Martin Chuzzlewit
bribed the driver of a return post-chaise to take him on with him; and
then made across the country at a run, and saved a mile or two before he
struck again into the road. At last, as his plan was, he came up with a
certain lumbering, slow, night-coach, which stopped wherever it could,
and was stopping then at a public-house, while the guard and coachman
ate and drank within.
He bargained for a seat outside this coach, and took it. And he quitted
it no more until it was within a few miles of its destination, but
occupied the same place all night.
All night! It is a common fancy that nature seems to sleep by night. It
is a false fancy, as who should know better than he?
The fishes slumbered in the cold, bright, glistening streams and rivers,
perhaps; and the birds roosted on the branches of the trees; and in
their stalls and pastures beasts were quiet; and human creatures slept.
But what of that, when the solemn night was watching, when it never
winked, when its darkness watched no less than its light! The stately
trees, the moon and shining stars, the softly stirring wind, the
over-shadowed lane, the broad, bright countryside, they all kept watch.
There was not a blade of growing grass or corn, but watched; and the
quieter it was, the more intent and fixed its watch upon him seemed to
be.
And yet he slept. Riding on among those sentinels of God, he slept,
and did not change the purpose of his journey. If he forgot it in his
troubled dreams, it came up steadily, and woke him. But it never woke
him to remorse, or to abandonment of his design.
He dreamed at one time that he was lying calmly in his bed, thinking of
a moonlight night and the noise of wheels, when the old clerk put
his head in at the door, and beckoned him. At this signal he arose
immediately--being already dressed in the clothes he actually wore at
that time--and accompanied him into a strange city, where the names of
the streets were written on the walls in characters quite new to him;
which gave him no surprise or uneasiness, for he remembered in his dream
to have been there before. Although these streets were very precipitous,
insomuch that to get from one to another it was necessary to descend
great heights by ladders that were too short, and ropes that moved deep
bells, and swung and swayed as they were clung to, the danger gave him
little emotion beyond the first thrill of terror; his anxieties being
concentrated on his dress which was quite unfitted for some festival
that was about to be holden there, and in which he had come to take
a part. Already, great crowds began to fill the streets, and in
one direction myriads of people came rushing down an interminable
perspective, strewing flowers and making way for others on white horses,
when a terrible figure started from the throng, and cried out that it
was the Last Day for all the world. The cry being spread, there was a
wild hurrying on to Judgment; and the press became so great that he and
his companion (who was constantly changing, and was never the same man
two minutes together, though he never saw one man come or another go),
stood aside in a porch, fearfully surveying the multitude; in which
there were many faces that he knew, and many that he did not know, but
dreamed he did; when all at once a struggling head rose up among the
rest--livid and deadly, but the same as he had known it--and denounced
him as having appointed that direful day to happen. They closed
together. As he strove to free the hand in which he held a club, and
strike the blow he had so often thought of, he started to the knowledge
of his waking purpose and the rising of the sun.
The sun was welcome to him. There were life and motion, and a world
astir, to divide the attention of Day. It was the eye of Night--of
wakeful, watchful, silent, and attentive Night, with so much leisure for
the observation of his wicked thoughts--that he dreaded most. There is
no glare in the night. Even Glory shows to small advantage in the night,
upon a crowded battle-field. How then shows Glory’s blood-relation,
bastard Murder!
Aye! He made no compromise, and held no secret with himself now. Murder.
He had come to do it.
‘Let me get down here’ he said
‘Short of the town, eh!’ observed the coachman.
‘I may get down where I please, I suppose?’
‘You got up to please yourself, and may get down to please yourself. It
won’t break our hearts to lose you, and it wouldn’t have broken ‘em if
we’d never found you. Be a little quicker. That’s all.’
The guard had alighted, and was waiting in the road to take his money.
In the jealousy and distrust of what he contemplated, he thought this
man looked at him with more than common curiosity.
‘What are you staring at?’ said Jonas.
‘Not at a handsome man,’ returned the guard. ‘If you want your fortune
told, I’ll tell you a bit of it. You won’t be drowned. That’s a
consolation for you.’
Before he could retort or turn away, the coachman put an end to the
dialogue by giving him a cut with his whip, and bidding him get out for a
surly dog. The guard jumped up to his seat at the same moment, and they
drove off, laughing; leaving him to stand in the road and shake his fist
at them. He was not displeased though, on second thoughts, to have
been taken for an ill-conditioned common country fellow; but rather
congratulated himself upon it as a proof that he was well disguised.
Wandering into a copse by the road-side--but not in that place; two or
three miles off--he tore out from a fence a thick, hard, knotted stake;
and, sitting down beneath a hayrick, spent some time in shaping it, in
peeling off the bark, and fashioning its jagged head with his knife.
The day passed on. Noon, afternoon, evening. Sunset.
At that serene and peaceful time two men, riding in a gig, came out
of the city by a road not much frequented. It was the day on which Mr
Pecksniff had agreed to dine with Montague. He had kept his appointment,
and was now going home. His host was riding with him for a short
distance; meaning to return by a pleasant track, which Mr Pecksniff had
engaged to show him, through some fields. Jonas knew their plans. He had
hung about the inn-yard while they were at dinner and had heard their
orders given.
They were loud and merry in their conversation, and might have been
heard at some distance; far above the sound of their carriage wheels
or horses’ hoofs. They came on noisily, to where a stile and footpath
indicated their point of separation. Here they stopped.
‘It’s too soon. Much too soon,’ said Mr Pecksniff. ‘But this is the
place, my dear sir. Keep the path, and go straight through the little
wood you’ll come to. The path is narrower there, but you can’t miss it.
When shall I see you again? Soon I hope?’
‘I hope so,’ replied Montague.
‘Good night!’
‘Good night. And a pleasant ride!’
So long as Mr Pecksniff was in sight, and turned his head at intervals
to salute him, Montague stood in the road smiling, and waving his hand.
But when his new partner had disappeared, and this show was no longer
necessary, he sat down on the stile with looks so altered, that he might
have grown ten years older in the meantime.
He was flushed with wine, but not gay. His scheme had succeeded, but he
showed no triumph. The effort of sustaining his difficult part before
his late companion had fatigued him, perhaps, or it may be that the
evening whispered to his conscience, or it may be (as it HAS been) that
a shadowy veil was dropping round him, closing out all thoughts but the
presentiment and vague foreknowledge of impending doom.
If there be fluids, as we know there are, which, conscious of a coming
wind, or rain, or frost, will shrink and strive to hide themselves in
their glass arteries; may not that subtle liquor of the blood perceive,
by properties within itself, that hands are raised to waste and spill
it; and in the veins of men run cold and dull as his did, in that hour!
So cold, although the air was warm; so dull, although the sky was
bright; that he rose up shivering from his seat, and hastily resumed
his walk. He checked himself as hastily; undecided whether to pursue the
footpath, which was lonely and retired, or to go back by the road.
He took the footpath.
The glory of the departing sun was on his face. The music of the birds
was in his ears. Sweet wild flowers bloomed about him. Thatched roofs of
poor men’s homes were in the distance; and an old grey spire, surmounted
by a Cross, rose up between him and the coming night.
He had never read the lesson which these things conveyed; he had ever
mocked and turned away from it; but, before going down into a hollow
place, he looked round, once, upon the evening prospect, sorrowfully.
Then he went down, down, down, into the dell.
It brought him to the wood; a close, thick, shadowy wood, through which
the path went winding on, dwindling away into a slender sheep-track. He
paused before entering; for the stillness of this spot almost daunted
him.
The last rays of the sun were shining in, aslant, making a path of
golden light along the stems and branches in its range, which, even as
he looked, began to die away, yielding gently to the twilight that came
creeping on. It was so very quiet that the soft and stealthy moss about
the trunks of some old trees, seemed to have grown out of the silence,
and to be its proper offspring. Those other trees which were subdued
by blasts of wind in winter time, had not quite tumbled down, but being
caught by others, lay all bare and scathed across their leafy arms, as
if unwilling to disturb the general repose by the crash of their fall.
Vistas of silence opened everywhere, into the heart and innermost
recesses of the wood; beginning with the likeness of an aisle, a
cloister, or a ruin open to the sky; then tangling off into a deep green
rustling mystery, through which gnarled trunks, and twisted boughs, and
ivy-covered stems, and trembling leaves, and bark-stripped bodies of old
trees stretched out at length, were faintly seen in beautiful confusion.
As the sunlight died away, and evening fell upon the wood, he entered
it. Moving, here and there a bramble or a drooping bough which stretched
across his path, he slowly disappeared. At intervals a narrow opening
showed him passing on, or the sharp cracking of some tender branch
denoted where he went; then, he was seen or heard no more.
Never more beheld by mortal eye or heard by mortal ear; one man
excepted. That man, parting the leaves and branches on the other side,
near where the path emerged again, came leaping out soon afterwards.
What had he left within the wood, that he sprang out of it as if it were
a hell!
The body of a murdered man. In one thick solitary spot, it lay among
the last year’s leaves of oak and beech, just as it had fallen headlong
down. Sopping and soaking in among the leaves that formed its pillow;
oozing down into the boggy ground, as if to cover itself from human
sight; forcing its way between and through the curling leaves, as if
those senseless things rejected and forswore it and were coiled up in
abhorrence; went a dark, dark stain that dyed the whole summer night
from earth to heaven.
The doer of this deed came leaping from the wood so fiercely, that he
cast into the air a shower of fragments of young boughs, torn away
in his passage, and fell with violence upon the grass. But he quickly
gained his feet again, and keeping underneath a hedge with his body
bent, went running on towards the road. The road once reached, he fell
into a rapid walk, and set on toward London.
And he was not sorry for what he had done. He was frightened when he
thought of it--when did he not think of it!--but he was not sorry. He
had had a terror and dread of the wood when he was in it; but being