Oliver Twist (43 page)

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 wicketgate 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 steats 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? It 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 very man who had accosted him in the innyard.

It was but an instant, a glance, a flash, before his eyes; and they were gone. But they had recognized 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.

 

WHEN THE INMATES OF THE HOUSE, ATTRACTED BY OUVER’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 despatched 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 break fast-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 yet 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 agonizing 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 there, 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 no fame won, and no young vision realized, 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?”