Martin Chuzzlewit
‘I could swear,’ returned the other, ‘that I have not closed my eyes!’
‘When you have sworn it,’ said Jonas, composedly, ‘we had better go on
again, if you have only stopped for that.’
He uncorked the bottle with the help of his teeth; and putting it to his
lips, took a long draught.
‘I wish we had never started on this journey. This is not,’ said
Montague, recoiling instinctively, and speaking in a voice that betrayed
his agitation; ‘this is not a night to travel in.’
‘Ecod! you’re right there,’ returned Jonas, ‘and we shouldn’t be out
in it but for you. If you hadn’t kept me waiting all day, we might have
been at Salisbury by this time; snug abed and fast asleep. What are we
stopping for?’
His companion put his head out of window for a moment, and drawing it in
again, observed (as if that were his cause of anxiety), that the boy was
drenched to the skin.
‘Serve him right,’ said Jonas. ‘I’m glad of it. What the devil are we
stopping for? Are you going to spread him out to dry?’
‘I have half a mind to take him inside,’ observed the other with some
hesitation.
‘Oh! thankee!’ said Jonas. ‘We don’t want any damp boys here; especially
a young imp like him. Let him be where he is. He ain’t afraid of a
little thunder and lightning, I dare say; whoever else is. Go on,
driver. We had better have HIM inside perhaps,’ he muttered with a
laugh; ‘and the horses!’
‘Don’t go too fast,’ cried Montague to the postillion; ‘and take care
how you go. You were nearly in the ditch when I called to you.’
This was not true; and Jonas bluntly said so, as they moved forward
again. Montague took little or no heed of what he said, but repeated
that it was not a night for travelling, and showed himself, both then
and afterwards, unusually anxious.
From this time Jonas recovered his former spirits, if such a term may be
employed to express the state in which he had left the city. He had his
bottle often at his mouth; roared out snatches of songs, without the
least regard to time or tune or voice, or anything but loud discordance;
and urged his silent friend to be merry with him.
‘You’re the best company in the world, my good fellow,’ said Montague
with an effort, ‘and in general irresistible; but to-night--do you hear
it?’
‘Ecod! I hear and see it too,’ cried Jonas, shading his eyes, for the
moment, from the lightning which was flashing, not in any one direction,
but all around them. ‘What of that? It don’t change you, nor me, nor our
affairs. Chorus, chorus,
It may lighten and storm,
Till it hunt the red worm
From the grass where the gibbet is driven;
But it can’t hurt the dead,
And it won’t save the head
That is doom’d to be rifled and riven.
That must be a precious old song,’ he added with an oath, as he stopped
short in a kind of wonder at himself. ‘I haven’t heard it since I was
a boy, and how it comes into my head now, unless the lightning put it
there, I don’t know. “Can’t hurt the dead”! No, no. “And won’t save the
head”! No, no. No! Ha, ha, ha!’
His mirth was of such a savage and extraordinary character, and was,
in an inexplicable way, at once so suited to the night, and yet such
a coarse intrusion on its terrors, that his fellow-traveller, always
a coward, shrunk from him in positive fear. Instead of Jonas being his
tool and instrument, their places seemed to be reversed. But there was
reason for this too, Montague thought; since the sense of his debasement
might naturally inspire such a man with the wish to assert a noisy
independence, and in that licence to forget his real condition. Being
quick enough, in reference to such subjects of contemplation, he was not
long in taking this argument into account and giving it its full weight.
But still, he felt a vague sense of alarm, and was depressed and uneasy.
He was certain he had not been asleep; but his eyes might have deceived
him; for, looking at Jonas now in any interval of darkness, he could
represent his figure to himself in any attitude his state of mind
suggested. On the other hand, he knew full well that Jonas had no
reason to love him; and even taking the piece of pantomime which had
so impressed his mind to be a real gesture, and not the working of
his fancy, the most that could be said of it was, that it was quite in
keeping with the rest of his diabolical fun, and had the same impotent
expression of truth in it. ‘If he could kill me with a wish,’ thought
the swindler, ‘I should not live long.’
He resolved that when he should have had his use of Jonas, he would
restrain him with an iron curb; in the meantime, that he could not do
better than leave him to take his own way, and preserve his own peculiar
description of good-humour, after his own uncommon manner. It was no
great sacrifice to bear with him; ‘for when all is got that can be got,’
thought Montague, ‘I shall decamp across the water, and have the laugh
on my side--and the gains.’
Such were his reflections from hour to hour; his state of mind being one
in which the same thoughts constantly present themselves over and
over again in wearisome repetition; while Jonas, who appeared to have
dismissed reflection altogether, entertained himself as before.
They agreed that they would go to Salisbury, and would cross to Mr
Pecksniff’s in the morning; and at the prospect of deluding that worthy
gentleman, the spirits of his amiable son-in-law became more boisterous
than ever.
As the night wore on, the thunder died away, but still rolled
gloomily and mournfully in the distance. The lightning too, though now
comparatively harmless, was yet bright and frequent. The rain was quite
as violent as it had ever been.
It was their ill-fortune, at about the time of dawn and in the last
stage of their journey, to have a restive pair of horses. These animals
had been greatly terrified in their stable by the tempest; and coming
out into the dreary interval between night and morning, when the glare
of the lightning was yet unsubdued by day, and the various objects in
their view were presented in indistinct and exaggerated shapes which
they would not have worn by night, they gradually became less and less
capable of control; until, taking a sudden fright at something by the
roadside, they dashed off wildly down a steep hill, flung the driver
from his saddle, drew the carriage to the brink of a ditch, stumbled
headlong down, and threw it crashing over.
The travellers had opened the carriage door, and had either jumped or
fallen out. Jonas was the first to stagger to his feet. He felt sick and
weak, and very giddy, and reeling to a five-barred gate, stood holding
by it; looking drowsily about as the whole landscape swam before his
eyes. But, by degrees, he grew more conscious, and presently observed
that Montague was lying senseless in the road, within a few feet of the
horses.
In an instant, as if his own faint body were suddenly animated by a
demon, he ran to the horses’ heads; and pulling at their bridles with
all his force, set them struggling and plunging with such mad violence
as brought their hoofs at every effort nearer to the skull of the
prostrate man; and must have led in half a minute to his brains being
dashed out on the highway.
As he did this, he fought and contended with them like a man possessed,
making them wilder by his cries.
‘Whoop!’ cried Jonas. ‘Whoop! again! another! A little more, a little
more! Up, ye devils! Hillo!’
As he heard the driver, who had risen and was hurrying up, crying to him
to desist, his violence increased.
‘Hiilo! Hillo!’ cried Jonas.
‘For God’s sake!’ cried the driver. ‘The gentleman--in the road--he’ll
be killed!’
The same shouts and the same struggles were his only answer. But the man
darting in at the peril of his own life, saved Montague’s, by dragging
him through the mire and water out of the reach of present harm. That
done, he ran to Jonas; and with the aid of his knife they very shortly
disengaged the horses from the broken chariot, and got them, cut and
bleeding, on their legs again. The postillion and Jonas had now leisure
to look at each other, which they had not had yet.
‘Presence of mind, presence of mind!’ cried Jonas, throwing up his hands
wildly. ‘What would you have done without me?’
‘The other gentleman would have done badly without ME,’ returned the
man, shaking his head. ‘You should have moved him first. I gave him up
for dead.’
‘Presence of mind, you croaker, presence of mind’ cried Jonas with a
harsh loud laugh. ‘Was he struck, do you think?’
They both turned to look at him. Jonas muttered something to himself,
when he saw him sitting up beneath the hedge, looking vacantly around.
‘What’s the matter?’ asked Montague. ‘Is anybody hurt?’
‘Ecod!’ said Jonas, ‘it don’t seem so. There are no bones broken, after
all.’
They raised him, and he tried to walk. He was a good deal shaken, and
trembled very much. But with the exception of a few cuts and bruises
this was all the damage he had sustained.
‘Cuts and bruises, eh?’ said Jonas. ‘We’ve all got them. Only cuts and
bruises, eh?’
‘I wouldn’t have given sixpence for the gentleman’s head in half-a-dozen
seconds more, for all he’s only cut and bruised,’ observed the post-boy.
‘If ever you’re in an accident of this sort again, sir; which I hope
you won’t be; never you pull at the bridle of a horse that’s down, when
there’s a man’s head in the way. That can’t be done twice without there
being a dead man in the case; it would have ended in that, this time, as
sure as ever you were born, if I hadn’t come up just when I did.’
Jonas replied by advising him with a curse to hold his tongue, and to go
somewhere, whither he was not very likely to go of his own accord. But
Montague, who had listened eagerly to every word, himself diverted the
subject, by exclaiming: ‘Where’s the boy?’
‘Ecod! I forgot that monkey,’ said Jonas. ‘What’s become of him?’ A very
brief search settled that question. The unfortunate Mr Bailey had been
thrown sheer over the hedge or the five-barred gate; and was lying in
the neighbouring field, to all appearance dead.
‘When I said to-night, that I wished I had never started on this
journey,’ cried his master, ‘I knew it was an ill-fated one. Look at
this boy!’
‘Is that all?’ growled Jonas. ‘If you call THAT a sign of it--’
‘Why, what should I call a sign of it?’ asked Montague, hurriedly. ‘What
do you mean?’
‘I mean,’ said Jonas, stooping down over the body, ‘that I never heard
you were his father, or had any particular reason to care much about
him. Halloa. Hold up there!’
But the boy was past holding up, or being held up, or giving any other
sign of life than a faint and fitful beating of the heart. After some
discussion the driver mounted the horse which had been least injured,
and took the lad in his arms as well as he could; while Montague and
Jonas, leading the other horse, and carrying a trunk between them,
walked by his side towards Salisbury.
‘You’d get there in a few minutes, and be able to send assistance to
meet us, if you went forward, post-boy,’ said Jonas. ‘Trot on!’
‘No, no,’ cried Montague; ‘we’ll keep together.’
‘Why, what a chicken you are! You are not afraid of being robbed; are
you?’ said Jonas.
‘I am not afraid of anything,’ replied the other, whose looks and manner
were in flat contradiction to his words. ‘But we’ll keep together.’
‘You were mighty anxious about the boy, a minute ago,’ said Jonas. ‘I
suppose you know that he may die in the meantime?’
‘Aye, aye. I know. But we’ll keep together.’
As it was clear that he was not to be moved from this determination,
Jonas made no other rejoinder than such as his face expressed; and they
proceeded in company. They had three or four good miles to travel; and