Oliver Twist (Barnes & Noble Classics Series) (36 page)

“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!” said 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.
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Listen to me, who with six words, can strangle Sikes as surely as if I had his bull’s throat between 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.
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And do it the moment he sets foot in this room, or mind me, it will be too late!”

“What is all this?” cried the girl involuntarily.

“What is it?” pursued Fagin, mad with rage. “When the boy’s worth hundreds of pounds to me, am I to lose what chance threw me in the way of getting safely, through the whims of a drunken gang that I could whistle away the lives of! And me bound, too, to a born devil that only wants the will, and has the power to, to—”

Panting for breath, the old man stammered for a word; and in that instant checked the torrent of his wrath, and changed his whole demeanour. A moment before, his clenched hands had grasped the air; his eyes had dilated; and his face grown livid with passion; but now, he shrunk into a chair, and, cowering together, trembled with the apprehension of having himself disclosed some hidden villany. After a short silence, he ventured to look round at his companion. He appeared somewhat reassured, on beholding her in the same listless attitude from which he had first roused her.

“Nancy, dear!” croaked the Jew, in his usual voice. “Did you mind me, dear?”

“Don’t worry me now, Fagin!” replied the girl, raising her head languidly. “If Bill has not done it this time, he will another. He has done many a good job for you, and will do many more when he can; and when he can’t he won’t; so no more about that.”

“Regarding this boy, my dear?” said the Jew, rubbing the palms of his hands nervously together.

“The boy must take his chance with the rest,” interrupted Nancy, hastily; “and I say again, I hope he is dead, and out of harm’s way, and out of yours—that is, if Bill comes to no harm. And if Toby got clear off, Bill’s pretty sure to be safe; for Bill’s worth two of Toby any time.”

“And about what I was saying, my dear?” observed the Jew, keeping his glistening eye steadily upon her.

“You must say it all over again, if it’s anything you want me to do,” rejoined Nancy; “and if it is, you had better wait till to-morrow You put me up for a minute; but now I’m stupid again.”

Fagin put several other questions: all with the same drift of ascertaining whether the girl had profited by his unguarded hints; but, she answered them so readily, and was withal so utterly unmoved by his searching looks, that his original impression of her being more than a trifle in liquor, was confirmed. Nancy, indeed, was not exempt from a failing which was very common among the Jew’s female pupils; and in which, in their tenderer years, they were rather encouraged than checked. Her disordered appearance, and a wholesale perfume of Geneva
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which pervaded the apartment, afforded strong confirmatory evidence of the justice of the Jew’s supposition; and when, after indulging in the temporary display of violence above described, she subsided, first into dulness, and afterwards into a compound of feelings: under the influence of which she shed tears one minute, and in the next gave utterance to various exclamations of “Never say die!” and divers calculations as to what might be the amount of the odds so long as a lady or gentleman was happy. Mr. Fagin, who had had considerable experience of such matters in his time, saw, with great satisfaction, that she was very far gone indeed.

Having eased his mind by this discovery; and having accomplished his twofold object of imparting to the girl what he had, that night, heard, and of ascertaining, with his own eyes, that Sikes had not returned, Mr. Fagin again turned his face homeward: leaving his young friend asleep, with her head upon the table.

It was within an hour of midnight. The weather being dark, and piercing cold, he had no great temptation to loiter. The sharp wind that scoured the streets, seemed to have cleared them of passengers, as of dust and mud, for few people were abroad, and they were to all appearance hastening fast home. It blew from the right quarter for the Jew, however, and straight before it he went: trembling, and shivering, as every fresh gust drove him rudely on his way.

He had reached the corner of his own street, and was already fumbling in his pocket for the door-key, when a dark figure emerged from a projecting entrance which lay in deep shadow, and, crossing the road, glided up to him unperceived.

“Fagin!” whispered a voice close to his ear.

“Ah!” said the Jew, turning quickly round, “is that—”

“Yes!” interrupted the stranger. “I have been lingering here these two hours. Where the devil have you been?”

“On your business, my dear,” replied the Jew, glancing uneasily at his companion, and slackening his pace as he spoke. “On your business all night.”

“Oh, of course!” said the stranger, with a sneer. “Well; and what’s come of it?”

“Nothing good,” said the Jew.

“Nothing bad, I hope?” said the stranger, stopping short, and turning a startled look on his companion.

The Jew shook his head, and was about to reply, when the stranger, interrupting him, motioned to the house, before which they had by this time arrived: remarking, that he had better say what he had got to say, under cover: for his blood was chilled with standing about so long, and the wind blew through him.

Fagin looked as if he could have willingly excused himself from taking home a visitor at that unseasonable hour; and, indeed, muttered something about having no fire; but his companion repeating his request in a preemptory manner, he unlocked the door, and requested him to close it softly, while he got a light.

“It’s as dark as the grave,” said the man, groping forward a few steps. “Make haste!”

“Shut the door,” whispered Fagin from the end of the passage. As he spoke, it closed with a loud noise.

“That wasn’t my doing,” said the other man, feeling his way. “The wind blew it to, or it shut of its own accord: one or the other. Look sharp with the light, or I shall knock my brains out against something in this confounded hole.”

Fagin stealthily descended the kitchen stairs. After a short absence, he returned with a lighted candle, and the intelligence that Toby Crackit was asleep in the back room below, and that the boys were in the front one. Beckoning the man to follow him, he led the way up stairs.

“We can say the few words we’ve got to say in here, my dear,” said the Jew, throwing open a door on the first floor; “and as there are holes in the shutters, and we never show lights to our neighbours, we’ll set the candle on the stairs. There!”

With those words, the Jew, stooping down, placed the candle on an upper flight of stairs, exactly opposite to the room door. This done, he led the way into the apartment; which was destitute of all moveables save a broken arm-chair, and an old couch or sofa without covering, which stood behind the door. Upon this piece of furniture, the stranger sat himself with the air of a weary man; and the Jew, drawing up the arm-chair opposite, they sat face to face. It was not quite dark; the door was partially open; and the candle outside, threw a feeble reflection on the opposite wall.

They conversed for some time in whispers. Though nothing of the conversation was distinguishable beyond a few disjointed words here and there, a listener might easily have perceived that Fagin appeared to be defending himself against some remarks of the stranger; and that the latter was in a state of considerable irritation. They might have been talking, thus, for a quarter of an hour or more, when Monks—by which name the Jew had designated the strange man several times in the course of their colloquy—said, raising his voice a little,

“I tell you again, it was badly planned. Why not have kept him here among the rest, and made a sneaking, snivelling pickpocket of him at once?”

“Only hear him!” exclaimed the Jew, shrugging his shoulders.

“Why, do you mean to say you couldn’t have done it, if you had chosen?” demanded Monks, sternly. “Haven’t you done it, with other boys, scores of times? If you had had patience for a twelve-month, at most, couldn’t you have got him convicted, and sent safely out of the kingdom; perhaps for life?”

“Whose turn would that have served, my dear?” inquired the Jew humbly.

“Mine,” replied Monks.

“But not mine,” said the Jew, submissively. “He might have become of use to me. When there are two parties to a bargain, it is only reasonable that the interests of both should be consulted; is it, my good friend?”

“What then?” demanded Monks.

“I saw it was not easy to train him to the business,” replied the Jew; “he was not like other boys in the same circumstances.”

“Curse him, no!” muttered the man, “or he would have been a thief, long ago.”

“I had no hold upon him to make him worse,” pursued the Jew, anxiously watching the countenance of his companion. “His hand was not in. I had nothing to frighten him with; which we always must have in the beginning, or we labour in vain. What could I do? Send him out with the Dodger and Charley? We had enough of that, at first, my dear; I trembled for us all.”

“That was not my doing,” observed Monks.

“No, no, my dear!” renewed the Jew. “And I don’t quarrel with it now; because, if it had never happened, you might never have clapped eyes upon the boy to notice him, and so led to the discovery that it was him you were looking for. Well! I got him back for you by means of the girl; and then she begins to favour him.”

“Throttle the girl!” said Monks, impatiently.

“Why, we can’t afford to do that just now, my dear,” replied the Jew, smiling; “and, besides, that sort of thing is not in our way; or, one of these days, I might be glad to have it done. I know what these girls are, Monks, well. As soon as the boy begins to harden, she’ll care no more for him, than for a block of wood. You want him made a thief. If he is alive, I can make him one from this time; and if—if—” said the Jew, drawing nearer to the other,—“it’s not likely, mind,—but if the worst comes to the worst, and he is dead—”

“It’s no fault of mine if he is!” interposed the other man, with a look of terror, and clasping the Jew’s arm with trembling hands. “Mind that, Fagin! I had no hand in it. Anything but his death, I told you from the first. I won’t shed blood; it’s always found out, and haunts a man besides. If they shot him dead, I was not the cause; do you hear me? Fire this infernal den! What’s that?”

“What!” cried the Jew, grasping the coward round the body, with both arms, as he sprung to his feet. “Where?”

“Yonder!” replied the man, glaring at the opposite wall. “The shadow! I saw the shadow of a woman, in a cloak and bonnet, pass along the wainscot like a breath!”

The Jew released his hold, and they rushed tumultuously from the room. The candle, wasted by the draught, was standing where it had been placed. It showed them only the empty staircase, and their own white faces. They listened intently: a profound silence reigned throughout the house.

“It’s your fancy,” said the Jew, taking up the light and turning to his companion.

“I’ll swear I saw it!” replied Monks, trembling. “It was bending forward when I saw it first; and when I spoke, it darted away.”

The Jew glanced contemptuously at the pale face of his associate, and, telling him he could follow, if he pleased, ascended the stairs. They looked into all the rooms; they were cold, bare, and empty. They descended into the passage, and thence into the cellars below. The green damp hung upon the low walls; the tracks of the snail and slug glistened in the light of the candle; but all was still as death.