companions.
It was Sunday night, and the bell of the nearest church struck
the hour. Sikes and the Jew were talking, but they paused to
listen. The girl looked up from the low seat on which she
crouched, and listened too. Eleven.
“An hour this side of midnight,” said Sikes, raising the blind to
look out and returning to his seat. “Dark and heavy it is too. A
good night for business this.”
“Ah!” replied Fagin. “What a pity, Bill, my dear, that there’s
none quite ready to be done.”
“You’re right for once,” replied Sikes gruffly. “It is a pity, for
I’m in the humour too.”
Fagin sighed, and shook his head despondingly.
“We must make up for lost time when we’ve got things into a
good train. That’s all I know,” said Sikes.
“That’s the way to talk, my dear,” replied Fagin, venturing to
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pat him on the shoulder. “It does me good to hear you.”
“Does you good, does it!” cried Sikes. “Well, so be it.”
“Ha! ha! ha!” laughed Fagin, as if he were relieved by even this
concession. “You’re like yourself tonight, Bill! Quite like yourself.”
“I don’t feel like myself when you lay that withered old claw on
my shoulder, so take it away,” said Sikes, casting off the Jew’s
hand.
“It makes you nervous, Bill—reminds you of being nabbed,
does it?” said Fagin, determined not to be offended.
“Reminds me of being nabbed by the devil,” returned Sikes.
“There never was another man with such a face as yours, unless it
was your father, and I suppose he is singeing his grizzled red
beard by this time, unless you came straight from the old un
without any father at all betwixt you; which I shouldn’t wonder at,
a bit.”
Fagin offered no reply to this compliment; but, pulling Sikes by
the sleeve, pointed his finger towards Nancy, who had taken
advantage of the foregoing conversation to put on her bonnet, and
was now leaving the room.
“Hallo!” cried Sikes. “Nance. Where’s the gal going to at this
time of night?”
“Not far.”
“What answer’s that?” returned Sikes. “Where are you going?”
“I say, not far.”
“And I say where?” retorted Sikes. “Do you hear me?”
“I don’t know where,” replied the girl.
“Then I do,” said Sikes, more in the spirit of obstinacy than
because he had any real objection to the girl going where she
listed. “Nowhere. Sit down.”
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“I’m not well. I told you that before,” rejoined the girl. “I want a
breath of air.”
“Put your head out of the winder,” replied Sikes.
“There’s not enough there,” said the girl. “I want it in the
street.”
“Then you won’t have it,” replied Sikes. With which assurance
he rose, locked the door, took the key out, and pulling her bonnet
from her head, flung it up to the top of an old press. “There,” said
the robber. “Now stop quietly where you are, will you?”
“It’s not such a matter as a bonnet would keep me,” said the
girl, turning very pale. “What do you mean, Bill? Do you know
what you’re doing?”
“Know what I’m—Oh!” cried Sikes, turning to Fagin, “she’s out
of her senses, you know, or she daren’t talk to me in that way.”
“You’ll drive me on to something desperate,” muttered the girl,
placing both hands upon her breast, as though to keep down by
force some violent outbreak. “Let me go, will you—this minute—
this instant.”
“No!” said Sikes.
“Tell him to let me go, Fagin. He had better. It’ll be better for
him. Do you hear me?” cried Nancy, stamping her foot upon the
ground.
“Hear you!” repeated Sikes, turning round in his chair to
confront her. “Aye! And if I hear you for half a minute longer, the
dog shall have such a grip on your throat as’ll tear some of that
screaming voice out. Wot has come over you, you jade! Wot is it?”
“Let me go,” said the girl, with great earnestness; then sitting
herself down on the floor, before the door, she said, “Bill, let me
go; you don’t know what you are doing. You don’t, indeed. For
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only one hour—do—do!”
“Cut my limbs off one by one!” cried Sikes, seizing her roughly
by the arm, “if I don’t think the gal’s stark raving mad. Get up.”
“Not till you let me go—not till you let me go; never—never!”
screamed the girl. Sikes looked on, for a minute, watching his
opportunity, and suddenly pinioning her hands dragged her,
struggling and wrestling with him by the way, into a small room
adjoining, where he sat himself on a bench, and thrusting her into
a chair, held her down by force. She struggled and implored by
turns until twelve o’clock had struck, and then, wearied and
exhausted, ceased to contest the point any further.
With a caution, backed by many oaths, to make no more efforts
to go out that night, Sikes left her to recover at leisure and
rejoined Fagin.
“Whew!” said the housebreaker, wiping the perspiration from
his face. “Wot a precious strange gal that is!”
“You may say that, Bill,” replied Fagin thoughtfully. “You may
say that.”
“Wot did she take it into her head to go out tonight for, do you
think?” asked Sikes. “Come: you should know her better than me.
Wot does it mean?”
“Obstinacy; woman’s obstinacy, I suppose, my dear.”
“Well, I suppose it is,” growled Sikes. “I thought I had tamed
her, but she’s as bad as ever.”
“Worse,” said Fagin thoughtfully. “I never knew her like this,
for such a little cause.”
“Nor I,” said Sikes. “I think she’s got a touch of that fever in her
blood yet, and it won’t come out—eh?”
“Like enough.”
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“I’ll let her a little blood, without troubling the doctor, if she’s
took that way again,” said Sikes.
Fagin nodded an expressive approval of this mode of treatment.
“She was hanging about me all day, and night too, when I was
stretched on my back; and you, like a black-hearted wolf as you
are, kept yourself aloof,” said Sikes. “We was very poor too, all the
time, and I think, one way or other, it’s worried and fretted her;
and that being shut up here so long has made her restless—eh?”
“That’s it, my dear,” replied the Jew, in a whisper. “Hush!”
As he uttered these words, the girl herself appeared and
resumed her former seat. Her eyes were swollen and red; she
rocked herself to and fro; tossed her head; and, after a little time,
burst out laughing.
“Why, now she’s on the other tack!” exclaimed Sikes, turning a
look of excessive surprise on his companion.
Fagin nodded to him to take no further notice just then; and, in
a few minutes, the girl subsided into her accustomed demeanour.
Whispering Sikes that there was no fear of her relapsing, Fagin
took up his hat and bade him good-night. He paused when he
reached the room door, and looking round, asked if somebody
would light him down the dark stairs.
“Light him down,” said Sikes, who was filling his pipe. “It’s a
pity he should break his neck himself, and disappoint the sightseers. Show him a light.”
Nancy followed the old man downstairs, with a candle. When
they reached the passage, he laid his finger on his lips, and
drawing close to the girl, said, in a whisper:
“What is it, Nancy, dear?”
“What do you mean?” replied the girl, in the same tone.
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“The reason of all this,” replied Fagin. “If he”—he pointed with
his skinny forefinger up the stairs—“is so hard with you (he’s a
brute, Nance, a brute-beast), why don’t you—”
“Well?” said the girl, as Fagin paused, with his mouth almost
touching her ear, and his eyes looking into hers.
“No matter just now,” said Fagin. “We’ll talk of this again. You
have a friend in me, Nance; a staunch friend. I have the means at
hand, quiet and close. If you want revenge on those that treat you
like a dog—like a dog! worse than his dog, for he humours him
sometimes—come to me. I say, come to me. He is the mere hound
of a day, but you know me of old, Nance.”
“I know you well,” replied the girl, without manifesting the
least emotion. “Good-night.”
She shrank back, as Fagin offered to lay his hand on hers, but
said good-night again, in a steady voice, and, answering his
parting look with a nod of intelligence, closed the door between
them.
Fagin walked towards his own home, intent upon the thoughts
that were working within his brain. He had conceived the idea—
not from what had just passed, though that had tended to confirm
him, but slowly and by degrees—that Nancy, wearied of the
housebreaker’s brutality, had conceived an attachment for some
new friend. Her altered manner, her repeated absences from
home alone, her comparative indifference to the interests of the
gang for which she had once been so zealous, and, added to these,
her desperate impatience to leave home that night at a particular
hour, all favoured the supposition, and rendered it, to him at least,
almost matter of certainty. The object of this new liking was not
among his myrmidons. He would be a valuable acquisition with
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such an assistant as Nancy, and must (thus Fagin argued) be
secured without delay.
There was another, and a darker, object to be gained. Sikes
knew too much, and his ruffian taunts had not galled Fagin the
less, because the wounds were hidden. The girl must know, well,
that if she shook him off, she could never be safe from his fury,
and that it would be surely wreaked—to the maiming of limbs, or
perhaps the loss of life—on the object of her more recent fancy.
“With a little persuasion,” thought Fagin, “what more likely than
that she would consent to poison him? Women have done such
things, and worse, to secure the same object before now. There
would be the dangerous villain—the man I hate—gone; another
secured in his place; and my influence over the girl, with a
knowledge of this crime to back it, unlimited.”
These things passed through the mind of Fagin, during the
short time he sat alone, in the housebreaker’s room; and with
them uppermost in his thoughts, he had taken the opportunity
afterwards afforded him, of sounding the girl in the broken hints
he threw out at parting. There was no expression of surprise, no
assumption of an inability to understand his meaning. The girl
clearly comprehended it. Her glance at parting showed that.
But perhaps she would recoil from a plot to take the life of
Sikes, and that was one of the chief ends to be attained. “How,”
thought Fagin, as he crept homewards, “can I increase my
influence with her? what new power can I acquire?”
Such brains are fertile in expedients. If, without extracting a
confession from herself, he laid a watch, discovered the object of
her altered regard, and threatened to reveal the whole history to
Sikes (of whom she stood in no common fear) unless she entered
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into his designs, could he not secure her compliance?”
“I can,” said Fagin, almost aloud. “She durst not refuse me
then. Not for her life, not for her life! I have it all. The means are
ready, and shall be set to work. I shall have you yet!”
He cast back a dark look, and a threatening motion of the hand,
towards the spot where he had left the bolder villain; and went on
his way, busying his bony hands in the folds of his tattered
garment, which he wrenched tightly in his grasp as though there
were a hated enemy crushed with every motion of his fingers.
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Chapter 45
Noah Claypole Is Employed By Fagin On A Secret
Mission.
The old man was up, betimes, next morning, and waited
impatiently for the appearance of his new associate, who,
after a delay that seemed interminable, at length
presented himself, and commenced a voracious assault on the
breakfast “Bolter,” said Fagin, drawing up a chair and seating
himself opposite Morris Bolter.
“Well, here I am,” returned Noah. “What’s the matter? Don’t
yer ask me to do anything till I have done eating. That’s a great
fault in this place. Yer never get time enough over yer meals.”
“You can talk as you eat, can’t you?” said Fagin, cursing his
dear young friend’s greediness from the very bottom of his heart.
“Oh, yes, I can talk. I get on better when I talk,” said Noah,
cutting a monstrous slice of bread. “Where’s Charlotte?”
“Out,” said Fagin. “I sent her out this morning with the other
young women, because I wanted us to be alone.”
“Oh!” said Noah. “I wish yer’d ordered her to make some
buttered toast first. Well. Talk away. Yer won’t interrupt me.”
There seemed, indeed, no great fear of anything interrupting
him, as he had evidently sat down with a determination to do a
great deal of business.
“You did well yesterday, my dear,” said Fagin. “Beautiful! Six
shillings and nine-pence-halfpenny on the very first day! The
kinchin lay will be a fortune to you.”
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“Don’t you forget to add three pint-pots and a milk-can,” said
Mr. Bolter.
“No, no, my dear. The pint-pots were great strokes of genius;
but the milk-can was a perfect masterpiece.”
“Pretty well, I think, for a beginner,” remarked Mr. Bolter
complacently. “The pots I took off airy railings, and the milkcan
was standing by itself outside a public-house. I thought it might
get rusty with the rain, or catch cold, yer know. Eh? Ha! ha! ha!”
Fagin affected to laugh very heartily; and Mr. Bolter having had
his laugh out, took a series of large bites, which finished his first
hunk of bread-and-butter, and assisted himself to a second.
“I want you, Bolter,” said Fagin, leaning over the table, “to do a
piece of work for me, my dear, that needs great care and caution.”
“I say,” rejoined Bolter, “don’t yer go shoving me into danger,
or sending me to any more o’ yer police-offices. That don’t suit me,
that don’t; and so I tell yer.”
“There’s not the smallest danger in it—not the very smallest,”
said the Jew; “it’s only to dodge a woman.”
“An old woman?” demanded Mr. Bolter.
“A young one,” replied Fagin.
“I can do that pretty well, I know,” said Bolter. “I was a regular
cunning sneak when I was at school. What am I to dodge her for?
Not to—”
“Not to anything, but to tell me where she goes, who she sees,
and, if possible, what she says; to remember the street, if it is a
street, or the house, if it is a house; and to bring back all the
information you can.”
“What’ll yer give me?” asked Noah, setting down his cup, and
looking his employer eagerly in the face.
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“If you do it well, a pound, my dear. One pound,” said Fagin,
wishing to interest him in the scent as much as possible. “And
that’s what I never gave yet, for any job of work where there
wasn’t valuable consideration to be gained.”
