Oliver Twist (32 page)

“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.

 

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 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, 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 who go as strangely as they come. Here the clothesman, the shoe-vamper, and the rag-merchant display their goods, as signboards to the petty thief; there, 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 hop talmy!” 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, turuing 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 gaslights, 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 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 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 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; others with every mark and stamp of their sex utterly beaten out, and pre -seating 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.”

“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. 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; the noise thus occasioned, roused the girl. She eyed his crafty face narrowly as she inquired whether there was any news, and as she listened 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!” cried 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 throatbetween 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!”