Oliver Twist, Charles Dickens [first ebook reader .txt] 📗

bag, told out twenty-five sovereigns on the table, and pushed them over to the woman.

“Now,” he said, “gather them up; and when this cursed peal of thunder, which I feel is coming up to break over the housetop, is gone, let’s hear your story.”

The thunder, which seemed in fact much nearer, and to shiver and break almost over their heads, having subsided, Monks, raising his face from the table, bent forward to listen to what the woman should say. The faces of the three nearly touched, as the two men leant over the small table in their eagerness to hear, and the woman also leant forward to render her whisper audible. The sickly rays of the suspended lantern falling directly upon them, aggravated the paleness and anxiety of their countenances: which, encircled by the deepest gloom and darkness, looked ghastly in the extreme.

“When this woman, that we called old Sally, died,” the matron began, “she and I were alone.”

“Was there no one by?” asked Monks, in the same hollow whisper; “No sick wretch or idiot in some other bed? No one who could hear, and might, by possibility, understand?”

“Not a soul,” replied the woman; “we were alone. I stood alone beside the body when death came over it.”

“Good,” said Monks, regarding her attentively. “Go on.”

“She spoke of a young creature,” resumed the matron, “who had brought a child into the world some years before; not merely in the same room, but in the same bed, in which she then lay dying.”

“Ay?” said Monks, with quivering lip, and glancing over his shoulder, “Blood! How things come about!”

“The child was the one you named to him last night,” said the matron, nodding carelessly towards her husband; “the mother this nurse had robbed.”

“In life?” asked Monks.

“In death,” replied the woman, with something like a shudder. “She stole from the corpse, when it had hardly turned to one, that which the dead mother had prayed her, with her last breath, to keep for the infant’s sake.”

“She sold it,” cried Monks, with desperate eagerness; “did she sell it? Where? When? To whom? How long before?”

“As she told me, with great difficulty, that she had done this,” said the matron, “she fell back and died.”

“Without saying more?” cried Monks, in a voice which, from its very suppression, seemed only the more furious. “It’s a lie! I’ll not be played with. She said more. I’ll tear the life out of you both, but I’ll know what it was.”

“She didn’t utter another word,” said the woman, to all appearance unmoved (as Mr. Bumble was very far from being) by the strange man’s violence; “but she clutched my gown, violently, with one hand, which was partly closed; and when I saw that she was dead, and so removed the hand by force, I found it clasped a scrap of dirty paper.”

“Which contained⁠—” interposed Monks, stretching forward.

“Nothing,” replied the woman; “it was a pawnbroker’s duplicate.”

“For what?” demanded Monks.

“In good time I’ll tell you.” said the woman. “I judge that she had kept the trinket, for some time, in the hope of turning it to better account; and then had pawned it; and had saved or scraped together money to pay the pawnbroker’s interest year by year, and prevent its running out; so that if anything came of it, it could still be redeemed. Nothing had come of it; and, as I tell you, she died with the scrap of paper, all worn and tattered, in her hand. The time was out in two days; I thought something might one day come of it too; and so redeemed the pledge.”

“Where is it now?” asked Monks quickly.

“There,” replied the woman. And, as if glad to be relieved of it, she hastily threw upon the table a small kid bag scarcely large enough for a French watch, which Monks pouncing upon, tore open with trembling hands. It contained a little gold locket: in which were two locks of hair, and a plain gold wedding-ring.

“It has the word ‘Agnes’ engraved on the inside,” said the woman.

“There is a blank left for the surname; and then follows the date; which is within a year before the child was born. I found out that.”

“And this is all?” said Monks, after a close and eager scrutiny of the contents of the little packet.

“All,” replied the woman.

Mr. Bumble drew a long breath, as if he were glad to find that the story was over, and no mention made of taking the five-and-twenty pounds back again; and now he took courage to wipe the perspiration which had been trickling over his nose, unchecked, during the whole of the previous dialogue.

“I know nothing of the story, beyond what I can guess at,” said his wife addressing Monks, after a short silence; “and I want to know nothing; for it’s safer not. But I may ask you two questions, may I?”

“You may ask,” said Monks, with some show of surprise; “but whether I answer or not is another question.”

“⁠—Which makes three,” observed Mr. Bumble, essaying a stroke of facetiousness.

“Is that what you expected to get from me?” demanded the matron.

“It is,” replied Monks. “The other question?”

“What do you propose to do with it? Can it be used against me?”

“Never,” rejoined Monks; “nor against me either. See here! But don’t move a step forward, or your life is not worth a bulrush.”

With these words, he suddenly wheeled the table aside, and pulling an iron ring in the boarding, threw back a large trap-door which opened close at Mr. Bumble’s feet, and caused that gentleman to retire several paces backward, with great precipitation.

“Look down,” said Monks, lowering the lantern into the gulf. “Don’t fear me. I could have let you down, quietly enough, when you were seated over it, if that had been my game.”

Thus encouraged, the matron drew near to the brink; and even Mr. Bumble himself, impelled by curiosity, ventured to do the same. The turbid water, swollen by the heavy rain, was rushing rapidly on below; and all other sounds were lost in the noise