Oliver Twist
The Jew thrust his head out of the room door when Sikes had left it;
looked after him as he walked up the dark passage; shook his clenched
fist; muttered a deep curse; and then, with a horrible grin, reseated
himself at the table; where he was soon deeply absorbed in the
interesting pages of the Hue-and-Cry.
Meanwhile, Oliver Twist, little dreaming that he was within so very
short a distance of the merry old gentleman, was on his way to the
book-stall. When he got into Clerkenwell, he accidently turned down a
by-street which was not exactly in his way; but not discovering his
mistake until he had got half-way down it, and knowing it must lead in
the right direction, he did not think it worth while to turn back; and
so marched on, as quickly as he could, with the books under his arm.
He was walking along, thinking how happy and contented he ought to
feel; and how much he would give for only one look at poor little Dick,
who, starved and beaten, might be weeping bitterly at that very moment;
when he was startled by a young woman screaming out very loud. “Oh, my
dear brother!” And he had hardly looked up, to see what the matter was,
when he was stopped by having a pair of arms thrown tight round his
neck.
“Don’t,” cried Oliver, struggling. “Let go of me. Who is it? What are
you stopping me for?”
The only reply to this, was a great number of loud lamentations from
the young woman who had embraced him; and who had a little basket and a
street-door key in her hand.
“Oh my gracious!” said the young woman, “I have found him! Oh! Oliver!
Oliver! Oh you naughty boy, to make me suffer such distress on your
account! Come home, dear, come. Oh, I’ve found him. Thank gracious
goodness heavins, I’ve found him!” With these incoherent exclamations,
the young woman burst into another fit of crying, and got so dreadfully
hysterical, that a couple of women who came up at the moment asked a
butcher’s boy with a shiny head of hair anointed with suet, who was
also looking on, whether he didn’t think he had better run for the
doctor. To which, the butcher’s boy: who appeared of a lounging, not to
say indolent disposition: replied, that he thought not.
“Oh, no, no, never mind,” said the young woman, grasping Oliver’s hand;
“I’m better now. Come home directly, you cruel boy! Come!”
“Oh, ma’am,” replied the young woman, “he ran away, near a month ago,
from his parents, who are hard-working and respectable people; and went
and joined a set of thieves and bad characters; and almost broke his
mother’s heart.”
“Young wretch!” said one woman.
“Go home, do, you little brute,” said the other.
“I am not,” replied Oliver, greatly alarmed. “I don’t know her. I
haven’t any sister, or father and mother either. I’m an orphan; I live
at Pentonville.”
“Only hear him, how he braves it out!” cried the young woman.
“Why, it’s Nancy!” exclaimed Oliver; who now saw her face for the first
time; and started back, in irrepressible astonishment.
“You see he knows me!” cried Nancy, appealing to the bystanders. “He
can’t help himself. Make him come home, there’s good people, or he’ll
kill his dear mother and father, and break my heart!”
“What the devil’s this?” said a man, bursting out of a beer-shop, with
a white dog at his heels; “young Oliver! Come home to your poor mother,
you young dog! Come home directly.”
“I don’t belong to them. I don’t know them. Help! help!” cried Oliver,
struggling in the man’s powerful grasp.
“Help!” repeated the man. “Yes; I’ll help you, you young rascal! What
books are these? You’ve been a stealing ’em, have you? Give ’em here.”
With these words, the man tore the volumes from his grasp, and struck
him on the head.
“That’s right!” cried a looker-on, from a garret-window. “That’s the
only way of bringing him to his senses!”
“To be sure!” cried a sleepy-faced carpenter, casting an approving look
at the garret-window.
“It’ll do him good!” said the two women.
“And he shall have it, too!” rejoined the man, administering another
blow, and seizing Oliver by the collar. “Come on, you young villain!
Here, Bull’s-eye, mind him, boy! Mind him!”
Weak with recent illness; stupified by the blows and the suddenness of
the attack; terrified by the fierce growling of the dog, and the
brutality of the man; overpowered by the conviction of the bystanders
that he really was the hardened little wretch he was described to be;
what could one poor child do! Darkness had set in; it was a low
neighborhood; no help was near; resistance was useless. In another
moment he was dragged into a labyrinth of dark narrow courts, and was
forced along them at a pace which rendered the few cries he dared to
give utterance to, unintelligible. It was of little moment, indeed,
whether they were intelligible or no; for there was nobody to care for
them, had they been ever so plain.
The gas-lamps were lighted; Mrs. Bedwin was waiting anxiously at the
open door; the servant had run up the street twenty times to see if
there were any traces of Oliver; and still the two old gentlemen sat,
perseveringly, in the dark parlour, with the watch between them.
CHAPTER XVI.
RELATES WHAT BECAME OF OLIVER TWIST, AFTER HE HAD BEEN CLAIMED BY NANCY
The narrow streets and courts, at length, terminated in a large open
space; scattered about which, were pens for beasts, and other
indications of a cattle-market. Sikes slackened his pace when they
reached this spot: the girl being quite unable to support any longer,
the rapid rate at which they had hitherto walked. Turning to Oliver, he
roughly commanded him to take hold of Nancy’s hand.
“Do you hear?” growled Sikes, as Oliver hesitated, and looked round.
They were in a dark corner, quite out of the track of passengers.
Oliver saw, but too plainly, that resistance would be of no avail. He
held out his hand, which Nancy clasped tight in hers.
“Give me the other,” said Sikes, seizing Oliver’s unoccupied hand.
“Here, Bull’s-Eye!”
The dog looked up, and growled.
“See here, boy!” said Sikes, putting his other hand to Oliver’s throat;
“if he speaks ever so soft a word, hold him! D’ye mind!”
The dog growled again; and licking his lips, eyed Oliver as if he were
anxious to attach himself to his windpipe without delay.
“He’s as willing as a Christian, strike me blind if he isn’t!” said
Sikes, regarding the animal with a kind of grim and ferocious approval.
“Now, you know what you’ve got to expect, master, so call away as quick
as you like; the dog will soon stop that game. Get on, young ’un!”
Bull’s-eye wagged his tail in acknowledgment of this unusually
endearing form of speech; and, giving vent to another admonitory growl
for the benefit of Oliver, led the way onward.
It was Smithfield that they were crossing, although it might have been
Grosvenor Square, for anything Oliver knew to the contrary. The night
was dark and foggy. The lights in the shops could scarecely struggle
through the heavy mist, which thickened every moment and shrouded the
streets and houses in gloom; rendering the strange place still stranger
in Oliver’s eyes; and making his uncertainty the more dismal and
depressing.
They had hurried on a few paces, when a deep church-bell struck the
hour. With its first stroke, his two conductors stopped, and turned
their heads in the direction whence the sound proceeded.
“Eight o’clock, Bill,” said Nancy, when the bell ceased.
“What’s the good of telling me that; I can hear it, can’t I?” replied
Sikes.
“I wonder whether _they_ can hear it,” said Nancy.
“Of course they can,” replied Sikes. “It was Bartlemy time when I was
shopped; and there warn’t a penny trumpet in the fair, as I couldn’t
hear the squeaking on. Arter I was locked up for the night, the row and
din outside made the thundering old jail so silent, that I could almost
have beat my brains out against the iron plates of the door.”
“Poor fellow!” said Nancy, who still had her face turned towards the
quarter in which the bell had sounded. “Oh, Bill, such fine young chaps
as them!”
“Yes; that’s all you women think of,” answered Sikes. “Fine young
chaps! Well, they’re as good as dead, so it don’t much matter.”
With this consolation, Mr. Sikes appeared to repress a rising tendency
to jealousy, and, clasping Oliver’s wrist more firmly, told him to step
out again.
“Wait a minute!” said the girl: “I wouldn’t hurry by, if it was you
that was coming out to be hung, the next time eight o’clock struck,
Bill. I’d walk round and round the place till I dropped, if the snow
was on the ground, and I hadn’t a shawl to cover me.”
“And what good would that do?” inquired the unsentimental Mr. Sikes.
“Unless you could pitch over a file and twenty yards of good stout
rope, you might as well be walking fifty mile off, or not walking at
all, for all the good it would do me. Come on, and don’t stand
preaching there.”
The girl burst into a laugh; drew her shawl more closely round her; and
they walked away. But Oliver felt her hand tremble, and, looking up in
her face as they passed a gas-lamp, saw that it had turned a deadly
white.
They walked on, by little-frequented and dirty ways, for a full
half-hour: meeting very few people, and those appearing from their
looks to hold much the same position in society as Mr. Sikes himself.
At length they turned into a very filthy narrow street, nearly full of
old-clothes shops; the dog running forward, as if conscious that there
was no further occasion for his keeping on guard, stopped before the
door of a shop that was closed and apparently untenanted; the house was
in a ruinous condition, and on the door was nailed a board, intimating
that it was to let: which looked as if it had hung there for many
years.
“All right,” cried Sikes, glancing cautiously about.
Nancy stooped below the shutters, and Oliver heard the sound of a bell.
They crossed to the opposite side of the street, and stood for a few
moments under a lamp. A noise, as if a sash window were gently raised,
was heard; and soon afterwards the door softly opened. Mr. Sikes then
seized the terrified boy by the collar with very little ceremony; and
all three were quickly inside the house.
The passage was perfectly dark. They waited, while the person who had
let them in, chained and barred the door.
“Anybody here?” inquired Sikes.
“No,” replied a voice, which Oliver thought he had heard before.
“Is the old ’un here?” asked the robber.
“Yes,” replied the voice, “and precious down in the mouth he has been.
Won’t he be glad to see you? Oh, no!”
The style of this reply, as well as the voice which delivered it,
seemed familiar to Oliver’s ears: but it was impossible to distinguish
even the form of the speaker in the darkness.
“Let’s have a glim,” said Sikes, “or we shall go breaking our necks, or
treading on the dog. Look after your legs if you do!”
“Stand still a moment, and I’ll get you one,” replied the voice. The
receding footsteps of the speaker were heard; and, in another minute,
the form of Mr. John Dawkins, otherwise the Artful Dodger, appeared. He
bore in his right hand a tallow candle stuck in the end of a cleft
stick.
The young gentleman did not stop to bestow any other mark of
recognition upon Oliver than a humourous grin; but, turning away,
beckoned the visitors to follow him down a flight of stairs. They
crossed an empty kitchen; and, opening the door of a low
earthy-smelling room, which seemed to have been built in a small
back-yard, were received with a shout of laughter.
“Oh, my wig, my wig!” cried Master Charles Bates, from whose lungs the
laughter had proceeded: “here he is! oh, cry, here he is! Oh, Fagin,
look at him! Fagin, do look at him! I can’t bear it; it is such a jolly
game, I can’t bear it. Hold me, somebody, while I laugh it out.”