Martin Chuzzlewit
out of it, and having committed the crime, his fears were now diverted,
strangely, to the dark room he had left shut up at home. He had a
greater horror, infinitely greater, of that room than of the wood. Now
that he was on his return to it, it seemed beyond comparison more dismal
and more dreadful than the wood. His hideous secret was shut up in the
room, and all its terrors were there; to his thinking it was not in the
wood at all.
He walked on for ten miles; and then stopped at an ale-house for a
coach, which he knew would pass through, on its way to London, before
long; and which he also knew was not the coach he had travelled down by,
for it came from another place. He sat down outside the door here, on
a bench, beside a man who was smoking his pipe. Having called for some
beer, and drunk, he offered it to this companion, who thanked him, and
took a draught. He could not help thinking that, if the man had known
all, he might scarcely have relished drinking out of the same cup with
him.
‘A fine night, master!’ said this person. ‘And a rare sunset.’
‘I didn’t see it,’ was his hasty answer.
‘Didn’t see it?’ returned the man.
‘How the devil could I see it, if I was asleep?’
‘Asleep! Aye, aye.’ The man appeared surprised by his unexpected
irritability, and saying no more, smoked his pipe in silence. They had
not sat very long, when there was a knocking within.
‘What’s that?’ cried Jonas.
‘Can’t say, I’m sure,’ replied the man.
He made no further inquiry, for the last question had escaped him in
spite of himself. But he was thinking, at the moment, of the closed-up
room; of the possibility of their knocking at the door on some special
occasion; of their being alarmed at receiving no answer; of their
bursting it open; of their finding the room empty; of their fastening
the door into the court, and rendering it impossible for him to get into
the house without showing himself in the garb he wore, which would lead
to rumour, rumour to detection, detection to death. At that instant, as
if by some design and order of circumstances, the knocking had come.
It still continued; like a warning echo of the dread reality he had
conjured up. As he could not sit and hear it, he paid for his beer and
walked on again. And having slunk about, in places unknown to him all
day; and being out at night, in a lonely road, in an unusual dress and
in that wandering and unsettled frame of mind; he stopped more than once
to look about him, hoping he might be in a dream.
Still he was not sorry. No. He had hated the man too much, and had been
bent, too desperately and too long, on setting himself free. If the
thing could have come over again, he would have done it again. His
malignant and revengeful passions were not so easily laid. There was no
more penitence or remorse within him now than there had been while the
deed was brewing.
Dread and fear were upon him, to an extent he had never counted on, and
could not manage in the least degree. He was so horribly afraid of that
infernal room at home. This made him, in a gloomy murderous, mad way,
not only fearful FOR himself, but OF himself; for being, as it were, a
part of the room: a something supposed to be there, yet missing from it:
he invested himself with its mysterious terrors; and when he pictured in
his mind the ugly chamber, false and quiet, false and quiet, through the
dark hours of two nights; and the tumbled bed, and he not in it, though
believed to be; he became in a manner his own ghost and phantom, and was
at once the haunting spirit and the haunted man.
When the coach came up, which it soon did, he got a place outside and
was carried briskly onward towards home. Now, in taking his seat among
the people behind, who were chiefly country people, he conceived a fear
that they knew of the murder, and would tell him that the body had been
found; which, considering the time and place of the commission of the
crime, were events almost impossible to have happened yet, as he very
well knew. But although he did know it, and had therefore no reason
to regard their ignorance as anything but the natural sequence to
the facts, still this very ignorance of theirs encouraged him. So far
encouraged him, that he began to believe the body never would be found,
and began to speculate on that probability. Setting off from this point,
and measuring time by the rapid hurry of his guilty thoughts, and
what had gone before the bloodshed, and the troops of incoherent and
disordered images of which he was the constant prey; he came by
daylight to regard the murder as an old murder, and to think himself
comparatively safe because it had not been discovered yet. Yet! When the
sun which looked into the wood, and gilded with its rising light a dead
man’s lace, had seen that man alive, and sought to win him to a thought
of Heaven, on its going down last night!
But here were London streets again. Hush!
It was but five o’clock. He had time enough to reach his own house
unobserved, and before there were many people in the streets, if nothing
had happened so far, tending to his discovery. He slipped down from
the coach without troubling the driver to stop his horses; and hurrying
across the road, and in and out of every by-way that lay near his
course, at length approached his own dwelling. He used additional
caution in his immediate neighbourhood; halting first to look all
down the street before him; then gliding swiftly through that one, and
stopping to survey the next, and so on.
The passage-way was empty when his murderer’s face looked into it. He
stole on, to the door on tiptoe, as if he dreaded to disturb his own
imaginary rest.
He listened. Not a sound. As he turned the key with a trembling hand,
and pushed the door softly open with his knee, a monstrous fear beset
his mind.
What if the murdered man were there before him!
He cast a fearful glance all round. But there was nothing there.
He went in, locked the door, drew the key through and through the dust
and damp in the fire-place to sully it again, and hung it up as of old.
He took off his disguise, tied it up in a bundle ready for carrying away
and sinking in the river before night, and locked it up in a cupboard.
These precautions taken, he undressed and went to bed.
The raging thirst, the fire that burnt within him as he lay beneath the
clothes, the augmented horror of the room when they shut it out from his
view; the agony of listening, in which he paid enforced regard to every
sound, and thought the most unlikely one the prelude to that knocking
which should bring the news; the starts with which he left his couch,
and looking in the glass, imagined that his deed was broadly written
in his face, and lying down and burying himself once more beneath the
blankets, heard his own heart beating Murder, Murder, Murder, in the
bed; what words can paint tremendous truths like these!
The morning advanced. There were footsteps in the house. He heard the
blinds drawn up, and shutters opened; and now and then a stealthy tread
outside his own door. He tried to call out, more than once, but his
mouth was dry as if it had been filled with sand. At last he sat up in
his bed, and cried:
‘Who’s there?’
It was his wife.
He asked her what it was o’clock? Nine.
‘Did--did no one knock at my door yesterday?’ he faltered. ‘Something
disturbed me; but unless you had knocked the door down, you would have
got no notice from me.’
‘No one,’ she replied. That was well. He had waited, almost breathless,
for her answer. It was a relief to him, if anything could be.
‘Mr Nadgett wanted to see you,’ she said, ‘but I told him you were
tired, and had requested not to be disturbed. He said it was of little
consequence, and went away. As I was opening my window to let in the
cool air, I saw him passing through the street this morning, very early;
but he hasn’t been again.’
Passing through the street that morning? Very early! Jonas trembled at
the thought of having had a narrow chance of seeing him himself; even
him, who had no object but to avoid people, and sneak on unobserved, and
keep his own secrets; and who saw nothing.
He called to her to get his breakfast ready, and prepared to go
upstairs; attiring himself in the clothes he had taken off when he came
into that room, which had been, ever since, outside the door. In his
secret dread of meeting the household for the first time, after what he
had done, he lingered at the door on slight pretexts that they might see
him without looking in his face; and left it ajar while he dressed; and
called out to have the windows opened, and the pavement watered, that
they might become accustomed to his voice. Even when he had put off the
time, by one means or other, so that he had seen or spoken to them all,
he could not muster courage for a long while to go in among them,
but stood at his own door listening to the murmur of their distant
conversation.
He could not stop there for ever, and so joined them. His last glance at
the glass had seen a tell-tale face, but that might have been because
of his anxious looking in it. He dared not look at them to see if they
observed him, but he thought them very silent.
And whatsoever guard he kept upon himself, he could not help listening,
and showing that he listened. Whether he attended to their talk, or
tried to think of other things, or talked himself, or held his peace, or
resolutely counted the dull tickings of a hoarse clock at his back, he
always lapsed, as if a spell were on him, into eager listening. For
he knew it must come. And his present punishment, and torture and
distraction, were, to listen for its coming.
Hush!
CHAPTER FORTY-EIGHT
BEARS TIDINGS OF MARTIN AND OF MARK, AS WELL AS OF A THIRD PERSON NOT
QUITE UNKNOWN TO THE READER. EXHIBITS FILIAL PIETY IN AN UGLY ASPECT;
AND CASTS A DOUBTFUL RAY OF LIGHT UPON A VERY DARK PLACE
Tom Pinch and Ruth were sitting at their early breakfast, with the
window open, and a row of the freshest little plants ranged before it
on the inside by Ruth’s own hands; and Ruth had fastened a sprig of
geranium in Tom’s button-hole, to make him very smart and summer-like
for the day (it was obliged to be fastened in, or that dear old Tom
was certain to lose it); and people were crying flowers up and down the
street; and a blundering bee, who had got himself in between the
two sashes of the window, was bruising his head against the glass,
endeavouring to force himself out into the fine morning, and considering
himself enchanted because he couldn’t do it; and the morning was as fine
a morning as ever was seen; and the fragrant air was kissing Ruth and
rustling about Tom, as if it said, ‘how are you, my dears; I came all
this way on purpose to salute you;’ and it was one of those glad times
when we form, or ought to form, the wish that every one on earth were
able to be happy, and catching glimpses of the summer of the heart, to
feel the beauty of the summer of the year.
It was even a pleasanter breakfast than usual; and it was always a
pleasant one. For little Ruth had now two pupils to attend, each three
times a week; and each two hours at a time; and besides this, she had
painted some screens and card-racks, and, unknown to Tom (was there ever
anything so delightful!), had walked into a certain shop which dealt
in such articles, after often peeping through the window; and had taken
courage to ask the Mistress of that shop whether she would buy them. And
the mistress had not only bought them, but had ordered more, and that
very morning Ruth had made confession of these facts to Tom, and had
handed him the money in a little purse she had worked expressly for the
purpose. They had been in a flutter about this, and perhaps had shed a