disappeared; so Mr. Lively, after ineffectually standing on tiptoe,
in the hope of catching sight of him, again forced himself into the
little chair, and, exchanging a shake of the head with a lady in the
opposite shop, in which doubt and mistrust were plainly mingled,
resumed his pipe with a grave demeanour.
The Three Cripples, or rather the Cripples, which was the sign
by which the establishment was familiarly known to its patrons,
was the public-house in which Mr. Sikes and his dog have already
figured. Merely making a sign to a man at the bar, Fagin walked
straight upstairs, and opening the door of a room, and softly
insinuating himself into the chamber, looked anxiously about,
shading his eyes with his hand, as if in search of some particular
person.
The room was illuminated by two gas-lights; the glare of which
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was prevented by the barred shutters, and closely-drawn curtains
of faded red, from being visible outside. The ceiling was
blackened, to prevent its colour from being injured by the flaring
of the lamps; and the place was so full of dense tobacco smoke,
that at first it was scarcely possible to discern anything more. By
degrees, however, as some of it cleared away through the open
door, an assemblage of heads, as confused as the noises that
greeted the ear, might be made out; and, as the eye grew more
accustomed to the scene, the spectator gradually became aware of
the presence of a numerous company, male and female, crowded
round a long table, at the upper end of which, sat a chairman with
a hammer of office in his hand; while a professional gentleman,
with a bluish nose, and his face tied up for the benefit of a
toothache, presided at a jingling piano in a remote corner.
As Fagin stepped softly in, the professional gentleman, running
over the keys by way of prelude, occasioned a general cry of order
for a song; which, having subsided, a young lady proceeded to
entertain the company with a ballad in four verses, between each
of which the accompanist played the melody all through, as loud
as he could. When this was over, the chairman gave a sentiment,
after which, the professional gentleman on the chairman’s right
and left volunteered a duet, and sang it, with great applause.
It was curious to observe some faces which stood out
prominently from among the group. There was the chairman
himself (the landlord of the house), a coarse, rough, heavy-built
fellow, who, while the songs were proceeding, rolled his eyes
hither and thither, and, seeming to give himself up to joviality, had
an eye for everything that was done, and an ear for everything that
was said—and sharp ones, too. Near him were the singers,
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receiving, with professional indifference, the compliments of the
company, and applying themselves, in turn, to a dozen proffered
glasses of spirits-and-water, tendered by their more boisterous
admirers; whose countenances, expressive of almost every vice in
almost every grade, irresistibly attracted the attention, by their
very repulsiveness. Cunning, ferocity, and drunkenness in all its
stages, were there, in their strongest aspects; and women, some
with the last lingering tinge of their early freshness almost fading
as you looked, others with every mark and stamp of their sex
utterly beaten out, and presenting but one loathsome blank of
profligacy and crime—some mere girls, others but young women,
and none past the prime of life—formed the darkest and saddest
portion of this dreary picture.
Fagin, troubled by no grave emotions, looked eagerly from face
to face while these proceedings were in progress; but apparently
without meeting that of which he was in search. Succeeding, at
length, in catching the eye of the man who occupied the chair, he
beckoned to him slightly, and left the room, as quietly as he had
entered it.
“What can I do for you, Mr. Fagin?” inquired the man. as he
followed him out to the landing. “Won’t you join us? They’ll be
delighted, every one of ’em.”
The Jew shook his head impatiently, and said in a whisper, “Is
he here?”
“No,” replied the man.
“And no news of Barney?” inquired Fagin.
“None,” replied the landlord of the Cripples; for it was he. “He
won’t stir till it’s all safe. Depend on it, they’re on the scent down
there; and that if he moved, he’d blow upon the thing at once. He’s
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all right enough Barney is, else I should have heard of him. I’ll
pound it, that Barney’s managing properly. Let him alone for
that.”
“Will he be here tonight?” asked the Jew, laying the same
emphasis on the pronoun as before.
“Monks, do you mean?” inquired the landlord, hesitating.
“Hush!” said the Jew. “Yes.”
“Certain,” replied the man, drawing a gold watch from his fob;
“I expected him here before now. If you’ll wait ten minutes, he’ll
be—”
“No, no,” said the Jew hastily; as though, however desirous he
might be to see the person in question, he was nevertheless
relieved by his absence. “Tell him I came here to see him; and that
he must come to me tonight. No, say tomorrow. As he is not here,
tomorrow will be time enough.”
“Good!” said the man. “Nothing more?”
“Not a word now,” said the Jew, descending the stairs.—“I say,”
said the other, looking over the rails, and speaking in a hoarse
whisper; “what a time this would be for a sell! I’ve got Phil Barker
here; so drunk, that a boy might take him.
“Aha! But it’s not Phil Barker’s time,” said the Jew, looking up.
“Phil has something more to do, before we can afford to part with
him; so go back to the company, my dear, and tell them to lead
merry lives—while they last. Ha! ha! ha!”
The landlord reciprocated the old man’s laugh; and returned to
his guests. The Jew was no sooner alone, than his countenance
resumed its former expression of anxiety and thought. After a
brief reflection, he called a hack cabriolet, and bade the man drive
towards Bethnal Green. He dismissed him within some quarter of
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a mile of Mr. Sikes’s residence, and performed the short
remainder of the distance, on foot.
“Now,” muttered the Jew, as he knocked at the door, “if there is
any deep play here, I shall have it out of you, my girl, cunning as
you are.”
She was in her room, the woman said. Fagin crept softly
upstairs, and entered it without any previous ceremony. The girl
was alone; lying with her head upon the table, and her hair
straggling over it. “She has been drinking,” thought the Jew
coolly, “or perhaps she is only miserable.”
The old man turned to close the door, as he made this
reflection; the noise thus occasioned roused the girl. She eyed his
crafty face narrowly, as she inquired whether there was any news,
and as she listened to his recital of Toby Crackit’s story. When it
was concluded, she sank into her former attitude, but spoke not a
word. She pushed the candle impatiently away; and once or twice
as she feverishly changed her position, shuffled her feet upon the
ground; but this was During the silence, the Jew looked restlessly
about the room, as if to assure himself that there were no
appearances of Sikes having covertly returned. Apparently
satisfied with his inspection, he coughed twice or thrice, and made
as many efforts to open a conversation; but the girl heeded him no
more than if he had been made of stone. At length he made
another attempt; and rubbing his hands together, said, in his most
conciliatory tone.
“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.
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“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. 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. 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
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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 shrank into a chair, and, cowering together, trembled
with the apprehension of having himself disclosed some hidden
villainy. 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
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tomorrow. 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 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 dullness, 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
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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 peremptory manner, he unlocked the
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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 upstairs.
“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
movables save a broken armchair, 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 armchair opposite, they sat face to face. It
was not quite dark; for 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
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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
