“Why, burn my body!” said the man, raising himself on his hands as he stared the girl in the face. “You look like a corpse come to life again. What’s the matter?”
“Matter!” replied the girl. “Nothing. What do you look at me so hard for?”
“What foolery is this?” demanded Sikes, grasping her by the arm, and shaking her roughly. “What is it? What do you mean? What are you thinking of?”
“Of many things, Bill,” replied the girl, shivering, and as she did so, pressing her hands upon her eyes. “But, Lord! What odds in that?”
The tone of forced gaiety in which the last words were spoken, seemed to produce a deeper impression on Sikes than the wild and rigid look which had preceded them.
“I tell you wot it is,” said Sikes: “if you haven’t caught the fever, and got it comin’ on, now, there’s something more than usual in the wind, and something dangerous too.You’re not a-going to—. No, damme! you wouldn’t do that!”
“Do what?” asked the girl.
“There ain’t,” said Sikes, fixing his eyes upon her, and muttering the words to himself; “there ain’t a stauncher-hearted gal going, or I’d have cut her throat three months ago. She’s got the fever coming on; that’s it.”
Fortifying himself with this assurance, Sikes drained the glass to the bottom, and then, with many grumbling oaths, called for his physic. The girl jumped up, with great alacrity; poured it quickly out, but with her back towards him; and held the vessel to his lips, while he drank off the contents.
“Now,” said the robber, “come and sit aside of me, and put on your own face; or I’ll alter it so, that you won’t know it again when you do want it.”
The girl obeyed. Sikes, locking her hand in his, fell back upon the pillow: turning his eyes upon her face. They closed; opened again; closed once more; again opened. He shifted his position restlessly; and, after dozing again, and again, for two or three minutes, and as often springing up with a look of terror, and gazing vacantly about him, was suddenly stricken, as it were, while in the very attitude of rising, into a deep and heavy sleep. The grasp of his hand relaxed; the upraised arm fell languidly by his side; and he lay like one in a profound trance.
“The laudanum has taken effect at last,” murmured the girl, as she rose from the bedside. “I may be too late, even now.”
She hastily dressed herself in her bonnet and shawl; looking fearfully round, from time to time, as if, despite the sleeping draught, she expected every moment to feel the pressure of Sikes’s heavy hand upon her shoulder; then, stooping softly over the bed, she kissed the robber’s lips; and then opening and closing the room-door with noiseless touch, hurried from the house.
A watchman was crying half-past nine, down a dark passage through which she had to pass, in gaining the main thoroughfare.
“Has it long gone the half-hour?” asked the girl.
“It’ll strike the hour in another quarter,” said the man: raising his lantern to her face.
“And I cannot get there in less than an hour or more,” muttered Nancy: brushing swiftly past him, and gliding rapidly down the street.
Many of the shops were already closing in the back lanes and avenues through which she tracked her way, in making from Spitalfields towards the West-End of London. The clock struck ten, increasing her impatience. She tore along the narrow pavement: elbowing the passengers from side to side; and darting almost under the horses” heads, crossed crowded streets, where clusters of persons were eagerly watching their opportunity to do the like.
“The woman is mad!” said the people, turning to look after her as she rushed away.
When she reached the more wealthy quarter of the town, the streets were comparatively deserted; and here her headlong progress excited a still greater curiosity in the stragglers whom she hurried past. Some quickened their pace behind, as though to see whither she was hastening at such an unusual rate; and a few made head upon her, and looked back, surprised at her undiminished speed; but they fell off one by one; and when she neared her place of destination, she was alone.
It was a family hotel in a quiet but handsome street near Hyde Park.
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As the brilliant light of the lamp which burnt before its door, guided her to the spot, the clock struck eleven. She had loitered for a few paces as though irresolute, and making up her mind to advance; but the sound determined her, and she stepped into the hall. The porter’s seat was vacant. She looked round with an air of incertitude, and advanced towards the stairs.
“Now, young woman!” said a smartly-dressed female, looking out from a door behind her, “who do you want here?”
“A lady who is stopping in this house,” answered the girl.
“A lady!” was the reply, accompanied with a scornful look. “What lady?”
“Miss Maylie,” said Nancy.
The young woman, who had by this time noted her appearance, replied only by a look of virtuous disdain; and summoned a man to answer her. To him, Nancy repeated her request.
“What name am I to say?” asked the waiter.
“It’s of no use saying any,” replied Nancy.
“Nor business?” said the man.
“No, nor that neither,” rejoined the girl. “I must see the lady.”
“Come!” said the man, pushing her towards the door. “None of this. Take yourself off.”
“I shall be carried out, if I go!” said the girl violently; “and I can make that a job that two of you won’t like to do. Isn’t there anybody here,” she said, looking round, “that will see a simple message carried for a poor wretch like me?”
This appeal produced an effect on a good-tempered-faced man-cook, who with some other of the servants was looking on, and who stepped forward to interfere.
“Take it up for her, Joe; can’t you?” said this person.
“What’s the good?” replied the man. “You don’t suppose the young lady will see such as her; do you?”
This allusion to Nancy’s doubtful character, raised a vast quantity of chaste wrath in the bosoms of four housemaids, who remarked, with great fervour, that the creature was a disgrace to her sex; and strongly advocated her being thrown, ruthlessly, into the kennel.
“Do what you like with me,” said the girl, turning to the men again; “but do what I ask you first, and I ask you to give this message for God Almighty’s sake.”
The soft-hearted cook added his intercession, and the result was that the man who had first appeared undertook its delivery.
“What’s it to be?” said the man, with one foot on the stairs.
“That a young woman earnestly asks to speak to Miss Maylie alone,” said Nancy; “and that if the lady will only hear the first word she has to say, she will know whether to hear her business, or to have her turned out of doors as an impostor.”
“I say,” said the man, “you’re coming it strong!”
“You give the message,” said the girl firmly; “and let me hear the answer.”
The man ran up stairs. Nancy remained, pale and almost breathless, listening with quivering lip to the very audible expressions of scorn, of which the chaste housemaids were very prolific; and of which they became still more so, when the man returned, and said the young woman was to walk up stairs.
“It’s no good being proper in this world,” said the first housemaid.
“Brass can do better than the gold what has stood the fire,” said the second.
The third contented herself with wondering, “what ladies was made of;” and the fourth took the first in a quartette of “Shameful!” with which the Dianas
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concluded.
Regardless of all this: for she had weightier matters at heart: Nancy followed the man, with trembling limbs, to a small antechamber, lighted by a lamp from the ceiling. Here he left her, and retired.
CHAPTER XL
A strange interview,
which is a sequel to the last chapter.
T
he girl’s life had been squandered in the streets, and among the most noisome of the stews
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and dens of London, but there was something of the woman’s original nature left in her still; and when she heard a light step approaching the door opposite to that by which she had entered, and thought of the wide contrast which the small room would in another moment contain, she felt burdened with the sense of her own deep shame, and shrunk as though she could scarcely bear the presence of her with whom she had sought this interview.
But struggling with these better feelings was pride,—the vice of the lowest and most debased creatures no less than of the high and self-assured. The miserable companion of thieves and ruffians, the fallen outcast of low haunts, the associate of the scourings of the jails and hulks,
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living within the shadow of the gallows itself,—even this degraded being felt too proud to betray a feeble gleam of the womanly feeling which she thought a weakness, but which alone connected her with that humanity, of which her wasting life had obliterated so many, many traces when a very child.
She raised her eyes sufficiently to observe that the figure which presented itself was that of a slight and beautiful girl; then, bending them on the ground, she tossed her head with affected carelessness as she said:
“It’s a hard matter to get to see you, lady. If I had taken offence, and gone away, as many would have done, you’d have been sorry for it one day, and not without reason either.”
“I am very sorry if any one has behaved harshly to you,” replied Rose. “Do not think of that. Tell me why you wished to see me. I am the person you inquired for.”
The kind tone of this answer, the sweet voice, the gentle manner, the absence of any accent of haughtiness or displeasure, took the girl completely by surprise, and she burst into tears.
“Oh, lady, lady!” she said, clasping her hands passionately before her face, “if there was more like you, there would be fewer like me,—there would—there would!”
“Sit down,” said Rose, earnestly. “If you are in poverty or affliction I shall be truly glad to relieve you if I can,—I shall indeed. Sit down.”
“Let me stand, lady,” said the girl, still weeping, “and do not speak to me so kindly till you know me better. It is growing late. Is—is—that door shut?”
“Yes,” said Rose, recoiling a few steps, as if to be nearer assistance in case she should require it. “Why?”
“Because,” said the girl, “I am about to put my life, and the lives of others in your hands. I am the girl that dragged little Oliver back to old Fagin’s, on the night he went out from the house in Pentonville.”
“You!” said Rose Maylie.
“I, lady!” replied the girl. “I am the infamous creature you have heard of, that lives among the thieves, and that never from the first moment I can recollect my eyes and senses opening on London streets have known any better life, or kinder words than they have given me, so help me God! Do not mind shrinking openly from me, lady. I am younger than you would think, to look at me, but I am well used to it. The poorest women fall back, as I make my way along the crowded pavement.”
“What dreadful things are these!” said Rose, involuntarily falling from her strange companion.
“Thank Heaven upon your knees, dear lady,” cried the girl, “that you had friends to care for and keep you in your childhood, and that you were never in the midst of cold and hunger, and riot and drunkenness, and—and—something worse than all—as I have been from my cradle. I may use the word, for the alley and the gutter were mine, as they will be my deathbed.”
“I pity you!” said Rose, in a broken voice. “It wrings my heart to hear you!”
“Heaven bless you for your goodness!” rejoined the girl. “If you knew what I am sometimes, you would pity me, indeed. But I have stolen away from those who would surely murder me, if they knew I had been here, to tell you what I have overheard. Do you know a man named Monks?”
“No,” said Rose.
“He knows you,” replied the girl; “and knew you were here, for it was by hearing him tell the place that I found you out.”
“I never heard the name,” said Rose.
“Then he goes by some other amongst us,” rejoined the girl, “which I more than thought before. Some time ago, and soon after Oliver was put into your house on the night of the robbery, I—suspecting this man—listened to a conversation held between him and Fagin in the dark. I found out, from what I heard, that Monks—the man I asked you about, you know—”
“Yes,” said Rose, “I understand.”
“—That Monks,” pursued the girl, “had seen him accidentally with two of our boys on the day we first lost him, and had known him directly to be the same child that he was watching for, though I couldn’t make out why. A bargain was struck with Fagin, that if Oliver was got back he should have a certain sum; and he was to have more for making him a thief, which this Monks wanted for some purpose of his own.”
“For what purpose?” asked Rose.
“He caught sight of my shadow on the wall as I listened, in the hope of finding out,” said the girl; “and there are not many people besides me that could have got out of their way in time to escape discovery. But I did; and I saw him no more till last night.”
“And what occurred then?”
“I’ll tell you, lady. Last night he came again. Again they went up stairs, and I, wrapping myself up so that my shadow should not betray me, again listened at the door. The first words I heard Monks say were these: ‘So 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.’ They laughed, and talked of his success in doing this; and Monks, talking on about the boy, and getting very wild, said that though he had got the young devil’s money safely now, he’d rather have had it the other way; for, what a game it would have been to have brought down the boast of the father’s will, by driving him through every jail in town, and then hauling him up for some capital felony which Fagin could easily manage, after having made a good profit of him besides.”