Oliver Twist (1838)/Volume 2/Chapter 26
CHAPTER XXVI.
In which a mysterious character appears upon the scene, and many things inseparable from this history are done and performed.
The old man had gained the street corner before he began to recover the effect of Toby Crackit's intelligence. He had relaxed nothing of his unusual speed, but was still pressing onward in the same wild and disordered manner, when the sudden dashing past of a carriage, and a boisterous cry from the foot-passengers who saw his danger, drove him back upon the pavement. Avoiding as much as possible all the main streets, and skulking only through the byways 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, there 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 pickpockets. 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 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; and 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, and, pointing in the direction of Saffron Hill, 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 any thing 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 same public-house in which Mr. Sikes and his dog have already figured. Merely making a sign to a man in the bar, Fagin walked straight up stairs, 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 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 any thing further. 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 gentlemen 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 every thing that was done, and an ear for every thing 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 drunkenness in all its stages were there in their strongest aspects; and women—some with the last lingering tinge of their early freshness almost fading as you looked, and 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 that 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."
"Aha! 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; so Fagin crept softly up stairs, 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 coolly, "or perhaps she is only miserable."
The old man turned to close the door as he made this reflection, and the noise thus occasioned roused the girl. She eyed his crafty face narrowly, as she inquired whether there was any news, and listened to his recital of Toby Crackit's story. When it was concluded, she sunk 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 this 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—eh?"
The girl moaned out some scarcely intelligible reply that she could not tell, and seemed, from the half-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, girl."
"Am I?" cried the girl bitterly. "It's no fault of yours if I am not! you'd never have me any thing 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 that 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. "This: 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 got the power to, to———"
Panting for breath, the old man stammered for a word, and in that one instant, checked the torrent of his wrath, and changed his whole demeanour. A moment before, his clenched hands 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 villany. After a short silence, he ventured to look round at his companion, and 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, he's pretty sure to for he's worth two of him 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 any thing 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 fully 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 dulness, 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 were 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 accomplished his twofold object of imparting to the girl what he had that night heard, and 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, and 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 harshly. "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 upon 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, and remarked 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 visiter at that unseasonable hour, and 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. I hate this!"
"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, and, after a short absence, returned with a lighted candle, and the intelligence that Toby Crackit was asleep in the back-room below, and the boys in the front one. Beckoning the other man to follow him, he led the way up stairs.
"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 neighhours, we'll set the candle on the stairs. There!"
With these words, the Jew, stooping down, placed the candle on an upper flight of stairs exactly opposite the room door, and led the way into the apartment, which was destitute of all moveables 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 flung 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, for the door was partially open, and the candle outside threw a feeble reflection on the opposite wall.
They conversed for some time in whispers; although 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 interest of both should be consulted; is it, my good friend?"
"What then?" demanded Monks sulkily.
"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 upon 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 Jews arm with trembling hands. "Mind that, Fagin! I had no hand in it. Any thing 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, and showed them the empty staircase, and their own white faces. They listened intently, but 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 violently. "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 to the passage, and thence into the cellars below. The green damp hung upon the low walls, and the tracks of the snail and slug glistened in the light, 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 down stairs 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.