The Pickwick Papers
forgotten it.’
The old man looked round the table, and leered more horribly than ever,
as if in triumph, at the attention which was depicted in every face.
Then rubbing his chin with his hand, and looking up to the ceiling as if
to recall the circumstances to his memory, he began as follows:--
THE OLD MAN’S TALE ABOUT THE QUEER CLIENT
‘It matters little,’ said the old man, ‘where, or how, I picked up this
brief history. If I were to relate it in the order in which it reached
me, I should commence in the middle, and when I had arrived at the
conclusion, go back for a beginning. It is enough for me to say that
some of its circumstances passed before my own eyes; for the remainder I
know them to have happened, and there are some persons yet living, who
will remember them but too well.
‘In the Borough High Street, near St. George’s Church, and on the same
side of the way, stands, as most people know, the smallest of our
debtors’ prisons, the Marshalsea. Although in later times it has been a
very different place from the sink of filth and dirt it once was, even
its improved condition holds out but little temptation to the
extravagant, or consolation to the improvident. The condemned felon has
as good a yard for air and exercise in Newgate, as the insolvent debtor
in the Marshalsea Prison. [Better. But this is past, in a better age,
and the prison exists no longer.]
‘It may be my fancy, or it may be that I cannot separate the place from
the old recollections associated with it, but this part of London I
cannot bear. The street is broad, the shops are spacious, the noise of
passing vehicles, the footsteps of a perpetual stream of people--all the
busy sounds of traffic, resound in it from morn to midnight; but the
streets around are mean and close; poverty and debauchery lie festering
in the crowded alleys; want and misfortune are pent up in the narrow
prison; an air of gloom and dreariness seems, in my eyes at least, to
hang about the scene, and to impart to it a squalid and sickly hue.
‘Many eyes, that have long since been closed in the grave, have looked
round upon that scene lightly enough, when entering the gate of the old
Marshalsea Prison for the first time; for despair seldom comes with the
first severe shock of misfortune. A man has confidence in untried
friends, he remembers the many offers of service so freely made by his
boon companions when he wanted them not; he has hope--the hope of happy
inexperience--and however he may bend beneath the first shock, it
springs up in his bosom, and flourishes there for a brief space, until
it droops beneath the blight of disappointment and neglect. How soon
have those same eyes, deeply sunken in the head, glared from faces
wasted with famine, and sallow from confinement, in days when it was no
figure of speech to say that debtors rotted in prison, with no hope of
release, and no prospect of liberty! The atrocity in its full extent no
longer exists, but there is enough of it left to give rise to
occurrences that make the heart bleed.
‘Twenty years ago, that pavement was worn with the footsteps of a mother
and child, who, day by day, so surely as the morning came, presented
themselves at the prison gate; often after a night of restless misery
and anxious thoughts, were they there, a full hour too soon, and then
the young mother turning meekly away, would lead the child to the old
bridge, and raising him in her arms to show him the glistening water,
tinted with the light of the morning’s sun, and stirring with all the
bustling preparations for business and pleasure that the river presented
at that early hour, endeavour to interest his thoughts in the objects
before him. But she would quickly set him down, and hiding her face in
her shawl, give vent to the tears that blinded her; for no expression of
interest or amusement lighted up his thin and sickly face. His
recollections were few enough, but they were all of one kind--all
connected with the poverty and misery of his parents. Hour after hour
had he sat on his mother’s knee, and with childish sympathy watched the
tears that stole down her face, and then crept quietly away into some
dark corner, and sobbed himself to sleep. The hard realities of the
world, with many of its worst privations--hunger and thirst, and cold
and want--had all come home to him, from the first dawnings of reason;
and though the form of childhood was there, its light heart, its merry
laugh, and sparkling eyes were wanting.
‘The father and mother looked on upon this, and upon each other, with
thoughts of agony they dared not breathe in words. The healthy, strong-
made man, who could have borne almost any fatigue of active exertion,
was wasting beneath the close confinement and unhealthy atmosphere of a
crowded prison. The slight and delicate woman was sinking beneath the
combined effects of bodily and mental illness. The child’s young heart
was breaking.
‘Winter came, and with it weeks of cold and heavy rain. The poor girl
had removed to a wretched apartment close to the spot of her husband’s
imprisonment; and though the change had been rendered necessary by their
increasing poverty, she was happier now, for she was nearer him. For two
months, she and her little companion watched the opening of the gate as
usual. One day she failed to come, for the first time. Another morning
arrived, and she came alone. The child was dead.
‘They little know, who coldly talk of the poor man’s bereavements, as a
happy release from pain to the departed, and a merciful relief from
expense to the survivor--they little know, I say, what the agony of
those bereavements is. A silent look of affection and regard when all
other eyes are turned coldly away--the consciousness that we possess the
sympathy and affection of one being when all others have deserted us--is
a hold, a stay, a comfort, in the deepest affliction, which no wealth
could purchase, or power bestow. The child had sat at his parents’ feet
for hours together, with his little hands patiently folded in each
other, and his thin wan face raised towards them. They had seen him pine
away, from day to day; and though his brief existence had been a joyless
one, and he was now removed to that peace and rest which, child as he
was, he had never known in this world, they were his parents, and his
loss sank deep into their souls.
‘It was plain to those who looked upon the mother’s altered face, that
death must soon close the scene of her adversity and trial. Her
husband’s fellow-prisoners shrank from obtruding on his grief and
misery, and left to himself alone, the small room he had previously
occupied in common with two companions. She shared it with him; and
lingering on without pain, but without hope, her life ebbed slowly away.
‘She had fainted one evening in her husband’s arms, and he had borne her
to the open window, to revive her with the air, when the light of the
moon falling full upon her face, showed him a change upon her features,
which made him stagger beneath her weight, like a helpless infant.
‘“Set me down, George,” she said faintly. He did so, and seating himself
beside her, covered his face with his hands, and burst into tears.
‘“It is very hard to leave you, George,” she said; “but it is God’s
will, and you must bear it for my sake. Oh! how I thank Him for having
taken our boy! He is happy, and in heaven now. What would he have done
here, without his mother!”
‘“You shall not die, Mary, you shall not die;” said the husband,
starting up. He paced hurriedly to and fro, striking his head with his
clenched fists; then reseating himself beside her, and supporting her in
his arms, added more calmly, “Rouse yourself, my dear girl. Pray, pray
do. You will revive yet.”
‘“Never again, George; never again,” said the dying woman. “Let them lay
me by my poor boy now, but promise me, that if ever you leave this
dreadful place, and should grow rich, you will have us removed to some
quiet country churchyard, a long, long way off--very far from here--
where we can rest in peace. Dear George, promise me you will.”
‘“I do, I do,” said the man, throwing himself passionately on his knees
before her. “Speak to me, Mary, another word; one look--but one!”
‘He ceased to speak: for the arm that clasped his neck grew stiff and
heavy. A deep sigh escaped from the wasted form before him; the lips
moved, and a smile played upon the face; but the lips were pallid, and
the smile faded into a rigid and ghastly stare. He was alone in the
world.
‘That night, in the silence and desolation of his miserable room, the
wretched man knelt down by the dead body of his wife, and called on God
to witness a terrible oath, that from that hour, he devoted himself to
revenge her death and that of his child; that thenceforth to the last
moment of his life, his whole energies should be directed to this one
object; that his revenge should be protracted and terrible; that his
hatred should be undying and inextinguishable; and should hunt its
object through the world.
‘The deepest despair, and passion scarcely human, had made such fierce
ravages on his face and form, in that one night, that his companions in
misfortune shrank affrighted from him as he passed by. His eyes were
bloodshot and heavy, his face a deadly white, and his body bent as if
with age. He had bitten his under lip nearly through in the violence of
his mental suffering, and the blood which had flowed from the wound had
trickled down his chin, and stained his shirt and neckerchief. No tear,
or sound of complaint escaped him; but the unsettled look, and
disordered haste with which he paced up and down the yard, denoted the
fever which was burning within.
‘It was necessary that his wife’s body should be removed from the
prison, without delay. He received the communication with perfect
calmness, and acquiesced in its propriety. Nearly all the inmates of the
prison had assembled to witness its removal; they fell back on either
side when the widower appeared; he walked hurriedly forward, and
stationed himself, alone, in a little railed area close to the lodge
gate, from whence the crowd, with an instinctive feeling of delicacy,
had retired. The rude coffin was borne slowly forward on men’s
shoulders. A dead silence pervaded the throng, broken only by the
audible lamentations of the women, and the shuffling steps of the
bearers on the stone pavement. They reached the spot where the bereaved
husband stood: and stopped. He laid his hand upon the coffin, and
mechanically adjusting the pall with which it was covered, motioned them
onward. The turnkeys in the prison lobby took off their hats as it
passed through, and in another moment the heavy gate closed behind it.
He looked vacantly upon the crowd, and fell heavily to the ground.
‘Although for many weeks after this, he was watched, night and day, in
the wildest ravings of fever, neither the consciousness of his loss, nor
the recollection of the vow he had made, ever left him for a moment.
Scenes changed before his eyes, place succeeded place, and event
followed event, in all the hurry of delirium; but they were all
connected in some way with the great object of his mind. He was sailing
over a boundless expanse of sea, with a blood-red sky above, and the
angry waters, lashed into fury beneath, boiling and eddying up, on every
side. There was another vessel before them, toiling and labouring in the
howling storm; her canvas fluttering in ribbons from the mast, and her
deck thronged with figures who were lashed to the sides, over which huge
waves every instant burst, sweeping away some devoted creatures into the
foaming sea. Onward they bore, amidst the roaring mass of water, with a
speed and force which nothing could resist; and striking the stem of the