchcraft made a new one. But sometimes he would suddenly
cry out, "The dark face gazes at me!" and be miserable the whole day
afterwards. Phoebe, when she hung over the fountain by Clifford's
side, could see nothing of all this,--neither the beauty nor the
ugliness,--but only the colored pebbles, looking as if the gush of the
waters shook and disarranged them. And the dark face, that so troubled
Clifford, was no more than the shadow thrown from a branch of one of
the damson-trees, and breaking the inner light of Maule's well. The
truth was, however, that his fancy--reviving faster than his will and
judgment, and always stronger than they--created shapes of loveliness
that were symbolic of his native character, and now and then a stern
and dreadful shape that typified his fate.
On Sundays, after Phoebe had been at church,--for the girl had a
church-going conscience, and would hardly have been at ease had she
missed either prayer, singing, sermon, or benediction,--after
church-time, therefore, there was, ordinarily, a sober little festival
in the garden. In addition to Clifford, Hepzibah, and Phoebe, two
guests made up the company. One was the artist Holgrave, who, in spite
of his consociation with reformers, and his other queer and
questionable traits, continued to hold an elevated place in Hepzibah's
regard. The other, we are almost ashamed to say, was the venerable
Uncle Venner, in a clean shirt, and a broadcloth coat, more respectable
than his ordinary wear, inasmuch as it was neatly patched on each
elbow, and might be called an entire garment, except for a slight
inequality in the length of its skirts. Clifford, on several
occasions, had seemed to enjoy the old man's intercourse, for the sake
of his mellow, cheerful vein, which was like the sweet flavor of a
frost-bitten apple, such as one picks up under the tree in December. A
man at the very lowest point of the social scale was easier and more
agreeable for the fallen gentleman to encounter than a person at any of
the intermediate degrees; and, moreover, as Clifford's young manhood
had been lost, he was fond of feeling himself comparatively youthful,
now, in apposition with the patriarchal age of Uncle Venner. In fact,
it was sometimes observable that Clifford half wilfully hid from
himself the consciousness of being stricken in years, and cherished
visions of an earthly future still before him; visions, however, too
indistinctly drawn to be followed by disappointment--though, doubtless,
by depression--when any casual incident or recollection made him
sensible of the withered leaf.
So this oddly composed little social party used to assemble under the
ruinous arbor. Hepzibah--stately as ever at heart, and yielding not an
inch of her old gentility, but resting upon it so much the more, as
justifying a princess-like condescension--exhibited a not ungraceful
hospitality. She talked kindly to the vagrant artist, and took sage
counsel--lady as she was--with the wood-sawyer, the messenger of
everybody's petty errands, the patched philosopher. And Uncle Venner,
who had studied the world at street-corners, and other posts equally
well adapted for just observation, was as ready to give out his wisdom
as a town-pump to give water.
"Miss Hepzibah, ma'am," said he once, after they had all been cheerful
together, "I really enjoy these quiet little meetings of a Sabbath
afternoon. They are very much like what I expect to have after I
retire to my farm!"
"Uncle Venner" observed Clifford in a drowsy, inward tone, "is always
talking about his farm. But I have a better scheme for him, by and by.
We shall see!"
"Ah, Mr. Clifford Pyncheon!" said the man of patches, "you may scheme
for me as much as you please; but I'm not going to give up this one
scheme of my own, even if I never bring it really to pass. It does
seem to me that men make a wonderful mistake in trying to heap up
property upon property. If I had done so, I should feel as if
Providence was not bound to take care of me; and, at all events, the
city wouldn't be! I'm one of those people who think that infinity is
big enough for us all--and eternity long enough."
"Why, so they are, Uncle Venner," remarked Phoebe after a pause; for
she had been trying to fathom the profundity and appositeness of this
concluding apothegm. "But for this short life of ours, one would like
a house and a moderate garden-spot of one's own."
"It appears to me," said the daguerreotypist, smiling, "that Uncle
Venner has the principles of Fourier at the bottom of his wisdom; only
they have not quite so much distinctness in his mind as in that of the
systematizing Frenchman."
"Come, Phoebe," said Hepzibah, "it is time to bring the currants."
And then, while the yellow richness of the declining sunshine still
fell into the open space of the garden, Phoebe brought out a loaf of
bread and a china bowl of currants, freshly gathered from the bushes,
and crushed with sugar. These, with water,--but not from the fountain
of ill omen, close at hand,--constituted all the entertainment.
Meanwhile, Holgrave took some pains to establish an intercourse with
Clifford, actuated, it might seem, entirely by an impulse of
kindliness, in order that the present hour might be cheerfuller than
most which the poor recluse had spent, or was destined yet to spend.
Nevertheless, in the artist's deep, thoughtful, all-observant eyes,
there was, now and then, an expression, not sinister, but questionable;
as if he had some other interest in the scene than a stranger, a
youthful and unconnected adventurer, might be supposed to have. With
great mobility of outward mood, however, he applied himself to the task
of enlivening the party; and with so much success, that even dark-hued
Hepzibah threw off one tint of melancholy, and made what shift she
could with the remaining portion. Phoebe said to herself,--"How
pleasant he can be!" As for Uncle Venner, as a mark of friendship and
approbation, he readily consented to afford the young man his
countenance in the way of his profession,--not metaphorically, be it
understood, but literally, by allowing a daguerreotype of his face, so
familiar to the town, to be exhibited at the entrance of Holgrave's
studio.
Clifford, as the company partook of their little banquet, grew to be
the gayest of them all. Either it was one of those up-quivering
flashes of the spirit, to which minds in an abnormal state are liable,
or else the artist had subtly touched some chord that made musical
vibration. Indeed, what with the pleasant summer evening, and the
sympathy of this little circle of not unkindly souls, it was perhaps
natural that a character so susceptible as Clifford's should become
animated, and show itself readily responsive to what was said around
him. But he gave out his own thoughts, likewise, with an airy and
fanciful glow; so that they glistened, as it were, through the arbor,
and made their escape among the interstices of the foliage. He had
been as cheerful, no doubt, while alone with Phoebe, but never with
such tokens of acute, although partial intelligence.
But, as the sunlight left the peaks of the Seven Gables, so did the
excitement fade out of Clifford's eyes. He gazed vaguely and
mournfully about him, as if he missed something precious, and missed it
the more drearily for not knowing precisely what it was.
"I want my happiness!" at last he murmured hoarsely and indistinctly,
hardly shaping out the words. "Many, many years have I waited for it!
It is late! It is late! I want my happiness!"
Alas, poor Clifford! You are old, and worn with troubles that ought
never to have befallen you. You are partly crazy and partly imbecile;
a ruin, a failure, as almost everybody is,--though some in less degree,
or less perceptibly, than their fellows. Fate has no happiness in
store for you; unless your quiet home in the old family residence with
the faithful Hepzibah, and your long summer afternoons with Phoebe, and
these Sabbath festivals with Uncle Venner and the daguerreotypist,
deserve to be called happiness! Why not? If not the thing itself, it
is marvellously like it, and the more so for that ethereal and
intangible quality which causes it all to vanish at too close an
introspection. Take it, therefore, while you may. Murmur
not,--question not,--but make the most of it!
| Clifford, as Hawthorne writes, is "partly crazy and partly an imbecile," with no remaining hopes for the future and no past from which he can take satisfaction. Since he lives within the immediate present, Clifford responds with great force to the various pleasures he experiences, yet each moment of satisfaction makes him more aware that he can only grasp temporal pleasures while avoiding things that may pain him. If Clifford is infantile and even suffers from delusions, he still cannot deny the pain of his past and therefore avoids confronting anything that corresponds to that reality. His greatest enjoyments are representations of human life rather than the actuality of experience. He enjoys the secluded garden with his small circle of companions because it gives the appearance of nature and reality, but is still cut off from any dangers of actual life. For Clifford the garden is an Eden: perfect and harmonious but nevertheless a fantasy separate from the world outside of the House of the Seven Gables. Holgrave, in contrast, is the only person in Clifford's social circle that belongs to a society outside of the House of the Seven Gables, for Since the eccentric Uncle Venner is an odd outcast from society. The interest that Holgrave shows in Clifford is questionable, as Hawthorne writes, for he seems to take an instrumental interest in Clifford that is not yet discernible. Holgrave observes Clifford as the means to some end that the author has not yet revealed. He approaches Clifford as a person to be studied; just as Phoebe represents femininity to Clifford, Clifford himself represents something undetermined for Holgrave | analysis |
FROM the inertness, or what we may term the vegetative character, of
his ordinary mood, Clifford would perhaps have been content to spend
one day after another, interminably,--or, at least, throughout the
summer-time,--in just the kind of life described in the preceding
pages. Fancying, however, that it might be for his benefit
occasionally to diversify the scene, Phoebe sometimes suggested that he
should look out upon the life of the street. For this purpose, they
used to mount the staircase together, to the second story of the house,
where, at the termination of a wide entry, there was an arched window,
of uncommonly large dimensions, shaded by a pair of curtains. It
opened above the porch, where there had formerly been a balcony, the
balustrade of which had long since gone to decay, and been removed. At
this arched window, throwing it open, but keeping himself in
comparative obscurity by means of the curtain, Clifford had an
opportunity of witnessing such a portion of the great world's movement
as might be supposed to roll through one of the retired streets of a
not very populous city. But he and Phoebe made a sight as well worth
seeing as any that the city could exhibit. The pale, gray, childish,
aged, melancholy, yet often simply cheerful, and sometimes delicately
intelligent aspect of Clifford, peering from behind the faded crimson
of the curtain,--watching the monotony of every-day occurrences with a
kind of inconsequential interest and earnestness, and, at every petty
throb of his sensibility, turning for sympathy to the eyes of the
bright young girl!
If once he were fairly seated at the window, even Pyncheon Street would
hardly be so dull and lonely but that, somewhere or other along its
extent, Clifford might discover matter to occupy his eye, and
titillate, if not engross, his observation. Things familiar to the
youngest child that had begun its outlook at existence seemed strange
to him. A cab; an omnibus, with its populous interior, dropping here
and there a passenger, and picking up another, and thus typifying that
vast rolling vehicle, the world, the end of whose journey is everywhere
and nowhere; these objects he followed eagerly with his eyes, but
forgot them before the dust raised by the horses and wheels had settled
along their track. As regarded novelties (among which cabs and
omnibuses were to be reckoned), his mind appeared to have lost its
proper gripe and retentiveness. Twice or thrice, for example, during
the sunny hours of the day, a water-cart went along by the Pyncheon
House, leaving a broad wake of moistened earth, instead of the white
dust that had risen at a lady's lightest footfall; it was like a summer
shower, which the city authorities had caught and tamed, and compelled
it into the commonest routine of their convenience. With the
water-cart Clifford could never grow familiar; it always affected him
with just the same surprise as at first. His mind took an apparently
sharp impression from it, but lost the recollection of this
perambulatory shower, before its next reappearance, as completely as
did the street itself, along which the heat so quickly strewed white
dust again. It was the same with the railroad. Clifford could hear
the obstreperous howl of the steam-devil, and, by leaning a little way
from the arched window, could catch a glimpse of the trains of cars,
flashing a brief transit across the extremity of the street. The idea
of terrible energy thus forced upon him was new at every recurrence,
and seemed to affect him as disagreeably, and with almost as much
surprise, the hundredth time as the first.
Nothing gives a sadder sense of decay than this loss or suspension of
the power to deal with unaccustomed things, and to keep up with the
swiftness of the passing moment. It can merely be a suspended
animation; for, were the power actually to perish, there would be
little use of immortality. We are less than ghosts, for the time
being, whenever this calamity befalls us.
Clifford was indeed the most inveterate of conservatives. All the
antique fashions of the street were dear to him; even such as were
characterized by a rudeness that would naturally have annoyed his
fastidious senses. He loved the old rumbling and jolting carts, the
former track of which he still found in his long-buried remembrance, as
the observer of to-day finds the wheel-tracks of ancient vehicles in
Herculaneum. The butcher's cart, with its snowy canopy, was an
acceptable object; so was the fish-cart, heralded by its horn; so,
likewise, was the countryman's cart of vegetables, plodding from door
to door, with long pauses of the patient horse, while his owner drove a
trade in turnips, carrots, summer-squashes, string-beans, green peas,
and new potatoes, with half the housewives of the neighborhood. The
baker's cart, with the harsh music of its bells, had a pleasant effect
on Clifford, because, as few things else did, it jingled the very
dissonance of yore. One afternoon a scissor-grinder chanced to set his
wheel a-going under the Pyncheon Elm, and just in front of the arched
window. Children came running with their mothers' scissors, or the
carving-knife, or the paternal razor, or anything else that lacked an
edge (except, indeed, poor Clifford's wits), that the grinder might
apply the article to his magic wheel, and give it back as good as new.
Round went the busily revolving machinery, kept in motion by the
scissor-grinder's foot, and wore away the hard steel against the hard
stone, whence issued an intense and spiteful prolongation of a hiss as
fierce as those emitted by Satan and his compeers in Pandemonium,
though squeezed into smaller compass. It was an ugly, little, venomous
serpent of a noise, as ever did petty violence to human ears. But
Clifford listened with rapturous delight. The sound, however
disagreeable, had very brisk life in it, and, together with the circle
of curious children watching the revolutions of the wheel, appeared to
give him a more vivid sense of active, bustling, and sunshiny existence
than he had attained in almost any other way. Nevertheless, its charm
lay chiefly in the past; for the scissor-grinder's wheel had hissed in
his childish ears.
He sometimes made doleful complaint that there were no stage-coaches
nowadays. And he asked in an injured tone what had become of all those
old square-topped chaises, with wings sticking out on either side, that
used to be drawn by a plough-horse, and driven by a farmer's wife and
daughter, peddling whortle-berries and blackberries about the town.
Their disappearance made him doubt, he said, whether the berries had
not left off growing in the broad pastures and along the shady country
lanes.
But anything that appealed to the sense of beauty, in however humble a
way, did not require to be recommended by these old associations. This
was observable when one of those Italian boys (who are rather a modern
feature of our streets) came along with his barrel-organ, and stopped
under the wide and cool shadows of the elm. With his quick
professional eye he took note of the two faces watching him from the
arched window, and, opening his instrument, began to scatter its
melodies abroad. He had a monkey on his shoulder, dressed in a
Highland plaid; and, to complete the sum of splendid attractions
wherewith he presented himself to the public, there was a company of
little figures, whose sphere and habitation was in the mahogany case of
his organ, and whose principle of life was the music which the Italian
made it his business to grind out. In all their variety of
occupation,--the cobbler, the blacksmith, the soldier, the lady with
her fan, the toper with his bottle, the milk-maid sitting by her
cow--this fortunate little society might truly be said to enjoy a
harmonious existence, and to make life literally a dance. The Italian
turned a crank; and, behold! every one of these small individuals
started into the most curious vivacity. The cobbler wrought upon a
shoe; the blacksmith hammered his iron, the soldier waved his
glittering blade; the lady raised a tiny breeze with her fan; the jolly
toper swigged lustily at his bottle; a scholar opened his book with
eager thirst for knowledge, and turned his head to and fro along the
page; the milkmaid energetically drained her cow; and a miser counted
gold into his strong-box,--all at the same turning of a crank. Yes;
and, moved by the self-same impulse, a lover saluted his mistress on
her lips! Possibly some cynic, at once merry and bitter, had desired to
signify, in this pantomimic scene, that we mortals, whatever our
business or amusement,--however serious, however trifling,--all dance
to one identical tune, and, in spite of our ridiculous activity, bring
nothing finally to pass. For the most remarkable aspect of the affair
was, that, at the cessation of the music, everybody was petrified at
once, from the most extravagant life into a dead torpor. Neither was
the cobbler's shoe finished, nor the blacksmith's iron shaped out; nor
was there a drop less of brandy in the toper's bottle, nor a drop more
of milk in the milkmaid's pail, nor one additional coin in the miser's
strong-box, nor was the scholar a page deeper in his book. All were
precisely in the same condition as before they made themselves so
ridiculous by their haste to toil, to enjoy, to accumulate gold, and to
become wise. Saddest of all, moreover, the lover was none the happier
for the maiden's granted kiss! But, rather than swallow this last too
acrid ingredient, we reject the whole moral of the show.
The monkey, meanwhile, with a thick tail curling out into preposterous
prolixity from beneath his tartans, took his station at the Italian's
feet. He turned a wrinkled and abominable little visage to every
passer-by, and to the circle of children that soon gathered round, and
to Hepzibah's shop-door, and upward to the arched window, whence Phoebe
and Clifford were looking down. Every moment, also, he took off his
Highland bonnet, and performed a bow and scrape. Sometimes, moreover,
he made personal application to individuals, holding out his small
black palm, and otherwise plainly signifying his excessive desire for
whatever filthy lucre might happen to be in anybody's pocket. The mean
and low, yet strangely man-like expression of his wilted countenance;
the prying and crafty glance, that showed him ready to gripe at every
miserable advantage; his enormous tail (too enormous to be decently
concealed under his gabardine), and the deviltry of nature which it
betokened,--take this monkey just as he was, in short, and you could
desire no better image of the Mammon of copper coin, symbolizing the
grossest form of the love of money. Neither was there any possibility
of satisfying the covetous little devil. Phoebe threw down a whole
handful of cents, which he picked up with joyless eagerness, handed
them over to the Italian for safekeeping, and immediately recommenced a
series of pantomimic petitions for more.
Doubtless, more than one New-Englander--or, let him be of what country
he might, it is as likely to be the case--passed by, and threw a look
at the monkey, and went on, without imagining how nearly his own moral
condition was here exemplified. Clifford, however, was a being of
another order. He had taken childish delight in the music, and smiled,
too, at the figures which it set in motion. But, after looking awhile
at the long-tailed imp, he was so shocked by his horrible ugliness,
spiritual as well as physical, that he actually began to shed tears; a
weakness which men of merely delicate endowments, and destitute of the
fiercer, deeper, and more tragic power of laughter, can hardly avoid,
when the worst and meanest aspect of life happens to be presented to
them.
Pyncheon Street was sometimes enlivened by spectacles of more imposing
pretensions than the above, and which brought the multitude along with
them. With a shivering repugnance at the idea of personal contact with
the world, a powerful impulse still seized on Clifford, whenever the
rush and roar of the human tide grew strongly audible to him. This was
made evident, one day, when a political procession, with hundreds of
flaunting banners, and drums, fifes, clarions, and cymbals,
reverberating between the rows of buildings, marched all through town,
and trailed its length of trampling footsteps, and most infrequent
uproar, past the ordinarily quiet House of the Seven Gables. As a mere
object of sight, nothing is more deficient in picturesque features than
a procession seen in its passage through narrow streets. The spectator
feels it to be fool's play, when he can distinguish the tedious
commonplace of each man's visage, with the perspiration and weary
self-importance on it, and the very cut of his pantaloons, and the
stiffness or laxity of his shirt-collar, and the dust on the back of
his black coat. In order to become majestic, it should be viewed from
some vantage point, as it rolls its slow and long array through the
centre of a wide plain, or the stateliest public square of a city; for
then, by its remoteness, it melts all the petty personalities, of which
it is made up, into one broad mass of existence,--one great life,--one
collected body of mankind, with a vast, homogeneous spirit animating
it. But, on the other hand, if an impressible person, standing alone
over the brink of one of these processions, should behold it, not in
its atoms, but in its aggregate,--as a mighty river of life, massive in
its tide, and black with mystery, and, out of its depths, calling to
the kindred depth within him,--then the contiguity would add to the
effect. It might so fascinate him that he would hardly be restrained
from plunging into the surging stream of human sympathies.
So it proved with Clifford. He shuddered; he grew pale; he threw an
appealing look at Hepzibah and Phoebe, who were with him at the window.
They comprehended nothing of his emotions, and supposed him merely
disturbed by the unaccustomed tumult. At last, with tremulous limbs,
he started up, set his foot on the window-sill, and in an instant more
would have been in the unguarded balcony. As it was, the whole
procession might have seen him, a wild, haggard figure, his gray locks
floating in the wind that waved their banners; a lonely being,
estranged from his race, but now feeling himself man again, by virtue
of the irrepressible instinct that possessed him. Had Clifford
attained the balcony, he would probably have leaped into the street;
but whether impelled by the species of terror that sometimes urges its
victim over the very precipice which he shrinks from, or by a natural
magnetism, tending towards the great centre of humanity, it were not
easy to decide. Both impulses might have wrought on him at once.
But his companions, affrighted by his gesture,--which was that of a man
hurried away in spite of himself,--seized Clifford's garment and held
him back. Hepzibah shrieked. Phoebe, to whom all extravagance was a
horror, burst into sobs and tears.
"Clifford, Clifford! are you crazy?" cried his sister.
"I hardly know, Hepzibah," said Clifford, drawing a long breath. "Fear
nothing,--it is over now,--but had I taken that plunge, and survived
it, methinks it would have made me another man!"
Possibly, in some sense, Clifford may have been right. He needed a
shock; or perhaps he required to take a deep, deep plunge into the
ocean of human life, and to sink down and be covered by its
profoundness, and then to emerge, sobered, invigorated, restored to the
world and to himself. Perhaps again, he required nothing less than the
great final remedy--death!
A similar yearning to renew the broken links of brotherhood with his
kind sometimes showed itself in a milder form; and once it was made
beautiful by the religion that lay even deeper than itself. In the
incident now to be sketched, there was a touching recognition, on
Clifford's part, of God's care and love towards him,--towards this
poor, forsaken man, who, if any mortal could, might have been pardoned
for regarding himself as thrown aside, forgotten, and left to be the
sport of some fiend, whose playfulness was an ecstasy of mischief.
It was the Sabbath morning; one of those bright, calm Sabbaths, with
its own hallowed atmosphere, when Heaven seems to diffuse itself over
the earth's face in a solemn smile, no less sweet than solemn. On such
a Sabbath morn, were we pure enough to be its medium, we should be
conscious of the earth's natural worship ascending through our frames,
on whatever spot of ground we stood. The church-bells, with various
tones, but all in harmony, were calling out and responding to one
another,--"It is the Sabbath!--The Sabbath!--Yea; the Sabbath!"--and
over the whole city the bells scattered the blessed sounds, now slowly,
now with livelier joy, now one bell alone, now all the bells together,
crying earnestly,--"It is the Sabbath!"--and flinging their accents
afar off, to melt into the air and pervade it with the holy word. The
air with God's sweetest and tenderest sunshine in it, was meet for
mankind to breathe into their hearts, and send it forth again as the
utterance of prayer.
Clifford sat at the window with Hepzibah, watching the neighbors as
they stepped into the street. All of them, however unspiritual on
other days, were transfigured by the Sabbath influence; so that their
very garments--whether it were an old man's decent coat well brushed
for the thousandth time, or a little boy's first sack and trousers
finished yesterday by his mother's needle--had somewhat of the quality
of ascension-robes. Forth, likewise, from the portal of the old house
stepped Phoebe, putting up her small green sunshade, and throwing
upward a glance and smile of parting kindness to the faces at the
arched window. In her aspect there was a familiar gladness, and a
holiness that you could play with, and yet reverence it as much as
ever. She was like a prayer, offered up in the homeliest beauty of
one's mother-tongue. Fresh was Phoebe, moreover, and airy and sweet in
her apparel; as if nothing that she wore--neither her gown, nor her
small straw bonnet, nor her little kerchief, any more than her snowy
stockings--had ever been put on before; or, if worn, were all the
fresher for it, and with a fragrance as if they had lain among the
rosebuds.
The girl waved her hand to Hepzibah and Clifford, and went up the
street; a religion in herself, warm, simple, true, with a substance
that could walk on earth, and a spirit that was capable of heaven.
"Hepzibah," asked Clifford, after watching Phoebe to the corner, "do
you never go to church?"
"No, Clifford!" she replied,--"not these many, many years!"
"Were I to be there," he rejoined, "it seems to me that I could pray
once more, when so many human souls were praying all around me!"
She looked into Clifford's face, and beheld there a soft natural
effusion; for his heart gushed out, as it were, and ran over at his
eyes, in delightful reverence for God, and kindly affection for his
human brethren. The emotion communicated itself to Hepzibah. She
yearned to take him by the hand, and go and kneel down, they two
together,--both so long separate from the world, and, as she now
recognized, scarcely friends with Him above,--to kneel down among the
people, and be reconciled to God and man at once.
"Dear brother," said she earnestly, "let us go! We belong nowhere. We
have not a foot of space in any church to kneel upon; but let us go to
some place of worship, even if we stand in the broad aisle. Poor and
forsaken as we are, some pew-door will be opened to us!"
So Hepzibah and her brother made themselves, ready--as ready as they
could in the best of their old-fashioned garments, which had hung on
pegs, or been laid away in trunks, so long that the dampness and mouldy
smell of the past was on them,--made themselves ready, in their faded
bettermost, to go to church. They descended the staircase
together,--gaunt, sallow Hepzibah, and pale, emaciated, age-stricken
Clifford! They pulled open the front door, and stepped across the
threshold, and felt, both of them, as if they were standing in the
presence of the whole world, and with mankind's great and terrible eye
on them alone. The eye of their Father seemed to be withdrawn, and
gave them no encouragement. The warm sunny air of the street made them
shiver. Their hearts quaked within them at the idea of taking one
step farther.
"It cannot be, Hepzibah!--it is too late," said Clifford with deep
sadness. "We are ghosts! We have no right among human beings,--no
right anywhere but in this old house, which has a curse on it, and
which, therefore, we are doomed to haunt! And, besides," he continued,
with a fastidious sensibility, inalienably characteristic of the man,
"it would not be fit nor beautiful to go! It is an ugly thought that I
should be frightful to my fellow-beings, and that children would cling
to their mothers' gowns at sight of me!"
They shrank back into the dusky passage-way, and closed the door. But,
going up the staircase again, they found the whole interior of the
house tenfold more dismal, and the air closer and heavier, for the
glimpse and breath of freedom which they had just snatched. They could
not flee; their jailer had but left the door ajar in mockery, and stood
behind it to watch them stealing out. At the threshold, they felt his
pitiless gripe upon them. For, what other dungeon is so dark as one's
own heart! What jailer so inexorable as one's self!
But it would be no fair picture of Clifford's state of mind were we to
represent him as continually or prevailingly wretched. On the
contrary, there was no other man in the city, we are bold to affirm, of
so much as half his years, who enjoyed so many lightsome and griefless
moments as himself. He had no burden of care upon him; there were none
of those questions and contingencies with the future to be settled
which wear away all other lives, and render them not worth having by
the very process of providing for their support. In this respect he
was a child,--a child for the whole term of his existence, be it long
or short. Indeed, his life seemed to be standing still at a period
little in advance of childhood, and to cluster all his reminiscences
about that epoch; just as, after the torpor of a heavy blow, the
sufferer's reviving consciousness goes back to a moment considerably
behind the accident that stupefied him. He sometimes told Phoebe and
Hepzibah his dreams, in which he invariably played the part of a child,
or a very young man. So vivid were they, in his relation of them, that
he once held a dispute with his sister as to the particular figure or
print of a chintz morning-dress which he had seen their mother wear, in
the dream of the preceding night. Hepzibah, piquing herself on a
woman's accuracy in such matters, held it to be slightly different from
what Clifford described; but, producing the very gown from an old
trunk, it proved to be identical with his remembrance of it. Had
Clifford, every time that he emerged out of dreams so lifelike,
undergone the torture of transformation from a boy into an old and
broken man, the daily recurrence of the shock would have been too much
to bear. It would have caused an acute agony to thrill from the
morning twilight, all the day through, until bedtime; and even then
would have mingled a dull, inscrutable pain and pallid hue of
misfortune with the visionary bloom and adolescence of his slumber.
But the nightly moonshine interwove itself with the morning mist, and
enveloped him as in a robe, which he hugged about his person, and
seldom let realities pierce through; he was not often quite awake, but
slept open-eyed, and perhaps fancied himself most dreaming then.
Thus, lingering always so near his childhood, he had sympathies with
children, and kept his heart the fresher thereby, like a reservoir into
which rivulets were pouring not far from the fountain-head. Though
prevented, by a subtile sense of propriety, from desiring to associate
with them, he loved few things better than to look out of the arched
window and see a little girl driving her hoop along the sidewalk, or
schoolboys at a game of ball. Their voices, also, were very pleasant
to him, heard at a distance, all swarming and intermingling together as
flies do in a sunny room.
Clifford would, doubtless, have been glad to share their sports. One
afternoon he was seized with an irresistible desire to blow
soap-bubbles; an amusement, as Hepzibah told Phoebe apart, that had
been a favorite one with her brother when they were both children.
Behold him, therefore, at the arched window, with an earthen pipe in
his mouth! Behold him, with his gray hair, and a wan, unreal smile over
his countenance, where still hovered a beautiful grace, which his worst
enemy must have acknowledged to be spiritual and immortal, since it had
survived so long! Behold him, scattering airy spheres abroad from the
window into the street! Little impalpable worlds were those
soap-bubbles, with the big world depicted, in hues bright as
imagination, on the nothing of their surface. It was curious to see
how the passers-by regarded these brilliant fantasies, as they came
floating down, and made the dull atmosphere imaginative about them.
Some stopped to gaze, and perhaps, carried a pleasant recollection of
the bubbles onward as far as the street-corner; some looked angrily
upward, as if poor Clifford wronged them by setting an image of beauty
afloat so near their dusty pathway. A great many put out their fingers
or their walking-sticks to touch, withal; and were perversely
gratified, no doubt, when the bubble, with all its pictured earth and
sky scene, vanished as if it had never been.
At length, just as an elderly gentleman of very dignified presence
happened to be passing, a large bubble sailed majestically down, and
burst right against his nose! He looked up,--at first with a stern,
keen glance, which penetrated at once into the obscurity behind the
arched window,--then with a smile which might be conceived as diffusing
a dog-day sultriness for the space of several yards about him.
"Aha, Cousin Clifford!" cried Judge Pyncheon. "What! Still blowing
soap-bubbles!"
The tone seemed as if meant to be kind and soothing, but yet had a
bitterness of sarcasm in it. As for Clifford, an absolute palsy of
fear came over him. Apart from any definite cause of dread which his
past experience might have given him, he felt that native and original
horror of the excellent Judge which is proper to a weak, delicate, and
apprehensive character in the presence of massive strength. Strength
is incomprehensible by weakness, and, therefore, the more terrible.
There is no greater bugbear than a strong-willed relative in the circle
of his own connections.
| The Arched Window: Clifford seemed content to spend one day after another interminably in the way previously described, but Phoebe often would suggest that he should look to life outside of the house. Clifford was the most inveterate of conservatives. All antique fashions were dear to him. One afternoon a scissor-grinder stops by Pyncheon Street in front of the arched window. Children come running with their mothers' scissors for sharpening. The disagreeable sound annoys everyone but Clifford, who listens with rapturous delight, for the sound had a brisk life and was a reminder of the past. Clifford would lament that there were no stagecoaches nowadays. Only those things that Clifford found beautiful did not need the association of the past. Often Italian boys with barrel-organs would be on Pyncheon Street. They would grind the organs and out would pop little figures, such as a scholar with his book, a miser with his gold, and two lovers kissing. The lovers' kiss was the saddest of these when it ended. Clifford became sad when the organ-grinder would stop, and others could not comprehend his emotions. He went into a tumult, and Hepzibah and Phoebe thought that he went mad. Clifford needed a shock to return to human life; perhaps he even required the great final remedy of death. Clifford mentions to Hepzibah that he could pray again if he went to church, if only because he would have others around him praying. They prepare to go to church, but Clifford relents. He claims that they are ghosts who have no right among human beings, doomed to haunt their house. However, this is not a fair picture of his existence, for Clifford spent most of his time with a childlike lack of grief. One afternoon Clifford was blowing soap bubbles when Judge Pyncheon passes by the house. He makes a sarcastic comment about Clifford still blowing soap bubbles. A palsy of fear overcomes Clifford, as he felt the original horror of the judge proper to a weak character in the presence of such strength. | summary |
FROM the inertness, or what we may term the vegetative character, of
his ordinary mood, Clifford would perhaps have been content to spend
one day after another, interminably,--or, at least, throughout the
summer-time,--in just the kind of life described in the preceding
pages. Fancying, however, that it might be for his benefit
occasionally to diversify the scene, Phoebe sometimes suggested that he
should look out upon the life of the street. For this purpose, they
used to mount the staircase together, to the second story of the house,
where, at the termination of a wide entry, there was an arched window,
of uncommonly large dimensions, shaded by a pair of curtains. It
opened above the porch, where there had formerly been a balcony, the
balustrade of which had long since gone to decay, and been removed. At
this arched window, throwing it open, but keeping himself in
comparative obscurity by means of the curtain, Clifford had an
opportunity of witnessing such a portion of the great world's movement
as might be supposed to roll through one of the retired streets of a
not very populous city. But he and Phoebe made a sight as well worth
seeing as any that the city could exhibit. The pale, gray, childish,
aged, melancholy, yet often simply cheerful, and sometimes delicately
intelligent aspect of Clifford, peering from behind the faded crimson
of the curtain,--watching the monotony of every-day occurrences with a
kind of inconsequential interest and earnestness, and, at every petty
throb of his sensibility, turning for sympathy to the eyes of the
bright young girl!
If once he were fairly seated at the window, even Pyncheon Street would
hardly be so dull and lonely but that, somewhere or other along its
extent, Clifford might discover matter to occupy his eye, and
titillate, if not engross, his observation. Things familiar to the
youngest child that had begun its outlook at existence seemed strange
to him. A cab; an omnibus, with its populous interior, dropping here
and there a passenger, and picking up another, and thus typifying that
vast rolling vehicle, the world, the end of whose journey is everywhere
and nowhere; these objects he followed eagerly with his eyes, but
forgot them before the dust raised by the horses and wheels had settled
along their track. As regarded novelties (among which cabs and
omnibuses were to be reckoned), his mind appeared to have lost its
proper gripe and retentiveness. Twice or thrice, for example, during
the sunny hours of the day, a water-cart went along by the Pyncheon
House, leaving a broad wake of moistened earth, instead of the white
dust that had risen at a lady's lightest footfall; it was like a summer
shower, which the city authorities had caught and tamed, and compelled
it into the commonest routine of their convenience. With the
water-cart Clifford could never grow familiar; it always affected him
with just the same surprise as at first. His mind took an apparently
sharp impression from it, but lost the recollection of this
perambulatory shower, before its next reappearance, as completely as
did the street itself, along which the heat so quickly strewed white
dust again. It was the same with the railroad. Clifford could hear
the obstreperous howl of the steam-devil, and, by leaning a little way
from the arched window, could catch a glimpse of the trains of cars,
flashing a brief transit across the extremity of the street. The idea
of terrible energy thus forced upon him was new at every recurrence,
and seemed to affect him as disagreeably, and with almost as much
surprise, the hundredth time as the first.
Nothing gives a sadder sense of decay than this loss or suspension of
the power to deal with unaccustomed things, and to keep up with the
swiftness of the passing moment. It can merely be a suspended
animation; for, were the power actually to perish, there would be
little use of immortality. We are less than ghosts, for the time
being, whenever this calamity befalls us.
Clifford was indeed the most inveterate of conservatives. All the
antique fashions of the street were dear to him; even such as were
characterized by a rudeness that would naturally have annoyed his
fastidious senses. He loved the old rumbling and jolting carts, the
former track of which he still found in his long-buried remembrance, as
the observer of to-day finds the wheel-tracks of ancient vehicles in
Herculaneum. The butcher's cart, with its snowy canopy, was an
acceptable object; so was the fish-cart, heralded by its horn; so,
likewise, was the countryman's cart of vegetables, plodding from door
to door, with long pauses of the patient horse, while his owner drove a
trade in turnips, carrots, summer-squashes, string-beans, green peas,
and new potatoes, with half the housewives of the neighborhood. The
baker's cart, with the harsh music of its bells, had a pleasant effect
on Clifford, because, as few things else did, it jingled the very
dissonance of yore. One afternoon a scissor-grinder chanced to set his
wheel a-going under the Pyncheon Elm, and just in front of the arched
window. Children came running with their mothers' scissors, or the
carving-knife, or the paternal razor, or anything else that lacked an
edge (except, indeed, poor Clifford's wits), that the grinder might
apply the article to his magic wheel, and give it back as good as new.
Round went the busily revolving machinery, kept in motion by the
scissor-grinder's foot, and wore away the hard steel against the hard
stone, whence issued an intense and spiteful prolongation of a hiss as
fierce as those emitted by Satan and his compeers in Pandemonium,
though squeezed into smaller compass. It was an ugly, little, venomous
serpent of a noise, as ever did petty violence to human ears. But
Clifford listened with rapturous delight. The sound, however
disagreeable, had very brisk life in it, and, together with the circle
of curious children watching the revolutions of the wheel, appeared to
give him a more vivid sense of active, bustling, and sunshiny existence
than he had attained in almost any other way. Nevertheless, its charm
lay chiefly in the past; for the scissor-grinder's wheel had hissed in
his childish ears.
He sometimes made doleful complaint that there were no stage-coaches
nowadays. And he asked in an injured tone what had become of all those
old square-topped chaises, with wings sticking out on either side, that
used to be drawn by a plough-horse, and driven by a farmer's wife and
daughter, peddling whortle-berries and blackberries about the town.
Their disappearance made him doubt, he said, whether the berries had
not left off growing in the broad pastures and along the shady country
lanes.
But anything that appealed to the sense of beauty, in however humble a
way, did not require to be recommended by these old associations. This
was observable when one of those Italian boys (who are rather a modern
feature of our streets) came along with his barrel-organ, and stopped
under the wide and cool shadows of the elm. With his quick
professional eye he took note of the two faces watching him from the
arched window, and, opening his instrument, began to scatter its
melodies abroad. He had a monkey on his shoulder, dressed in a
Highland plaid; and, to complete the sum of splendid attractions
wherewith he presented himself to the public, there was a company of
little figures, whose sphere and habitation was in the mahogany case of
his organ, and whose principle of life was the music which the Italian
made it his business to grind out. In all their variety of
occupation,--the cobbler, the blacksmith, the soldier, the lady with
her fan, the toper with his bottle, the milk-maid sitting by her
cow--this fortunate little society might truly be said to enjoy a
harmonious existence, and to make life literally a dance. The Italian
turned a crank; and, behold! every one of these small individuals
started into the most curious vivacity. The cobbler wrought upon a
shoe; the blacksmith hammered his iron, the soldier waved his
glittering blade; the lady raised a tiny breeze with her fan; the jolly
toper swigged lustily at his bottle; a scholar opened his book with
eager thirst for knowledge, and turned his head to and fro along the
page; the milkmaid energetically drained her cow; and a miser counted
gold into his strong-box,--all at the same turning of a crank. Yes;
and, moved by the self-same impulse, a lover saluted his mistress on
her lips! Possibly some cynic, at once merry and bitter, had desired to
signify, in this pantomimic scene, that we mortals, whatever our
business or amusement,--however serious, however trifling,--all dance
to one identical tune, and, in spite of our ridiculous activity, bring
nothing finally to pass. For the most remarkable aspect of the affair
was, that, at the cessation of the music, everybody was petrified at
once, from the most extravagant life into a dead torpor. Neither was
the cobbler's shoe finished, nor the blacksmith's iron shaped out; nor
was there a drop less of brandy in the toper's bottle, nor a drop more
of milk in the milkmaid's pail, nor one additional coin in the miser's
strong-box, nor was the scholar a page deeper in his book. All were
precisely in the same condition as before they made themselves so
ridiculous by their haste to toil, to enjoy, to accumulate gold, and to
become wise. Saddest of all, moreover, the lover was none the happier
for the maiden's granted kiss! But, rather than swallow this last too
acrid ingredient, we reject the whole moral of the show.
The monkey, meanwhile, with a thick tail curling out into preposterous
prolixity from beneath his tartans, took his station at the Italian's
feet. He turned a wrinkled and abominable little visage to every
passer-by, and to the circle of children that soon gathered round, and
to Hepzibah's shop-door, and upward to the arched window, whence Phoebe
and Clifford were looking down. Every moment, also, he took off his
Highland bonnet, and performed a bow and scrape. Sometimes, moreover,
he made personal application to individuals, holding out his small
black palm, and otherwise plainly signifying his excessive desire for
whatever filthy lucre might happen to be in anybody's pocket. The mean
and low, yet strangely man-like expression of his wilted countenance;
the prying and crafty glance, that showed him ready to gripe at every
miserable advantage; his enormous tail (too enormous to be decently
concealed under his gabardine), and the deviltry of nature which it
betokened,--take this monkey just as he was, in short, and you could
desire no better image of the Mammon of copper coin, symbolizing the
grossest form of the love of money. Neither was there any possibility
of satisfying the covetous little devil. Phoebe threw down a whole
handful of cents, which he picked up with joyless eagerness, handed
them over to the Italian for safekeeping, and immediately recommenced a
series of pantomimic petitions for more.
Doubtless, more than one New-Englander--or, let him be of what country
he might, it is as likely to be the case--passed by, and threw a look
at the monkey, and went on, without imagining how nearly his own moral
condition was here exemplified. Clifford, however, was a being of
another order. He had taken childish delight in the music, and smiled,
too, at the figures which it set in motion. But, after looking awhile
at the long-tailed imp, he was so shocked by his horrible ugliness,
spiritual as well as physical, that he actually began to shed tears; a
weakness which men of merely delicate endowments, and destitute of the
fiercer, deeper, and more tragic power of laughter, can hardly avoid,
when the worst and meanest aspect of life happens to be presented to
them.
Pyncheon Street was sometimes enlivened by spectacles of more imposing
pretensions than the above, and which brought the multitude along with
them. With a shivering repugnance at the idea of personal contact with
the world, a powerful impulse still seized on Clifford, whenever the
rush and roar of the human tide grew strongly audible to him. This was
made evident, one day, when a political procession, with hundreds of
flaunting banners, and drums, fifes, clarions, and cymbals,
reverberating between the rows of buildings, marched all through town,
and trailed its length of trampling footsteps, and most infrequent
uproar, past the ordinarily quiet House of the Seven Gables. As a mere
object of sight, nothing is more deficient in picturesque features than
a procession seen in its passage through narrow streets. The spectator
feels it to be fool's play, when he can distinguish the tedious
commonplace of each man's visage, with the perspiration and weary
self-importance on it, and the very cut of his pantaloons, and the
stiffness or laxity of his shirt-collar, and the dust on the back of
his black coat. In order to become majestic, it should be viewed from
some vantage point, as it rolls its slow and long array through the
centre of a wide plain, or the stateliest public square of a city; for
then, by its remoteness, it melts all the petty personalities, of which
it is made up, into one broad mass of existence,--one great life,--one
collected body of mankind, with a vast, homogeneous spirit animating
it. But, on the other hand, if an impressible person, standing alone
over the brink of one of these processions, should behold it, not in
its atoms, but in its aggregate,--as a mighty river of life, massive in
its tide, and black with mystery, and, out of its depths, calling to
the kindred depth within him,--then the contiguity would add to the
effect. It might so fascinate him that he would hardly be restrained
from plunging into the surging stream of human sympathies.
So it proved with Clifford. He shuddered; he grew pale; he threw an
appealing look at Hepzibah and Phoebe, who were with him at the window.
They comprehended nothing of his emotions, and supposed him merely
disturbed by the unaccustomed tumult. At last, with tremulous limbs,
he started up, set his foot on the window-sill, and in an instant more
would have been in the unguarded balcony. As it was, the whole
procession might have seen him, a wild, haggard figure, his gray locks
floating in the wind that waved their banners; a lonely being,
estranged from his race, but now feeling himself man again, by virtue
of the irrepressible instinct that possessed him. Had Clifford
attained the balcony, he would probably have leaped into the street;
but whether impelled by the species of terror that sometimes urges its
victim over the very precipice which he shrinks from, or by a natural
magnetism, tending towards the great centre of humanity, it were not
easy to decide. Both impulses might have wrought on him at once.
But his companions, affrighted by his gesture,--which was that of a man
hurried away in spite of himself,--seized Clifford's garment and held
him back. Hepzibah shrieked. Phoebe, to whom all extravagance was a
horror, burst into sobs and tears.
"Clifford, Clifford! are you crazy?" cried his sister.
"I hardly know, Hepzibah," said Clifford, drawing a long breath. "Fear
nothing,--it is over now,--but had I taken that plunge, and survived
it, methinks it would have made me another man!"
Possibly, in some sense, Clifford may have been right. He needed a
shock; or perhaps he required to take a deep, deep plunge into the
ocean of human life, and to sink down and be covered by its
profoundness, and then to emerge, sobered, invigorated, restored to the
world and to himself. Perhaps again, he required nothing less than the
great final remedy--death!
A similar yearning to renew the broken links of brotherhood with his
kind sometimes showed itself in a milder form; and once it was made
beautiful by the religion that lay even deeper than itself. In the
incident now to be sketched, there was a touching recognition, on
Clifford's part, of God's care and love towards him,--towards this
poor, forsaken man, who, if any mortal could, might have been pardoned
for regarding himself as thrown aside, forgotten, and left to be the
sport of some fiend, whose playfulness was an ecstasy of mischief.
It was the Sabbath morning; one of those bright, calm Sabbaths, with
its own hallowed atmosphere, when Heaven seems to diffuse itself over
the earth's face in a solemn smile, no less sweet than solemn. On such
a Sabbath morn, were we pure enough to be its medium, we should be
conscious of the earth's natural worship ascending through our frames,
on whatever spot of ground we stood. The church-bells, with various
tones, but all in harmony, were calling out and responding to one
another,--"It is the Sabbath!--The Sabbath!--Yea; the Sabbath!"--and
over the whole city the bells scattered the blessed sounds, now slowly,
now with livelier joy, now one bell alone, now all the bells together,
crying earnestly,--"It is the Sabbath!"--and flinging their accents
afar off, to melt into the air and pervade it with the holy word. The
air with God's sweetest and tenderest sunshine in it, was meet for
mankind to breathe into their hearts, and send it forth again as the
utterance of prayer.
Clifford sat at the window with Hepzibah, watching the neighbors as
they stepped into the street. All of them, however unspiritual on
other days, were transfigured by the Sabbath influence; so that their
very garments--whether it were an old man's decent coat well brushed
for the thousandth time, or a little boy's first sack and trousers
finished yesterday by his mother's needle--had somewhat of the quality
of ascension-robes. Forth, likewise, from the portal of the old house
stepped Phoebe, putting up her small green sunshade, and throwing
upward a glance and smile of parting kindness to the faces at the
arched window. In her aspect there was a familiar gladness, and a
holiness that you could play with, and yet reverence it as much as
ever. She was like a prayer, offered up in the homeliest beauty of
one's mother-tongue. Fresh was Phoebe, moreover, and airy and sweet in
her apparel; as if nothing that she wore--neither her gown, nor her
small straw bonnet, nor her little kerchief, any more than her snowy
stockings--had ever been put on before; or, if worn, were all the
fresher for it, and with a fragrance as if they had lain among the
rosebuds.
The girl waved her hand to Hepzibah and Clifford, and went up the
street; a religion in herself, warm, simple, true, with a substance
that could walk on earth, and a spirit that was capable of heaven.
"Hepzibah," asked Clifford, after watching Phoebe to the corner, "do
you never go to church?"
"No, Clifford!" she replied,--"not these many, many years!"
"Were I to be there," he rejoined, "it seems to me that I could pray
once more, when so many human souls were praying all around me!"
She looked into Clifford's face, and beheld there a soft natural
effusion; for his heart gushed out, as it were, and ran over at his
eyes, in delightful reverence for God, and kindly affection for his
human brethren. The emotion communicated itself to Hepzibah. She
yearned to take him by the hand, and go and kneel down, they two
together,--both so long separate from the world, and, as she now
recognized, scarcely friends with Him above,--to kneel down among the
people, and be reconciled to God and man at once.
"Dear brother," said she earnestly, "let us go! We belong nowhere. We
have not a foot of space in any church to kneel upon; but let us go to
some place of worship, even if we stand in the broad aisle. Poor and
forsaken as we are, some pew-door will be opened to us!"
So Hepzibah and her brother made themselves, ready--as ready as they
could in the best of their old-fashioned garments, which had hung on
pegs, or been laid away in trunks, so long that the dampness and mouldy
smell of the past was on them,--made themselves ready, in their faded
bettermost, to go to church. They descended the staircase
together,--gaunt, sallow Hepzibah, and pale, emaciated, age-stricken
Clifford! They pulled open the front door, and stepped across the
threshold, and felt, both of them, as if they were standing in the
presence of the whole world, and with mankind's great and terrible eye
on them alone. The eye of their Father seemed to be withdrawn, and
gave them no encouragement. The warm sunny air of the street made them
shiver. Their hearts quaked within them at the idea of taking one
step farther.
"It cannot be, Hepzibah!--it is too late," said Clifford with deep
sadness. "We are ghosts! We have no right among human beings,--no
right anywhere but in this old house, which has a curse on it, and
which, therefore, we are doomed to haunt! And, besides," he continued,
with a fastidious sensibility, inalienably characteristic of the man,
"it would not be fit nor beautiful to go! It is an ugly thought that I
should be frightful to my fellow-beings, and that children would cling
to their mothers' gowns at sight of me!"
They shrank back into the dusky passage-way, and closed the door. But,
going up the staircase again, they found the whole interior of the
house tenfold more dismal, and the air closer and heavier, for the
glimpse and breath of freedom which they had just snatched. They could
not flee; their jailer had but left the door ajar in mockery, and stood
behind it to watch them stealing out. At the threshold, they felt his
pitiless gripe upon them. For, what other dungeon is so dark as one's
own heart! What jailer so inexorable as one's self!
But it would be no fair picture of Clifford's state of mind were we to
represent him as continually or prevailingly wretched. On the
contrary, there was no other man in the city, we are bold to affirm, of
so much as half his years, who enjoyed so many lightsome and griefless
moments as himself. He had no burden of care upon him; there were none
of those questions and contingencies with the future to be settled
which wear away all other lives, and render them not worth having by
the very process of providing for their support. In this respect he
was a child,--a child for the whole term of his existence, be it long
or short. Indeed, his life seemed to be standing still at a period
little in advance of childhood, and to cluster all his reminiscences
about that epoch; just as, after the torpor of a heavy blow, the
sufferer's reviving consciousness goes back to a moment considerably
behind the accident that stupefied him. He sometimes told Phoebe and
Hepzibah his dreams, in which he invariably played the part of a child,
or a very young man. So vivid were they, in his relation of them, that
he once held a dispute with his sister as to the particular figure or
print of a chintz morning-dress which he had seen their mother wear, in
the dream of the preceding night. Hepzibah, piquing herself on a
woman's accuracy in such matters, held it to be slightly different from
what Clifford described; but, producing the very gown from an old
trunk, it proved to be identical with his remembrance of it. Had
Clifford, every time that he emerged out of dreams so lifelike,
undergone the torture of transformation from a boy into an old and
broken man, the daily recurrence of the shock would have been too much
to bear. It would have caused an acute agony to thrill from the
morning twilight, all the day through, until bedtime; and even then
would have mingled a dull, inscrutable pain and pallid hue of
misfortune with the visionary bloom and adolescence of his slumber.
But the nightly moonshine interwove itself with the morning mist, and
enveloped him as in a robe, which he hugged about his person, and
seldom let realities pierce through; he was not often quite awake, but
slept open-eyed, and perhaps fancied himself most dreaming then.
Thus, lingering always so near his childhood, he had sympathies with
children, and kept his heart the fresher thereby, like a reservoir into
which rivulets were pouring not far from the fountain-head. Though
prevented, by a subtile sense of propriety, from desiring to associate
with them, he loved few things better than to look out of the arched
window and see a little girl driving her hoop along the sidewalk, or
schoolboys at a game of ball. Their voices, also, were very pleasant
to him, heard at a distance, all swarming and intermingling together as
flies do in a sunny room.
Clifford would, doubtless, have been glad to share their sports. One
afternoon he was seized with an irresistible desire to blow
soap-bubbles; an amusement, as Hepzibah told Phoebe apart, that had
been a favorite one with her brother when they were both children.
Behold him, therefore, at the arched window, with an earthen pipe in
his mouth! Behold him, with his gray hair, and a wan, unreal smile over
his countenance, where still hovered a beautiful grace, which his worst
enemy must have acknowledged to be spiritual and immortal, since it had
survived so long! Behold him, scattering airy spheres abroad from the
window into the street! Little impalpable worlds were those
soap-bubbles, with the big world depicted, in hues bright as
imagination, on the nothing of their surface. It was curious to see
how the passers-by regarded these brilliant fantasies, as they came
floating down, and made the dull atmosphere imaginative about them.
Some stopped to gaze, and perhaps, carried a pleasant recollection of
the bubbles onward as far as the street-corner; some looked angrily
upward, as if poor Clifford wronged them by setting an image of beauty
afloat so near their dusty pathway. A great many put out their fingers
or their walking-sticks to touch, withal; and were perversely
gratified, no doubt, when the bubble, with all its pictured earth and
sky scene, vanished as if it had never been.
At length, just as an elderly gentleman of very dignified presence
happened to be passing, a large bubble sailed majestically down, and
burst right against his nose! He looked up,--at first with a stern,
keen glance, which penetrated at once into the obscurity behind the
arched window,--then with a smile which might be conceived as diffusing
a dog-day sultriness for the space of several yards about him.
"Aha, Cousin Clifford!" cried Judge Pyncheon. "What! Still blowing
soap-bubbles!"
The tone seemed as if meant to be kind and soothing, but yet had a
bitterness of sarcasm in it. As for Clifford, an absolute palsy of
fear came over him. Apart from any definite cause of dread which his
past experience might have given him, he felt that native and original
horror of the excellent Judge which is proper to a weak, delicate, and
apprehensive character in the presence of massive strength. Strength
is incomprehensible by weakness, and, therefore, the more terrible.
There is no greater bugbear than a strong-willed relative in the circle
of his own connections.
| From the arched window of the House of the Seven Gables, Clifford has a view of the outside world but cannot actually be part of it. Clifford shows the most affinity for those things in the window that remind him most of childhood in general and his experiences as a youth in particular. Clifford is not simply a man who exhibits childlike characteristics; he exists as a youth whose maturation was completely interrupted by his prison sentence. He can only experience fragments of that life he experienced before convicted of murder. Hawthorne uses the organ grinder and its dancing figures as a metaphor with multiple meanings. The miniature figures on the organ are dense with meaning. They share some affinity with the existence that Clifford experiences. They go through the motions of life but are nevertheless only replicas of actual life. And like Clifford, these figures are subjected to periodic interruptions; just as Clifford experienced decades of cruel stasis while in jail, the figures stop at the whim of the organ grinder. The kissing lovers are the most tragic of these figures because, like Clifford, they are barred from human intercourse. The other figures are solitary persons engaged in simple labor, thus the interruption in their activity only stops them from performing simple, isolated tasks. Hawthorne does not limit the metaphorical implications of the organ grinder to Clifford. He instead inflates the metaphor to encompass all of society. The interruptions in the figures' movement exposes the absurdity of the individual act when examined in a static state. Each of these figures is subject to the whims of the organ grinder, unable to control his fate, but Hawthorne sees this as ridiculous rather than the cause for cynicism. Hawthorne does mention that the scene may indicate how all persons are subject to the same fate and how one's actions eventually come to nothing, but he dismisses this as the musings of a bitter cynic. Rather, Hawthorne adopts for a less nihilistic perspective, intending the scene to show how each of these figures returns to its original state. All return to precisely the same condition as before, corresponding to the novel's theme of the recurring past. Hawthorne does not find the actions of these figures meaningless, for the action is an end in itself. The figures are defined by their actions, thus they cease to have meaning when they stop performing that action. This relates back to Clifford, who exists as one of the figures in stasis. He lacks the humanizing quality of action. Clifford finally loses his final traces of sanity when he has his most firm grip on reality. He realizes that both he and Hepzibah are not fit to be around normal people, for they exist as ghosts haunting the House of the Seven Gables. He can only find comfort in his childlike behavior, which contrasts sharply with that of the imposing Judge Pyncheon, whose appearance is a sharp reminder that Clifford is not completely isolated within the house. Although Clifford believes he is a ghost, his actions are visible through the arched window. This is particularly painful for Clifford because the Judge intrudes upon Clifford's fragile reality. Clifford demonstrates a palpable fear of the Judge based on past events; these events, Hawthorne indicates, may conform to Pyncheon custom and repeat | analysis |
Subsets and Splits
No community queries yet
The top public SQL queries from the community will appear here once available.