Oliver Twist (21 page)

 

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 acknowledgement 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 scarcely 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 fellows!” 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 miles 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, and 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 humorous 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 can’t 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 ecstasy 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 this, 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 or 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 a‘n’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 it, 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 ecstasy, 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 those 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 scarcely 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 lay 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 tonight Ha! ha! my dear, you are acting beautifully.”