Martin Chuzzlewit
can soon rewive you, sir, I promige you. Bite a person’s thumbs, or
turn their fingers the wrong way,’ said Mrs Gamp, smiling with the
consciousness of at once imparting pleasure and instruction to her
auditors, ‘and they comes to, wonderful, Lord bless you!’
As this excellent woman had been formerly entrusted with the care of Mr
Chuffey on a previous occasion, neither Mrs Jonas nor anybody else had
the resolution to interfere directly with her mode of treatment;
though all present (Tom Pinch and his sister especially) appeared to be
disposed to differ from her views. For such is the rash boldness of the
uninitiated, that they will frequently set up some monstrous abstract
principle, such as humanity, or tenderness, or the like idle folly, in
obstinate defiance of all precedent and usage; and will even venture to
maintain the same against the persons who have made the precedents
and established the usage, and who must therefore be the best and most
impartial judges of the subject.
‘Ah, Mr Pinch!’ said Miss Pecksniff. ‘It all comes of this unfortunate
marriage. If my sister had not been so precipitate, and had not united
herself to a Wretch, there would have been no Mr Chuffey in the house.’
‘Hush!’ cried Tom. ‘She’ll hear you.’
‘I should be very sorry if she did hear me, Mr Pinch,’ said Cherry,
raising her voice a little; ‘for it is not in my nature to add to the
uneasiness of any person; far less of my own sister. I know what a
sister’s duties are, Mr Pinch, and I hope I always showed it in my
practice. Augustus, my dear child, find my pocket-handkerchief, and give
it to me.’
Augustus obeyed, and took Mrs Todgers aside to pour his griefs into her
friendly bosom.
‘I am sure, Mr Pinch,’ said Charity, looking after her betrothed and
glancing at her sister, ‘that I ought to be very grateful for the
blessings I enjoy, and those which are yet in store for me. When I
contrast Augustus’--here she was modest and embarrased--‘who, I don’t
mind saying to you, is all softness, mildness, and devotion, with the
detestable man who is my sister’s husband; and when I think, Mr Pinch,
that in the dispensations of this world, our cases might have been
reversed; I have much to be thankful for, indeed, and much to make me
humble and contented.’
Contented she might have been, but humble she assuredly was not. Her
face and manner experienced something so widely different from humility,
that Tom could not help understanding and despising the base motives
that were working in her breast. He turned away, and said to Ruth, that
it was time for them to go.
‘I will write to your husband,’ said Tom to Merry, ‘and explain to him,
as I would have done if I had met him here, that if he has sustained any
inconvenience through my means, it is not my fault; a postman not being
more innocent of the news he brings, than I was when I handed him that
letter.’
‘I thank you!’ said Merry. ‘It may do some good.’
She parted tenderly from Ruth, who with her brother was in the act of
leaving the room, when a key was heard in the lock of the door below,
and immediately afterwards a quick footstep in the passage. Tom stopped,
and looked at Merry.
It was Jonas, she said timidly.
‘I had better not meet him on the stairs, perhaps,’ said Tom, drawing
his sister’s arm through his, and coming back a step or two. ‘I’ll wait
for him here, a moment.’
He had scarcely said it when the door opened, and Jonas entered. His
wife came forward to receive him; but he put her aside with his hand,
and said in a surly tone:
‘I didn’t know you’d got a party.’
As he looked, at the same time, either by accident or design, towards
Miss Pecksniff; and as Miss Pecksniff was only too delighted to quarrel
with him, she instantly resented it.
‘Oh dear!’ she said, rising. ‘Pray don’t let us intrude upon your
domestic happiness! That would be a pity. We have taken tea here, sir,
in your absence; but if you will have the goodness to send us a note of
the expense, receipted, we shall be happy to pay it. Augustus, my love,
we will go, if you please. Mrs Todgers, unless you wish to remain here,
we shall be happy to take you with us. It would be a pity, indeed, to
spoil the bliss which this gentleman always brings with him, especially
into his own home.’
‘Charity! Charity!’ remonstrated her sister, in such a heartfelt tone
that she might have been imploring her to show the cardinal virtue whose
name she bore.
‘Merry, my dear, I am much obliged to you for your advice,’ returned
Miss Pecksniff, with a stately scorn--by the way, she had not been
offered any--‘but I am not his slave--’
‘No, nor wouldn’t have been if you could,’ interrupted Jonas. ‘We know
all about it.’
‘WHAT did you say, sir?’ cried Miss Pecksniff, sharply.
‘Didn’t you hear?’ retorted Jonas, lounging down upon a chair. ‘I am not
a-going to say it again. If you like to stay, you may stay. If you like
to go, you may go. But if you stay, please to be civil.’
‘Beast!’ cried Miss Pecksniff, sweeping past him. ‘Augustus! He is
beneath your notice!’ Augustus had been making some faint and sickly
demonstration of shaking his fist. ‘Come away, child,’ screamed Miss
Pecksniff, ‘I command you!’
The scream was elicited from her by Augustus manifesting an intention to
return and grapple with him. But Miss Pecksniff giving the fiery youth
a pull, and Mrs Todgers giving him a push they all three tumbled out
of the room together, to the music of Miss Pecksniff’s shrill
remonstrances.
All this time Jonas had seen nothing of Tom and his sister; for they
were almost behind the door when he opened it, and he had sat down with
his back towards them, and had purposely kept his eyes upon the opposite
side of the street during his altercation with Miss Pecksniff, in order
that his seeming carelessness might increase the exasperation of that
wronged young damsel. His wife now faltered out that Tom had been
waiting to see him; and Tom advanced.
The instant he presented himself, Jonas got up from his chair, and
swearing a great oath, caught it in his grasp, as if he would have
felled Tom to the ground with it. As he most unquestionably would have
done, but that his very passion and surprise made him irresolute, and
gave Tom, in his calmness, an opportunity of being heard.
‘You have no cause to be violent, sir,’ said Tom. ‘Though what I wish to
say relates to your own affairs, I know nothing of them, and desire to
know nothing of them.’
Jonas was too enraged to speak. He held the door open; and stamping his
foot upon the ground, motioned Tom away.
‘As you cannot suppose,’ said Tom, ‘that I am here with any view of
conciliating you or pleasing myself, I am quite indifferent to your
reception of me, or your dismissal of me. Hear what I have to say, if
you are not a madman! I gave you a letter the other day, when you were
about to go abroad.’
‘You Thief, you did!’ retorted Jonas. ‘I’ll pay you for the carriage of
it one day, and settle an old score besides. I will!’
‘Tut, tut,’ said Tom, ‘you needn’t waste words or threats. I wish you
to understand--plainly because I would rather keep clear of you and
everything that concerns you: not because I have the least apprehension
of your doing me any injury: which would be weak indeed--that I am no
party to the contents of that letter. That I know nothing of it. That I
was not even aware that it was to be delivered to you; and that I had it
from--’
‘By the Lord!’ cried Jonas, fiercely catching up the chair, ‘I’ll knock
your brains out, if you speak another word.’
Tom, nevertheless, persisting in his intention, and opening his lips to
speak again, Jonas set upon him like a savage; and in the quickness and
ferocity of his attack would have surely done him some grievous injury,
defenceless as he was, and embarrassed by having his frightened sister
clinging to his arm, if Merry had not run between them, crying to
Tom for the love of Heaven to leave the house. The agony of this poor
creature, the terror of his sister, the impossibility of making himself
audible, and the equal impossibility of bearing up against Mrs Gamp, who
threw herself upon him like a feather-bed, and forced him backwards down
the stairs by the mere oppression of her dead weight, prevailed. Tom
shook the dust of that house off his feet, without having mentioned
Nadgett’s name.
If the name could have passed his lips; if Jonas, in the insolence of
his vile nature, had never roused him to do that old act of manliness,
for which (and not for his last offence) he hated him with such
malignity; if Jonas could have learned, as then he could and would have
learned, through Tom’s means, what unsuspected spy there was upon him;
he would have been saved from the commission of a Guilty Deed, then
drawing on towards its black accomplishment. But the fatality was of
his own working; the pit was of his own digging; the gloom that gathered
round him was the shadow of his own life.
His wife had closed the door, and thrown herself before it, on the
ground, upon her knees. She held up her hands to him now, and besought
him not to be harsh with her, for she had interposed in fear of
bloodshed.
‘So, so!’ said Jonas, looking down upon her, as he fetched his breath.
‘These are your friends, are they, when I am away? You plot and tamper
with this sort of people, do you?’
‘No, indeed! I have no knowledge of these secrets, and no clue to
their meaning. I have never seen him since I left home but once--but
twice--before to-day.’
‘Oh!’ sneered Jonas, catching at this correction. ‘But once, but twice,
eh? Which do you mean? Twice and once, perhaps. Three times! How many
more, you lying jade?’
As he made an angry motion with his hand, she shrunk down hastily. A
suggestive action! Full of a cruel truth!
‘How many more times?’ he repeated.
‘No more. The other morning, and to-day, and once besides.’
He was about to retort upon her, when the clock struck. He started
stopped, and listened; appearing to revert to some engagement, or to
some other subject, a secret within his own breast, recalled to him by
this record of the progress of the hours.
‘Don’t lie there! Get up!’
Having helped her to rise, or rather hauled her up by the arm, he went
on to say:
‘Listen to me, young lady; and don’t whine when you have no occasion, or
I may make some for you. If I find him in my house again, or find that
you have seen him in anybody else’s house, you’ll repent it. If you are
not deaf and dumb to everything that concerns me, unless you have my
leave to hear and speak, you’ll repent it. If you don’t obey exactly
what I order, you’ll repent it. Now, attend. What’s the time?’
‘It struck eight a minute ago.’
He looked towards her intently; and said, with a laboured distinctness,
as if he had got the words off by heart:
‘I have been travelling day and night, and am tired. I have lost some
money, and that don’t improve me. Put my supper in the little off-room
below, and have the truckle-bed made. I shall sleep there to-night, and
maybe to-morrow night; and if I can sleep all day to-morrow, so much
the better, for I’ve got trouble to sleep off, if I can. Keep the house
quiet, and don’t call me. Mind! Don’t call me. Don’t let anybody call
me. Let me lie there.’
She said it should be done. Was that all?
‘All what? You must be prying and questioning!’ he angrily retorted.
‘What more do you want to know?’
‘I want to know nothing, Jonas, but what you tell me. All hope of
confidence between us has long deserted me!’
‘Ecod, I should hope so!’ he muttered.
‘But if you will tell me what you wish, I will be obedient and will
try to please you. I make no merit of that, for I have no friend in
my father or my sister, but am quite alone. I am very humble and