Oliver Twist
although for aught he knew, it would be quite strange to your ears.
When he was rescued by me, then, and lay recovering from sickness in my
house, his strong resemblance to this picture I have spoken of, struck
me with astonishment. Even when I first saw him in all his dirt and
misery, there was a lingering expression in his face that came upon me
like a glimpse of some old friend flashing on one in a vivid dream. I
need not tell you he was snared away before I knew his history—”
“Why not?” asked Monks hastily.
“Because you know it well.”
“I!”
“Denial to me is vain,” replied Mr. Brownlow. “I shall show you that I
know more than that.”
“You—you—can’t prove anything against me,” stammered Monks. “I defy you
to do it!”
“We shall see,” returned the old gentleman with a searching glance. “I
lost the boy, and no efforts of mine could recover him. Your mother
being dead, I knew that you alone could solve the mystery if anybody
could, and as when I had last heard of you you were on your own estate
in the West Indies—whither, as you well know, you retired upon your
mother’s death to escape the consequences of vicious courses here—I
made the voyage. You had left it, months before, and were supposed to
be in London, but no one could tell where. I returned. Your agents had
no clue to your residence. You came and went, they said, as strangely
as you had ever done: sometimes for days together and sometimes not for
months: keeping to all appearance the same low haunts and mingling with
the same infamous herd who had been your associates when a fierce
ungovernable boy. I wearied them with new applications. I paced the
streets by night and day, but until two hours ago, all my efforts were
fruitless, and I never saw you for an instant.”
“And now you do see me,” said Monks, rising boldly, “what then? Fraud
and robbery are high-sounding words—justified, you think, by a fancied
resemblance in some young imp to an idle daub of a dead man’s Brother!
You don’t even know that a child was born of this maudlin pair; you
don’t even know that.”
“I _did not_,” replied Mr. Brownlow, rising too; “but within the last
fortnight I have learnt it all. You have a brother; you know it, and
him. There was a will, which your mother destroyed, leaving the secret
and the gain to you at her own death. It contained a reference to some
child likely to be the result of this sad connection, which child was
born, and accidentally encountered by you, when your suspicions were
first awakened by his resemblance to your father. You repaired to the
place of his birth. There existed proofs—proofs long suppressed—of his
birth and parentage. Those proofs were destroyed by you, and now, in
your own words to your accomplice the Jew, ‘_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_.’ Unworthy son,
coward, liar,—you, who hold your councils with thieves and murderers in
dark rooms at night,—you, whose plots and wiles have brought a violent
death upon the head of one worth millions such as you,—you, who from
your cradle were gall and bitterness to your own father’s heart, and in
whom all evil passions, vice, and profligacy, festered, till they found
a vent in a hideous disease which had made your face an index even to
your mind—you, Edward Leeford, do you still brave me!”
“No, no, no!” returned the coward, overwhelmed by these accumulated
charges.
“Every word!” cried the gentleman, “every word that has passed between
you and this detested villain, is known to me. Shadows on the wall have
caught your whispers, and brought them to my ear; the sight of the
persecuted child has turned vice itself, and given it the courage and
almost the attributes of virtue. Murder has been done, to which you
were morally if not really a party.”
“No, no,” interposed Monks. “I—I knew nothing of that; I was going to
inquire the truth of the story when you overtook me. I didn’t know the
cause. I thought it was a common quarrel.”
“It was the partial disclosure of your secrets,” replied Mr. Brownlow.
“Will you disclose the whole?”
“Yes, I will.”
“Set your hand to a statement of truth and facts, and repeat it before
witnesses?”
“That I promise too.”
“Remain quietly here, until such a document is drawn up, and proceed
with me to such a place as I may deem most advisable, for the purpose
of attesting it?”
“If you insist upon that, I’ll do that also,” replied Monks.
“You must do more than that,” said Mr. Brownlow. “Make restitution to
an innocent and unoffending child, for such he is, although the
offspring of a guilty and most miserable love. You have not forgotten
the provisions of the will. Carry them into execution so far as your
brother is concerned, and then go where you please. In this world you
need meet no more.”
While Monks was pacing up and down, meditating with dark and evil looks
on this proposal and the possibilities of evading it: torn by his fears
on the one hand and his hatred on the other: the door was hurriedly
unlocked, and a gentleman (Mr. Losberne) entered the room in violent
agitation.
“The man will be taken,” he cried. “He will be taken tonight!”
“The murderer?” asked Mr. Brownlow.
“Yes, yes,” replied the other. “His dog has been seen lurking about
some old haunt, and there seems little doubt that his master either is,
or will be, there, under cover of the darkness. Spies are hovering
about in every direction. I have spoken to the men who are charged with
his capture, and they tell me he cannot escape. A reward of a hundred
pounds is proclaimed by Government tonight.”
“I will give fifty more,” said Mr. Brownlow, “and proclaim it with my
own lips upon the spot, if I can reach it. Where is Mr. Maylie?”
“Harry? As soon as he had seen your friend here, safe in a coach with
you, he hurried off to where he heard this,” replied the doctor, “and
mounting his horse sallied forth to join the first party at some place
in the outskirts agreed upon between them.”
“Fagin,” said Mr. Brownlow; “what of him?”
“When I last heard, he had not been taken, but he will be, or is, by
this time. They’re sure of him.”
“Have you made up your mind?” asked Mr. Brownlow, in a low voice, of
Monks.
“Yes,” he replied. “You—you—will be secret with me?”
“I will. Remain here till I return. It is your only hope of safety.”
They left the room, and the door was again locked.
“What have you done?” asked the doctor in a whisper.
“All that I could hope to do, and even more. Coupling the poor girl’s
intelligence with my previous knowledge, and the result of our good
friend’s inquiries on the spot, I left him no loophole of escape, and
laid bare the whole villainy which by these lights became plain as day.
Write and appoint the evening after tomorrow, at seven, for the
meeting. We shall be down there, a few hours before, but shall require
rest: especially the young lady, who _may_ have greater need of
firmness than either you or I can quite foresee just now. But my blood
boils to avenge this poor murdered creature. Which way have they
taken?”
“Drive straight to the office and you will be in time,” replied Mr.
Losberne. “I will remain here.”
The two gentlemen hastily separated; each in a fever of excitement
wholly uncontrollable.
CHAPTER L.
THE PURSUIT AND ESCAPE
Near to that part of the Thames on which the church at Rotherhithe
abuts, where the buildings on the banks are dirtiest and the vessels on
the river blackest with the dust of colliers and the smoke of
close-built low-roofed houses, there exists the filthiest, the
strangest, the most extraordinary of the many localities that are
hidden in London, wholly unknown, even by name, to the great mass of
its inhabitants.
To reach this place, the visitor has to penetrate through a maze of
close, narrow, and muddy streets, thronged by the roughest and poorest
of waterside people, and devoted to the traffic they may be supposed to
occasion. The cheapest and least delicate provisions are heaped in the
shops; the coarsest and commonest articles of wearing apparel dangle at
the salesman’s door, and stream from the house-parapet and windows.
Jostling with unemployed labourers of the lowest class,
ballast-heavers, coal-whippers, brazen women, ragged children, and the
raff and refuse of the river, he makes his way with difficulty along,
assailed by offensive sights and smells from the narrow alleys which
branch off on the right and left, and deafened by the clash of
ponderous waggons that bear great piles of merchandise from the stacks
of warehouses that rise from every corner. Arriving, at length, in
streets remoter and less-frequented than those through which he has
passed, he walks beneath tottering house-fronts projecting over the
pavement, dismantled walls that seem to totter as he passes, chimneys
half crushed half hesitating to fall, windows guarded by rusty iron
bars that time and dirt have almost eaten away, every imaginable sign
of desolation and neglect.
In such a neighborhood, beyond Dockhead in the Borough of Southwark,
stands Jacob’s Island, surrounded by a muddy ditch, six or eight feet
deep and fifteen or twenty wide when the tide is in, once called Mill
Pond, but known in the days of this story as Folly Ditch. It is a creek
or inlet from the Thames, and can always be filled at high water by
opening the sluices at the Lead Mills from which it took its old name.
At such times, a stranger, looking from one of the wooden bridges
thrown across it at Mill Lane, will see the inhabitants of the houses
on either side lowering from their back doors and windows, buckets,
pails, domestic utensils of all kinds, in which to haul the water up;
and when his eye is turned from these operations to the houses
themselves, his utmost astonishment will be excited by the scene before
him. Crazy wooden galleries common to the backs of half a dozen houses,
with holes from which to look upon the slime beneath; windows, broken
and patched, with poles thrust out, on which to dry the linen that is
never there; rooms so small, so filthy, so confined, that the air would
seem too tainted even for the dirt and squalor which they shelter;
wooden chambers thrusting themselves out above the mud, and threatening
to fall into it—as some have done; dirt-besmeared walls and decaying
foundations; every repulsive lineament of poverty, every loathsome
indication of filth, rot, and garbage; all these ornament the banks of
Folly Ditch.
In Jacob’s Island, the warehouses are roofless and empty; the walls are
crumbling down; the windows are windows no more; the doors are falling
into the streets; the chimneys are blackened, but they yield no smoke.
Thirty or forty years ago, before losses and chancery suits came upon
it, it was a thriving place; but now it is a desolate island indeed.
The houses have no owners; they are broken open, and entered upon by
those who have the courage; and there they live, and there they die.
They must have powerful motives for a secret residence, or be reduced
to a destitute condition indeed, who seek a refuge in Jacob’s Island.
In an upper room of one of these houses—a detached house of fair size,
ruinous in other respects, but strongly defended at door and window: of
which house the back commanded the ditch in manner already
described—there were assembled three men, who, regarding each other
every now and then with looks expressive of perplexity and expectation,
sat for some time in profound and gloomy silence. One of these was Toby
Crackit, another Mr. Chitling, and the third a robber of fifty years,
whose nose had been almost beaten in, in some old scuffle, and whose
face bore a frightful scar which might probably be traced to the same