Чарльз Диккенс
Oliver Twist. Volume 3 of 3
CHAPTER XLVII
MONKS AND MR. BROWNLOW AT LENGTH MEET. THEIR CONVERSATION, AND THE INTELLIGENCE THAT INTERRUPTS IT
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 to the old gentleman as if for instructions.
“He knows the alternative,” said Mr. Brownlow. “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 the instant you set foot in the street, that instant will I 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 upon 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, 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 further,” 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; emphatically 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 sister’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 fill my heart, and even the sight of you brings with it old thoughts of him, – it is all these things that move me 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,” returned Mr. Brownlow.
“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 that 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 in evident confusion. “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 wanderings 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, untried 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 him; 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 use, for harshness or favour are now alike to him – of his guilty love; resolved that if my fears were realized that erring child should find one heart and home open 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 could 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, starting.
“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 aught 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 his 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 hurled 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 has made your face an index even to your mind – you, Edward Leeford, do you brave me still!”
“No, no, no!” returned the coward, overwhelmed by these accumulated charges.
“Every word!” cried the old 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 – know 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 can never 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.”
“The Jew” – 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 villany 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, and 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.
CHAPTER XLVIII
THE PURSUIT AND ESCAPE
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, at the present day, 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 water-side 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 very 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, and every imaginable sign of desolation and neglect.
In such a neighbourhood, 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 these days 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 street; 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 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 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 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,” was the reply. “Charley and I made our lucky up the wash’us chimney, and Bolter got into the empty water-butt, head downwards, but his legs was 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 saw 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; if 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; 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 dragging him along amongst ’em; I can see the people jumping up, one behind another, and snarling with their teeth and making at him like wild beasts; I can see the blood upon his hair and beard, and hear the dreadful 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 fast closed got up and paced violently to and fro like one distracted.
Whilst 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, down stairs, 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 Kags, 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, and the dog creeping under a chair, coiled himself up to sleep, without further 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 two days had made a deep impression upon 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.
