Oliver Twist
as though irresolute, and making up her mind to advance; but the sound
determined her, and she stepped into the hall. The porter’s seat was
vacant. She looked round with an air of incertitude, and advanced
towards the stairs.
“Now, young woman!” said a smartly-dressed female, looking out from a
door behind her, “who do you want here?”
“A lady who is stopping in this house,” answered the girl.
“A lady!” was the reply, accompanied with a scornful look. “What lady?”
“Miss Maylie,” said Nancy.
The young woman, who had by this time, noted her appearance, replied
only by a look of virtuous disdain; and summoned a man to answer her.
To him, Nancy repeated her request.
“What name am I to say?” asked the waiter.
“It’s of no use saying any,” replied Nancy.
“Nor business?” said the man.
“No, nor that neither,” rejoined the girl. “I must see the lady.”
“Come!” said the man, pushing her towards the door. “None of this. Take
yourself off.”
“I shall be carried out if I go!” said the girl violently; “and I can
make that a job that two of you won’t like to do. Isn’t there anybody
here,” she said, looking round, “that will see a simple message carried
for a poor wretch like me?”
This appeal produced an effect on a good-tempered-faced man-cook, who
with some of the other servants was looking on, and who stepped forward
to interfere.
“Take it up for her, Joe; can’t you?” said this person.
“What’s the good?” replied the man. “You don’t suppose the young lady
will see such as her; do you?”
This allusion to Nancy’s doubtful character, raised a vast quantity of
chaste wrath in the bosoms of four housemaids, who remarked, with great
fervour, that the creature was a disgrace to her sex; and strongly
advocated her being thrown, ruthlessly, into the kennel.
“Do what you like with me,” said the girl, turning to the men again;
“but do what I ask you first, and I ask you to give this message for
God Almighty’s sake.”
The soft-hearted cook added his intercession, and the result was that
the man who had first appeared undertook its delivery.
“What’s it to be?” said the man, with one foot on the stairs.
“That a young woman earnestly asks to speak to Miss Maylie alone,” said
Nancy; “and that if the lady will only hear the first word she has to
say, she will know whether to hear her business, or to have her turned
out of doors as an impostor.”
“I say,” said the man, “you’re coming it strong!”
“You give the message,” said the girl firmly; “and let me hear the
answer.”
The man ran upstairs. Nancy remained, pale and almost breathless,
listening with quivering lip to the very audible expressions of scorn,
of which the chaste housemaids were very prolific; and of which they
became still more so, when the man returned, and said the young woman
was to walk upstairs.
“It’s no good being proper in this world,” said the first housemaid.
“Brass can do better than the gold what has stood the fire,” said the
second.
The third contented herself with wondering “what ladies was made of”;
and the fourth took the first in a quartette of “Shameful!” with which
the Dianas concluded.
Regardless of all this: for she had weightier matters at heart: Nancy
followed the man, with trembling limbs, to a small ante-chamber,
lighted by a lamp from the ceiling. Here he left her, and retired.
CHAPTER XL.
A STRANGE INTERVIEW, WHICH IS A SEQUEL TO THE LAST CHAMBER
The girl’s life had been squandered in the streets, and among the most
noisome of the stews and dens of London, but there was something of the
woman’s original nature left in her still; and when she heard a light
step approaching the door opposite to that by which she had entered,
and thought of the wide contrast which the small room would in another
moment contain, she felt burdened with the sense of her own deep shame,
and shrunk as though she could scarcely bear the presence of her with
whom she had sought this interview.
But struggling with these better feelings was pride,—the vice of the
lowest and most debased creatures no less than of the high and
self-assured. The miserable companion of thieves and ruffians, the
fallen outcast of low haunts, the associate of the scourings of the
jails and hulks, living within the shadow of the gallows itself,—even
this degraded being felt too proud to betray a feeble gleam of the
womanly feeling which she thought a weakness, but which alone connected
her with that humanity, of which her wasting life had obliterated so
many, many traces when a very child.
She raised her eyes sufficiently to observe that the figure which
presented itself was that of a slight and beautiful girl; then, bending
them on the ground, she tossed her head with affected carelessness as
she said:
“It’s a hard matter to get to see you, lady. If I had taken offence,
and gone away, as many would have done, you’d have been sorry for it
one day, and not without reason either.”
“I am very sorry if any one has behaved harshly to you,” replied Rose.
“Do not think of that. Tell me why you wished to see me. I am the
person you inquired for.”
The kind tone of this answer, the sweet voice, the gentle manner, the
absence of any accent of haughtiness or displeasure, took the girl
completely by surprise, and she burst into tears.
“Oh, lady, lady!” she said, clasping her hands passionately before her
face, “if there was more like you, there would be fewer like me,—there
would—there would!”
“Sit down,” said Rose, earnestly. “If you are in poverty or affliction
I shall be truly glad to relieve you if I can,—I shall indeed. Sit
down.”
“Let me stand, lady,” said the girl, still weeping, “and do not speak
to me so kindly till you know me better. It is growing late. Is—is—that
door shut?”
“Yes,” said Rose, recoiling a few steps, as if to be nearer assistance
in case she should require it. “Why?”
“Because,” said the girl, “I am about to put my life and the lives of
others in your hands. I am the girl that dragged little Oliver back to
old Fagin’s on the night he went out from the house in Pentonville.”
“You!” said Rose Maylie.
“I, lady!” replied the girl. “I am the infamous creature you have heard
of, that lives among the thieves, and that never from the first moment
I can recollect my eyes and senses opening on London streets have known
any better life, or kinder words than they have given me, so help me
God! Do not mind shrinking openly from me, lady. I am younger than you
would think, to look at me, but I am well used to it. The poorest women
fall back, as I make my way along the crowded pavement.”
“What dreadful things are these!” said Rose, involuntarily falling from
her strange companion.
“Thank Heaven upon your knees, dear lady,” cried the girl, “that you
had friends to care for and keep you in your childhood, and that you
were never in the midst of cold and hunger, and riot and drunkenness,
and—and—something worse than all—as I have been from my cradle. I may
use the word, for the alley and the gutter were mine, as they will be
my deathbed.”
“I pity you!” said Rose, in a broken voice. “It wrings my heart to hear
you!”
“Heaven bless you for your goodness!” rejoined the girl. “If you knew
what I am sometimes, you would pity me, indeed. But I have stolen away
from those who would surely murder me, if they knew I had been here, to
tell you what I have overheard. Do you know a man named Monks?”
“No,” said Rose.
“He knows you,” replied the girl; “and knew you were here, for it was
by hearing him tell the place that I found you out.”
“I never heard the name,” said Rose.
“Then he goes by some other amongst us,” rejoined the girl, “which I
more than thought before. Some time ago, and soon after Oliver was put
into your house on the night of the robbery, I—suspecting this
man—listened to a conversation held between him and Fagin in the dark.
I found out, from what I heard, that Monks—the man I asked you about,
you know—”
“Yes,” said Rose, “I understand.”
“—That Monks,” pursued the girl, “had seen him accidently with two of
our boys on the day we first lost him, and had known him directly to be
the same child that he was watching for, though I couldn’t make out
why. A bargain was struck with Fagin, that if Oliver was got back he
should have a certain sum; and he was to have more for making him a
thief, which this Monks wanted for some purpose of his own.”
“For what purpose?” asked Rose.
“He caught sight of my shadow on the wall as I listened, in the hope of
finding out,” said the girl; “and there are not many people besides me
that could have got out of their way in time to escape discovery. But I
did; and I saw him no more till last night.”
“And what occurred then?”
“I’ll tell you, lady. Last night he came again. Again they went
upstairs, and I, wrapping myself up so that my shadow would not betray
me, again listened at the door. The first words I heard Monks say were
these: ‘So the only proofs of the boy’s identity lie at the bottom of
the river, and the old hag that received them from the mother is
rotting in her coffin.’ They laughed, and talked of his success in
doing this; and Monks, talking on about the boy, and getting very wild,
said that though he had got the young devil’s money safely now, he’d
rather have had it the other way; for, what a game it would have been
to have brought down the boast of the father’s will, by driving him
through every jail in town, and then hauling him up for some capital
felony which Fagin could easily manage, after having made a good profit
of him besides.”
“What is all this!” said Rose.
“The truth, lady, though it comes from my lips,” replied the girl.
“Then, he said, with oaths common enough in my ears, but strange to
yours, that if he could gratify his hatred by taking the boy’s life
without bringing his own neck in danger, he would; but, as he couldn’t,
he’d be upon the watch to meet him at every turn in life; and if he
took advantage of his birth and history, he might harm him yet. ‘In
short, Fagin,’ he says, ‘Jew as you are, you never laid such snares as
I’ll contrive for my young brother, Oliver.’”
“His brother!” exclaimed Rose.
“Those were his words,” said Nancy, glancing uneasily round, as she had
scarcely ceased to do, since she began to speak, for a vision of Sikes
haunted her perpetually. “And more. When he spoke of you and the other
lady, and said it seemed contrived by Heaven, or the devil, against
him, that Oliver should come into your hands, he laughed, and said
there was some comfort in that too, for how many thousands and hundreds
of thousands of pounds would you not give, if you had them, to know who
your two-legged spaniel was.”
“You do not mean,” said Rose, turning very pale, “to tell me that this
was said in earnest?”
“He spoke in hard and angry earnest, if a man ever did,” replied the
girl, shaking her head. “He is an earnest man when his hatred is up. I
know many who do worse things; but I’d rather listen to them all a
dozen times, than to that Monks once. It is growing late, and I have to
reach home without suspicion of having been on such an errand as this.
I must get back quickly.”
“But what can I do?” said Rose. “To what use can I turn this
communication without you? Back! Why do you wish to return to
companions you paint in such terrible colors? If you repeat this
information to a gentleman whom I can summon in an instant from the
next room, you can be consigned to some place of safety without half an
hour’s delay.”
“I wish to go back,” said the girl. “I must go back, because—how can I
tell such things to an innocent lady like you?—because among the men I
have told you of, there is one: the most desperate among them all; that
I can’t leave: no, not even to be saved from the life I am leading
now.”