Чарльз Диккенс
Tales from Dickens
III
HOW EVERYTHING TURNED OUT RIGHT FOR OLIVER
IN THE END
After a long, long time Oliver came to himself. The morning was breaking. He tried to rise and found that his arm was wounded and his clothes wet with blood.
He was so dizzy he could hardly stand, but it was freezing cold, and he knew if he stayed there he must die. So he staggered on till he came to a road where, a little way off, he saw a house. There, he thought, he might get help. But when he came closer he saw that it was the very house the men had tried to rob that night. Fear came over him then, and he would have run away, but he was too weak.
He had just strength left to push open the gate, totter across the lawn and knock at the door; then he sank in a faint on the steps.
In the house lived a lady named Mrs. Maylie, just as kind-hearted as was Mr. Brownlow who had rescued Oliver at the police station, and with her lived a beautiful girl whom she had adopted, named Rose. The servants, when they came to the door, made sure Oliver was one of the robbers, and sent at once for policemen to take him in charge; but Miss Rose, the moment she saw what a good face the boy had and how little he looked like a thief, made them put him to bed and send at once for the doctor.
When the good doctor arrived and saw Oliver, who was still unconscious, he thought Miss Rose was right, and when the boy had come to himself and told them how he had suffered, he was certain of it. They were both sorry the policemen had been sent for, because the doctor was sure they would not believe Oliver's story, especially as he had been arrested once before. He would have taken him away, but he was too sick to be moved.
So when the officers came the doctor told them that the boy had been accidentally shot and had come to the house for assistance, when the servants had mistaken him for one of the burglars. This was not exactly the truth, but it seemed necessary to deceive the policemen if Oliver was to be saved. Of course, the servant that had fired the pistol was not able to swear that he had hit anybody at all, so the officers had to go away without arresting anybody.
After this Oliver was ill for a long time, but he was carefully nursed, especially by Miss Rose, who grew as fond of him as if she had been his sister. As soon as he grew better she wrote a letter for him to Mr. Brownlow, the old gentleman who had rescued him from the police station, but to Oliver's grief she found that he had gone to the West Indies.
Thus the time passed till Oliver was quite well, and then Miss Rose (first carefully instructing the servant who went with them not to lose sight of him for a moment for fear of his old enemies) took him with her for a visit to London.
Meantime there had been a dreadful scene in Fagin's house when Bill Sikes got back to London and told the old Jew that the robbery had failed and that Oliver was lost again. They were more afraid than ever that they would be caught and sent to prison. Fagin swore at Sikes, and Monks cursed Fagin, and between them all they determined that Oliver must either be captured or killed.
While they were plotting afresh Nancy, who had been feeling sorrier and sorrier for what she had done, overheard them, and so found out that Monks was Oliver's half-brother and why he so hated him; and she made up her mind to save the boy from his last and greatest danger.
So one evening, when she was alone with him, she gave Sikes some laudanum in a glass of liquor, and when he was asleep she slipped away, found Miss Rose and told her all about it. Bad as Nancy was, however, she was not willing to betray Fagin or Bill Sikes, so she only told her of Monks.
Miss Rose was greatly astonished, for she had never heard of him before, but she pitied Nancy because she had tried to help Oliver, and, of course, she herself wanted very much to help him discover who he was and who his parents had been. She thanked Nancy and begged her to come to see her again. Nancy was afraid to do this, because Bill Sikes watched her so closely, but she promised that on the next Sunday at midnight she would be on a certain bridge where Miss Rose might see her. Then Nancy hurried back before Sikes should wake up.
Miss Rose was in trouble now, for there was no one in London with her then who could help her. But the same afternoon, whom should Oliver see at a distance, walking into his house, but Mr. Brownlow. He came back in great joy to tell Miss Rose, and she concluded that the old gentleman would be the very one to aid her. She took Oliver to the house, and, sure enough, there was the boy's old benefactor.
Very glad, indeed, he was to hear what she told him. For the old gentleman, when Oliver had disappeared with the money he had given him to take to the bookseller, had been reluctant to think the boy he had befriended was, after all, a liar and a thief. He had advertised for him, but the only result had been a call from Mr. Bumble, who told him terrible tales of Oliver's wickedness. To find now, after all this time, that Oliver had not run away, and that Mr. Bumble's tales were lying ones, was a joyful surprise to Mr. Brownlow.
After he had heard the whole, and when Oliver had gone into the garden, Miss Rose told him of Nancy's visit and of the man Monks who still pursued the boy to do him harm.
It was fortunate that she had come to Mr. Brownlow, for, as it happened, he knew a great deal about Monks and his evil life. Years before the old gentleman himself had been a friend of Oliver's father. He knew all about his death in a foreign country, and had watched his older son's career of shame with sorrow. The very trip he had made to the West Indies had acquainted him with a crime Monks had committed there, from which he had fled to England. But, while Mr. Brownlow knew of the curious will Oliver's father had made, what had become of the baby to which the latter referred he had never known. Now, from the story Miss Rose told him, he was assured that Oliver was, indeed, this baby half-brother of Monks.
But it was one thing to know this and quite another to enable Oliver to prove it. The old gentleman was quick to see that they must get possession of Monks and frighten him into confessing the fact – whose only proofs had been lost when he threw the locket and ring into the river. Mr. Brownlow, for this reason, agreed with Miss Rose that they should both meet Nancy on the bridge on the coming Sunday to hear all she had been able to find out.
They said not a word of this to Oliver, and when Sunday night came they drove to the spot where Nancy had promised to meet them. She had kept her word. She was there before them, and Mr. Brownlow heard her story over again from her own lips.
But some one else was there, too, hidden behind a pillar, where he could hear every word she said, and this listener was a spy of Fagin's.
Nancy had cried so much and acted so strangely that the old Jew had grown suspicious and had set some one to watch her. And who do you suppose this spy was? No other than the cowardly apprentice who had bullied Oliver until he ran away from the undertaker's house. The apprentice had finally run away, too, had come to London and begun a wicked life. He was too big a coward to rob any one but little children who had been sent to the shop to buy something, so Fagin had given him spying work to do, and in this, being by nature a sneak, he proved very successful.
The spy lay hid till he had heard all Nancy said; then he slipped out and ran as fast as his legs would carry him back to Fagin. The latter sent for Bill Sikes, knowing him to be the most brutal and bloodthirsty ruffian of all, and told him what Nancy had done.
The knowledge, as the Jew expected, turned Sikes into a demon. He rushed to where Nancy lived. She had returned and was asleep on her couch, but she woke as he entered, and saw by his face that he meant to murder her. Through all her evil career Nancy had been true to Sikes and would not have betrayed him. But he would not listen now, though she pleaded with him pitifully to come with her to some foreign country (as Miss Rose had begged her to do), where they might both lead better lives. Fury had made him mad. As she clung to his knees, he seized a heavy club and struck her down.
So poor Nancy died, with only time for a feeble prayer to God for mercy.
Of all bad deeds that Sikes had ever done, that was the worst. The sun shone through the window and lit the room where Nancy lay. He tried to shut it out, but he could not. He grew suddenly afraid. Horror came upon him. He crept out of the room, locked the door behind him, and plunged into the crowded street.
He walked for miles and miles, here and there, without purpose. Whichever way he went he could not rid himself of that horror. When night came he crawled into a disused shed, but he could not sleep. Whenever he closed his eyes he seemed to see Nancy's eyes looking at him. He got up and wandered on again, desperately lonely for some one to talk to.
He heard a man telling another about the murder as he read the account in a newspaper, and knew that he must hide. He hastened then to a den he knew in a house beside the river, dirty and dismal and the haunt of thieves. Some of his old companions were there, but even they shrank from him.
He had been seen to enter the place, however, and in a few minutes the street was full of people, all yelling for his capture. He barred the doors and windows, but they began to break down the shutters with sledge-hammers.
He ran to the roof with a rope, thinking to let himself down on the side next the river and so escape. Here he fastened one end of the rope to the chimney, and, making a loop in the other end, put it over his head.
Just at that instant he imagined he saw Nancy's eyes again looking at him. He staggered back in terror, missed his footing, and fell over the edge of the roof. He had not had time to draw the noose down under his arms, so that it slipped up around his neck, and there he hung, dead, with a broken neck.
Meanwhile Mr. Brownlow had acted very quickly, so that Monks had got no warning. He had had men watching for the latter and now, having found out all he wanted to know, he had him seized in the street, put into a coach and driven to his office, where he brought him face to face with Oliver.
The old gentleman told Monks he could do one of two things: either he could confess before witnesses the whole infamous plot he had framed against Oliver, and so restore to him his rights and name, or else he could refuse, in which case he would at once be arrested and sent to prison. Seeing that Mr. Brownlow knew all about the part he had played, Monks, to save himself, made a full confession – how he had planned to keep his half-brother from his inheritance. And he also confessed what no one there had guessed: that Miss Rose, who had been adopted in her infancy, was really the sister of Oliver's dead mother – his aunt, indeed. This was the happiest of all Oliver's surprises that day, for he had learned to love Miss Rose very dearly.
Monks thus bought his own freedom, and cheap enough he probably thought it, for before he had finished his story, word came that Fagin the Jew had been captured by the police and was to be tried without delay for his life.
Oliver no longer had anything to fear, and came into possession of his true name and his fortune. Mr. Brownlow adopted him as his own son, and moved to the village where Oliver had been cared for in the family of Miss Rose, and where they all lived happily ever afterward.
The company of thieves was broken up with Fagin's arrest. Fagin himself was found guilty, and died on the gallows shrieking with fear. Monks sailed for America, where he was soon detected in crime and died in prison.
The wicked apprentice, who had been the real cause of poor Nancy's murder, was so frightened at the fate of Fagin that he reformed and became a spy for the police, and by his aid the Artful Dodger, who continued to pick pockets, soon found himself in jail.
As for Mr. and Mrs. Bumble, they, of course, lost their positions, and sank from bad to worse till they finally became paupers and were sent to the very same poorhouse where they had tortured little Oliver Twist.
BARNABY RUDGE
Published 1841
CHARACTERS
BARNABY RUDGE
I
BARNABY'S BOYHOOD
Many years ago a gentleman named Haredale lived at a house called The Warren, near London. His wife was dead and he had one baby daughter, Emma.
One morning he was found murdered in his house, which had been robbed. Both the gardener and the steward, Rudge, were missing, and some people thought one had done it and some thought the other. But some days later a disfigured body was found in a pond on the grounds which, by its clothes and a watch and ring, was recognized as that of Rudge, the missing steward. Then, of course, every one believed the gardener had murdered both, and the police searched for him a long time, but he was never found.
On the same day this cruel murder was discovered, a baby was born to Mrs. Rudge, the wife of the steward – a pretty boy, though with a birth-mark on the wrist as red as blood, and a strange look of terror on the baby face. He was named Barnaby, and his mother loved him all the more because it was soon seen he was weak-minded, and could never be in his right senses. She herself, poor woman! seemed never able to forget the horror of that day.
Geoffrey Haredale, the brother and heir of the murdered man, took up his abode at The Warren and adopted the little Emma, his niece, as his own daughter. He was kind to Mrs. Rudge also. Not only did he let her live rent-free in a house he owned, but he did many a kind deed secretly for her half-witted son as he grew older.
Barnaby Rudge grew up a strange, weird creature. His hair was long and red and hung in disorder about his shoulders. His skin was pale, his eyes bright and his clothes he trimmed most curiously with bits of gaudy lace and bright ribbons and glass toys. He wore a cluster of broken peacock feathers in his hat and girded at his side was the broken hilt of an old sword without a blade. But strangest of all was a little wicker basket he always carried on his back. When he set this down and opened it, there hopped out a tame raven who would cock its head on one side and say hoarsely and very knowingly:
"Hello! Hello! Hello! What's the matter here? Keep up your spirits. Never say die. I'm a devil, I'm a devil, I'm a devil! Hurrah!"
Then it would whistle or make a noise like the drawing of a cork out of a bottle, repeated a great many times, and flap its wings against its sides as if it were bursting with laughter. This raven was named Grip and was Barnaby's constant companion. The neighbors used to say it was one hundred and twenty years old (for ravens live a very long time), and some said it knew altogether too much to be only a bird. But Barnaby would hear nothing said against it, and, next to his mother, loved it better than anything in the world.
Barnaby knew that folks called him half-witted, but he cared little for that. Sometimes he would laugh at what they said.
"Why," he would say, "how much better to be silly than as wise as you! You don't see shadowy people like those that live in sleep – not you. Nor eyes in the knotted panes of glass, nor swift ghosts when it blows hard, nor do you hear voices in the air, nor see men stalking in the sky – not you. I lead a merrier life than you with all your cleverness. You're the dull men. We're the bright ones. Ha, ha! I'll not change with you, not I!"
Haredale, who had been so kind to Barnaby's mother, was a burly, stern man who had few acquaintances and lived much alone. When first he came to live at The Warren an enemy of his, Sir John Chester, had circulated suspicious rumors about him, so that some came half to believe he himself had had something to do with his brother's murder.
These whispers so affected Haredale that as time passed he grew gloomy and morose and lived in seclusion, thinking only how he could solve the mystery of the murder, and loving more and more the little Emma as she grew into a beautiful girl. He neglected The Warren so that the property looked quite desolate and ruined, and at length superstitious people in the neighborhood came to mutter that it was haunted by the ghost of Rudge, the steward, whose body had been found in the pond.
The old bell-ringer of the near-by church even said he had seen this ghost once, when he went, late one night, to wind the church clock. But of course others, who knew there were no such things as ghosts, only smiled at these stories.
Sir John Chester, who so hated Haredale, was just as smooth and smiling and elegant as the other was rough. Haredale had been Sir John's drudge and scapegoat at school and the latter had always despised him. And as the years went by Sir John came to hate him.
His own son Edward had fallen in love with Emma, Haredale's niece, and she loved him in return. Sir John had been all his life utterly selfish and without conscience. He had little money and was much in debt and wanted his son to marry an heiress, so that he himself could continue his life of pleasure. Edward, however, gave his father to understand that he would never give up his love for Emma. Sir John believed that if Haredale chose, he could make his niece dislike Edward, and because he did not, Sir John hated Haredale the more bitterly.
Emma had a close friend named Dolly Varden, the daughter of a locksmith. Dolly was a pretty, dimpled, roguish little flirt, as rosy and sparkling and fresh as an apple, and she had a great many lovers.
One of these was her father's apprentice, who lived in the same house. His name was Simon Tappertit – a conceited, bragging, empty-headed young man with a great opinion of his own good looks. When he looked at his thin legs, which he admired exceedingly, he could not see how it was that Dolly could help worshiping him.
Tappertit had ambitions of his own and thought himself a great man who was kept down by a tyrannical master, though the good-natured locksmith was the kindest man in London. He had formed a society of apprentices whose toast was, "Death to all masters, life to all apprentices, and love to all fair damsels!" He was their leader. He had made them all keys to fit their masters' doors, and at night, when they were supposed to be asleep in bed, they would steal out to meet in a dirty cellar owned by an old blind man, where they kept a skull and cross-bones and signed high-sounding oaths with a pen dipped in blood, and did other silly things. The object of the society was to hurt, annoy, wrong and pick quarrels with such of their masters as happened not to please them. With such cheap fooleries Tappertit had convinced himself that he was fit to be a great general.
But with all his smirking, Dolly Varden only laughed at him. To tell the truth, she was very fond of young Joe Willet, whose father kept the Maypole Inn, very near The Warren where her friend Emma Haredale lived. Joe was a good, brave fellow, and was head over ears in love with Dolly, but Dolly was a coquette, and never let him know how much she cared for him. Joe was not contented at home, for his father seemed to think him a child and did not treat him according to his years, so that but for leaving Dolly Varden he would long ago have run away to seek his fortune.
Both Joe and Dolly knew how Edward Chester loved Emma Haredale, and they used sometimes to carry notes from one to the other, since the hatred of Sir John for Emma's uncle often prevented the lovers from meeting.
Sir John found this out, and bribed a hostler at the Maypole Inn to spy for him and prevent, if he could, these letters passing. The hostler was an uncouth, drunken giant that people called Maypole Hugh, as strong as an ox, and cruel and cunning. Hugh watched carefully, and from time to time would go to Sir John's house in London and report what he had seen.
II
THE MYSTERIOUS STRANGER AND WHO HE WAS
About this time residents in the neighborhood of The Warren and the Maypole Inn began to tell tales of a mysterious man who roamed about the country-side.
He was seen often and by many persons, always at night, skulking in the shadow or riding furiously on a horse. He was fierce and haggard and discourteous to travelers, wore a slouch hat which he never took off, and generally kept the lower part of his face muffled in a handkerchief. He always went alone. Some said he slept in church-yards, others that he never slept at all, and still others that he was a wicked man who had sold his soul to the Evil One.
One night he rested at the Maypole Inn, and a little while after he had gone, Varden the locksmith, Dolly's father, as he drove home, found Edward Chester lying in the road, having been wounded and robbed of his money. Barnaby Rudge had seen the attack and was bending over him. He had been too frightened to give aid, but from his description Varden knew the robber was the stranger who had stopped at the inn.
The honest locksmith took Edward into his chaise, drove him to Barnaby's house, which was near by, and left him in care of Mrs. Rudge, where a doctor soon dressed the wound, which was not serious.
Next day Mr. Varden came to see how the wounded man was. As he sat talking with Mrs. Rudge a tapping came at the window. She went to the door. The locksmith heard her cry out, and sprang forward to find standing there, to his astonishment, the robber of the night before. He grasped at him, but the woman threw herself before him, clasped his arm and besought him, for her life's sake, not to pursue the man.
The locksmith had known Barnaby's mother all his life, but so strange was her action now (especially since she refused to answer any question, begging him to ask her nothing) that he almost wondered if she herself could be in league with a crime-doer. Her apparent agony touched him, however, and, raising no alarm, he went home in great puzzle of mind.
He would have been far more disturbed if he had known the whole truth. For the mysterious stranger he had seen, who by night had haunted the neighborhood, was none other than Mrs. Rudge's husband, Barnaby's father, the steward who everybody believed had been murdered with his master, and whose body had been found in the pond.
Rudge himself had committed that wicked deed. He had killed both master and gardener, and to cover the crime had put his own clothes, his watch and ring on the latter's body and sunk it in the pond. When, on the night of the murder, he told his wife what he had done, she had shrunk fearfully from him, declaring that, although being his wife she would not give him up to justice, yet she would never own him or shelter him. He had fled then with the money he had stolen, and that night, while she lay sick with horror, Barnaby had been born with his poor crazed brain, the look of terror in his baby face and the birth-mark of blood on his wrist.
For many years the guilty wretch had wandered the earth, but he could not escape the knowledge of his deed. And at last his conscience had driven him back to the scene of his crime, friendless, penniless, fearful of the sunlight, slinking by night like a ghost about the house in which he had murdered his master, and hounding his miserable wife for money with which to buy food and drink. The poor woman had kept her terrible secret, giving him every coin she could save, striving so that Barnaby, unhappily born as he was, should never know the shame of having his father suffer death on the gallows. When Rudge had come to her house that day he had thought her alone, and she had saved him from capture only by begging the locksmith to stay his hand.
After his hairbreadth escape from Varden, Rudge hid himself in a narrow street. When the next dawn came, as he searched for some dark den in which he might lie sheltered till another night, he saw Simon Tappertit issuing with his noisy apprentice crew from the cellar in which they held their meetings. He entered its door, made friends with the villainous blind man who kept it and there established his headquarters.
Once more, one night after the wounded Edward had been taken to his own home, Rudge hunted out his trembling wife and demanded money, threatening to bring harm to Barnaby if she refused him, and she gave him all she had.
But this time dread of him made her desperate. When morning came she went to Haredale and told him that she and her son could no longer live on his bounty. The next day, with Barnaby, who carried on his back his beloved raven, Grip, she left the house afoot, telling no one where they were going lest her husband find her out, and pushed far into the country to find a home in some obscure village. And though Rudge, the murderer, and the blind man (who was much more crafty and cunning than many men with eyesight) searched for them everywhere, it was a long time before they found any trace.
Perhaps Joe and Dolly Varden missed poor cheery Barnaby more than did any one else. But several events occurred soon after this that gave them other things to think of.
Maypole Hugh, the savage hostler, had continued his spying work for Edward's father, and Sir John determined it was high time to break off his son's attachment for Emma Haredale.
One day Dolly was carrying a letter from Emma at The Warren to Edward, and as she passed through the fields, Hugh attacked her, throwing his arms around her and pretending to make coarse love to her. She was dreadfully frightened and screamed as loud as she could. Joe, as it happened, was walking within sound of her voice, and ran like the wind to her aid.
In another moment Hugh had leaped the hedge and disappeared and Dolly was sobbing in her rescuer's arms. She was afraid to tell Joe who had frightened her, for fear the hostler would take his revenge by harming him, so she only said she had been attacked by a man whom she had never seen.
In her scare she had forgotten all about the letter she had carried, and now she discovered it was gone. It was nowhere to be found.
This, of course, was because Hugh had stolen it. It was to get the letter that he had frightened her, and he was soon on his way to carry it to Sir John. Dolly did not guess this. She wrote to Emma telling her of the mishap, and this note Joe, to whom she intrusted it, knowing no reason to distrust the hostler, gave to Hugh to deliver. So Sir John got both missives in the end.
Emma Haredale, not understanding why Edward returned no answer to her letter, was hurt, and thought him cold. Sir John, seizing his opportunity, told her one day (pretending sorrow while he did so) that his son, naturally fickle, had fallen in love with some one else, to whom he was soon to be married.
Emma, not dreaming the father of the man she loved could be such a false liar, believed him, and when Edward wrote her, speaking of his poverty and telling her he was going to leave England to try to better his prospects, she thought his manly letter only an excuse to part from her.
Proud, though heartbroken, she did not answer it, and so, thanks to his father's selfish scheming, Edward sailed away to the West Indies, hopeless and despairing.
Another left England at the same time whose going meant far more to Dolly Varden. This was Joe. His father, the innkeeper, had been restraining him more and more, until his treatment had become the jest of the country-side, and Joe had chafed to the point of rebellion at the gibes that continually met him. One day, at the jeer of an old enemy of his, his wrath boiled over. He sprang upon him and thrashed him soundly in the inn before the assembled guests. Then, knowing his father would never forgive him, he went to his own room and barricaded the door. That night Joe let himself down from his window and before daylight was in London.
He went first to the locksmith's house to tell Dolly he had run away and that he loved her, but Dolly being a flirt, only laughed. To tell the truth, she was so very fond of Joe that she didn't like to show him how sorry she was. So the poor fellow went away thinking she cared very little (though as soon as he was out of sight she nearly cried her eyes out), and enlisted as a soldier. That same night Joe started from London to fight in the war in America. And it was a long time before either he or Edward Chester was heard of again.
