Oliver Twist
“Damn you!” cried the desperate ruffian, throwing up the sash and
menacing the crowd. “Do your worst! I’ll cheat you yet!”
Of all the terrific yells that ever fell on mortal ears, none could
exceed the cry of the infuriated throng. Some shouted to those who were
nearest to set the house on fire; others roared to the officers to
shoot him dead. Among them all, none showed such fury as the man on
horseback, who, throwing himself out of the saddle, and bursting
through the crowd as if he were parting water, cried, beneath the
window, in a voice that rose above all others, “Twenty guineas to the
man who brings a ladder!”
The nearest voices took up the cry, and hundreds echoed it. Some called
for ladders, some for sledge-hammers; some ran with torches to and fro
as if to seek them, and still came back and roared again; some spent
their breath in impotent curses and execrations; some pressed forward
with the ecstasy of madmen, and thus impeded the progress of those
below; some among the boldest attempted to climb up by the water-spout
and crevices in the wall; and all waved to and fro, in the darkness
beneath, like a field of corn moved by an angry wind: and joined from
time to time in one loud furious roar.
“The tide,” cried the murderer, as he staggered back into the room, and
shut the faces out, “the tide was in as I came up. Give me a rope, a
long rope. They’re all in front. I may drop into the Folly Ditch, and
clear off that way. Give me a rope, or I shall do three more murders
and kill myself.”
The panic-stricken men pointed to where such articles were kept; the
murderer, hastily selecting the longest and strongest cord, hurried up
to the house-top.
All the windows in the rear of the house had been long ago bricked up,
except one small trap in the room where the boy was locked, and that
was too small even for the passage of his body. But, from this
aperture, he had never ceased to call on those without, to guard the
back; and thus, when the murderer emerged at last on the house-top by
the door in the roof, a loud shout proclaimed the fact to those in
front, who immediately began to pour round, pressing upon each other in
an unbroken stream.
He planted a board, which he had carried up with him for the purpose,
so firmly against the door that it must be matter of great difficulty
to open it from the inside; and creeping over the tiles, looked over
the low parapet.
The water was out, and the ditch a bed of mud.
The crowd had been hushed during these few moments, watching his
motions and doubtful of his purpose, but the instant they perceived it
and knew it was defeated, they raised a cry of triumphant execration to
which all their previous shouting had been whispers. Again and again it
rose. Those who were at too great a distance to know its meaning, took
up the sound; it echoed and re-echoed; it seemed as though the whole
city had poured its population out to curse him.
On pressed the people from the front—on, on, on, in a strong struggling
current of angry faces, with here and there a glaring torch to lighten
them up, and show them out in all their wrath and passion. The houses
on the opposite side of the ditch had been entered by the mob; sashes
were thrown up, or torn bodily out; there were tiers and tiers of faces
in every window; cluster upon cluster of people clinging to every
house-top. Each little bridge (and there were three in sight) bent
beneath the weight of the crowd upon it. Still the current poured on to
find some nook or hole from which to vent their shouts, and only for an
instant see the wretch.
“They have him now,” cried a man on the nearest bridge. “Hurrah!”
The crowd grew light with uncovered heads; and again the shout uprose.
“I will give fifty pounds,” cried an old gentleman from the same
quarter, “to the man who takes him alive. I will remain here, till he
come to ask me for it.”
There was another roar. At this moment the word was passed among the
crowd that the door was forced at last, and that he who had first
called for the ladder had mounted into the room. The stream abruptly
turned, as this intelligence ran from mouth to mouth; and the people at
the windows, seeing those upon the bridges pouring back, quitted their
stations, and running into the street, joined the concourse that now
thronged pell-mell to the spot they had left: each man crushing and
striving with his neighbor, and all panting with impatience to get near
the door, and look upon the criminal as the officers brought him out.
The cries and shrieks of those who were pressed almost to suffocation,
or trampled down and trodden under foot in the confusion, were
dreadful; the narrow ways were completely blocked up; and at this time,
between the rush of some to regain the space in front of the house, and
the unavailing struggles of others to extricate themselves from the
mass, the immediate attention was distracted from the murderer,
although the universal eagerness for his capture was, if possible,
increased.
The man had shrunk down, thoroughly quelled by the ferocity of the
crowd, and the impossibility of escape; but seeing this sudden change
with no less rapidity than it had occurred, he sprang upon his feet,
determined to make one last effort for his life by dropping into the
ditch, and, at the risk of being stifled, endeavouring to creep away in
the darkness and confusion.
Roused into new strength and energy, and stimulated by the noise within
the house which announced that an entrance had really been effected, he
set his foot against the stack of chimneys, fastened one end of the
rope tightly and firmly round it, and with the other made a strong
running noose by the aid of his hands and teeth almost in a second. He
could let himself down by the cord to within a less distance of the
ground than his own height, and had his knife ready in his hand to cut
it then and drop.
At the very instant when he brought the loop over his head previous to
slipping it beneath his arm-pits, and when the old gentleman
before-mentioned (who had clung so tight to the railing of the bridge
as to resist the force of the crowd, and retain his position) earnestly
warned those about him that the man was about to lower himself down—at
that very instant the murderer, looking behind him on the roof, threw
his arms above his head, and uttered a yell of terror.
“The eyes again!” he cried in an unearthly screech.
Staggering as if struck by lightning, he lost his balance and tumbled
over the parapet. The noose was on his neck. It ran up with his weight,
tight as a bow-string, and swift as the arrow it speeds. He fell for
five-and-thirty feet. There was a sudden jerk, a terrific convulsion of
the limbs; and there he hung, with the open knife clenched in his
stiffening hand.
The old chimney quivered with the shock, but stood it bravely. The
murderer swung lifeless against the wall; and the boy, thrusting aside
the dangling body which obscured his view, called to the people to come
and take him out, for God’s sake.
A dog, which had lain concealed till now, ran backwards and forwards on
the parapet with a dismal howl, and collecting himself for a spring,
jumped for the dead man’s shoulders. Missing his aim, he fell into the
ditch, turning completely over as he went; and striking his head
against a stone, dashed out his brains.
CHAPTER LI.
AFFORDING AN EXPLANATION OF MORE MYSTERIES THAN ONE, AND COMPREHENDING
A PROPOSAL OF MARRIAGE WITH NO WORD OF SETTLEMENT OR PIN-MONEY
The events narrated in the last chapter were yet but two days old, when
Oliver found himself, at three o’clock in the afternoon, in a
travelling-carriage rolling fast towards his native town. Mrs. Maylie,
and Rose, and Mrs. Bedwin, and the good doctor were with him: and Mr.
Brownlow followed in a post-chaise, accompanied by one other person
whose name had not been mentioned.
They had not talked much upon the way; for Oliver was in a flutter of
agitation and uncertainty which deprived him of the power of collecting
his thoughts, and almost of speech, and appeared to have scarcely less
effect on his companions, who shared it, in at least an equal degree.
He and the two ladies had been very carefully made acquainted by Mr.
Brownlow with the nature of the admissions which had been forced from
Monks; and although they knew that the object of their present journey
was to complete the work which had been so well begun, still the whole
matter was enveloped in enough of doubt and mystery to leave them in
endurance of the most intense suspense.
The same kind friend had, with Mr. Losberne’s assistance, cautiously
stopped all channels of communication through which they could receive
intelligence of the dreadful occurrences that had so recently taken
place. “It was quite true,” he said, “that they must know them before
long, but it might be at a better time than the present, and it could
not be at a worse.” So, they travelled on in silence: each busied with
reflections on the object which had brought them together: and no one
disposed to give utterance to the thoughts which crowded upon all.
But if Oliver, under these influences, had remained silent while they
journeyed towards his birth-place by a road he had never seen, how the
whole current of his recollections ran back to old times, and what a
crowd of emotions were wakened up in his breast, when they turned into
that which he had traversed on foot: a poor houseless, wandering boy,
without a friend to help him, or a roof to shelter his head.
“See there, there!” cried Oliver, eagerly clasping the hand of Rose,
and pointing out at the carriage window; “that’s the stile I came over;
there are the hedges I crept behind, for fear any one should overtake
me and force me back! Yonder is the path across the fields, leading to
the old house where I was a little child! Oh Dick, Dick, my dear old
friend, if I could only see you now!”
“You will see him soon,” replied Rose, gently taking his folded hands
between her own. “You shall tell him how happy you are, and how rich
you have grown, and that in all your happiness you have none so great
as the coming back to make him happy too.”
“Yes, yes,” said Oliver, “and we’ll—we’ll take him away from here, and
have him clothed and taught, and send him to some quiet country place
where he may grow strong and well,—shall we?”
Rose nodded “yes,” for the boy was smiling through such happy tears
that she could not speak.
“You will be kind and good to him, for you are to every one,” said
Oliver. “It will make you cry, I know, to hear what he can tell; but
never mind, never mind, it will be all over, and you will smile again—I
know that too—to think how changed he is; you did the same with me. He
said ‘God bless you’ to me when I ran away,” cried the boy with a burst
of affectionate emotion; “and I will say ‘God bless you’ now, and show
him how I love him for it!”
As they approached the town, and at length drove through its narrow
streets, it became matter of no small difficulty to restrain the boy
within reasonable bounds. There was Sowerberry’s the undertaker’s just
as it used to be, only smaller and less imposing in appearance than he
remembered it—there were all the well-known shops and houses, with
almost every one of which he had some slight incident connected—there
was Gamfield’s cart, the very cart he used to have, standing at the old
public-house door—there was the workhouse, the dreary prison of his
youthful days, with its dismal windows frowning on the street—there was
the same lean porter standing at the gate, at sight of whom Oliver
involuntarily shrunk back, and then laughed at himself for being so
foolish, then cried, then laughed again—there were scores of faces at