CHAPTER FORTY-SEVEN

________________________________________________
_ CONCLUSION OF THE ENTERPRISE OF MR JONAS AND HIS FRIEND

 

Did no men passing through the dim streets shrink without knowing

why, when he came stealing up behind them? As he glided on, had no

child in its sleep an indistinct perception of a guilty shadow

falling on its bed, that troubled its innocent rest? Did no dog

howl, and strive to break its rattling chain, that it might tear

him; no burrowing rat, scenting the work he had in hand, essay to

gnaw a passage after him, that it might hold a greedy revel at the

feast of his providing? When he looked back, across his shoulder,

was it to see if his quick footsteps still fell dry upon the dusty

pavement, or were already moist and clogged with the red mire that

stained the naked feet of Cain!

 

He shaped his course for the main western road, and soon reached it;

riding a part of the way, then alighting and walking on again. He

travelled for a considerable distance upon the roof of a stage-

coach, which came up while he was afoot; and when it turned out of

his road, bribed the driver of a return post-chaise to take him on

with him; and then made across the country at a run, and saved a

mile or two before he struck again into the road. At last, as his

plan was, he came up with a certain lumbering, slow, night-coach,

which stopped wherever it could, and was stopping then at a public-

house, while the guard and coachman ate and drank within.

 

He bargained for a seat outside this coach, and took it. And he

quitted it no more until it was within a few miles of its

destination, but occupied the same place all night.

 

All night! It is a common fancy that nature seems to sleep by night.

It is a false fancy, as who should know better than he?

 

The fishes slumbered in the cold, bright, glistening streams and

rivers, perhaps; and the birds roosted on the branches of the trees;

and in their stalls and pastures beasts were quiet; and human

creatures slept. But what of that, when the solemn night was

watching, when it never winked, when its darkness watched no less

than its light! The stately trees, the moon and shining stars, the

softly stirring wind, the over-shadowed lane, the broad, bright

countryside, they all kept watch. There was not a blade of growing

grass or corn, but watched; and the quieter it was, the more intent

and fixed its watch upon him seemed to be.

 

And yet he slept. Riding on among those sentinels of God, he slept,

and did not change the purpose of his journey. If he forgot it in

his troubled dreams, it came up steadily, and woke him. But it

never woke him to remorse, or to abandonment of his design.

 

He dreamed at one time that he was lying calmly in his bed, thinking

of a moonlight night and the noise of wheels, when the old clerk put

his head in at the door, and beckoned him. At this signal he arose

immediately--being already dressed in the clothes he actually wore

at that time--and accompanied him into a strange city, where the

names of the streets were written on the walls in characters quite

new to him; which gave him no surprise or uneasiness, for he

remembered in his dream to have been there before. Although these

streets were very precipitous, insomuch that to get from one to

another it was necessary to descend great heights by ladders that

were too short, and ropes that moved deep bells, and swung and

swayed as they were clung to, the danger gave him little emotion

beyond the first thrill of terror; his anxieties being concentrated

on his dress which was quite unfitted for some festival that was

about to be holden there, and in which he had come to take a part.

Already, great crowds began to fill the streets, and in one

direction myriads of people came rushing down an interminable

perspective, strewing flowers and making way for others on white

horses, when a terrible figure started from the throng, and cried

out that it was the Last Day for all the world. The cry being

spread, there was a wild hurrying on to Judgment; and the press

became so great that he and his companion (who was constantly

changing, and was never the same man two minutes together, though he

never saw one man come or another go), stood aside in a porch,

fearfully surveying the multitude; in which there were many faces

that he knew, and many that he did not know, but dreamed he did;

when all at once a struggling head rose up among the rest--livid and

deadly, but the same as he had known it--and denounced him as having

appointed that direful day to happen. They closed together. As he

strove to free the hand in which he held a club, and strike the blow

he had so often thought of, he started to the knowledge of his

waking purpose and the rising of the sun.

 

The sun was welcome to him. There were life and motion, and a world

astir, to divide the attention of Day. It was the eye of Night--of

wakeful, watchful, silent, and attentive Night, with so much leisure

for the observation of his wicked thoughts--that he dreaded most.

There is no glare in the night. Even Glory shows to small advantage

in the night, upon a crowded battle-field. How then shows Glory's

blood-relation, bastard Murder!

 

Aye! He made no compromise, and held no secret with himself now.

Murder. He had come to do it.

 

'Let me get down here' he said

 

'Short of the town, eh!' observed the coachman.

 

'I may get down where I please, I suppose?'

 

'You got up to please yourself, and may get down to please yourself.

It won't break our hearts to lose you, and it wouldn't have broken

'em if we'd never found you. Be a little quicker. That's all.'

 

The guard had alighted, and was waiting in the road to take his

money. In the jealousy and distrust of what he contemplated, he

thought this man looked at him with more than common curiosity

 

'What are you staring at?' said Jonas.

 

'Not at a handsome man,' returned the guard. 'If you want your

fortune told, I'll tell you a bit of it. You won't be drowned.

That's a consolation for you.'

 

Before he could retort or turn away, the coachman put an end to the

dialogue by giving him a cut with his whip, and biddig him get

out for a surly dog. The guard jumped up to his seat at the same

moment, and they drove off, laughing; leaving him to stand in the

road and shake his fist at them. He was not displeased though,

on second thoughts, to have been taken for an ill-conditioned

common country fellow; but rather congratulated himself upon it

as a proof that he was well disguised.

 

Wandering into a copse by the road-side--but not in that place; two

or three miles off--he tore out from a fence a thick, hard, knotted

stake; and, sitting down beneath a hayrick, spent some time in

shaping it, in peeling off the bark, and fashioning its jagged head

with his knife.

 

The day passed on. Noon, afternoon, evening. Sunset.

 

At that serene and peaceful time two men, riding in a gig, came out

of the city by a road not much frequented. It was the day on which

Mr Pecksniff had agreed to dine with Montague. He had kept his

appointment, and was now going home. His host was riding with him

for a short distance; meaning to return by a pleasant track, which

Mr Pecksniff had engaged to show him, through some fields. Jonas

knew their plans. He had hung about the inn-yard while they were at

dinner and had heard their orders given.

 

They were loud and merry in their conversation, and might have been

heard at some distance; far above the sound of their carriage wheels

or horses' hoofs. They came on noisily, to where a stile and

footpath indicated their point of separation. Here they stopped.

 

'It's too soon. Much too soon,' said Mr Pecksniff. 'But this is

the place, my dear sir. Keep the path, and go straight through the

little wood you'll come to. The path is narrower there, but you

can't miss it. When shall I see you again? Soon I hope?'

 

'I hope so,' replied Montague.

 

'Good night!'

 

'Good night. And a pleasant ride!'

 

So long as Mr Pecksniff was in sight, and turned his head at

intervals to salute him, Montague stood in the road smiling, and

waving his hand. But when his new partner had disappeared, and this

show was no longer necessary, he sat down on the stile with looks so

altered, that he might have grown ten years older in the meantime.

 

He was flushed with wine, but not gay. His scheme had succeeded,

but he showed no triumph. The effort of sustaining his difficult

part before his late companion had fatigued him, perhaps, or it may

be that the evening whispered to his conscience, or it may be (as it

HAS been) that a shadowy veil was dropping round him, closing out

all thoughts but the presentiment and vague foreknowledge of

impending doom.

 

If there be fluids, as we know there are, which, conscious of a

coming wind, or rain, or frost, will shrink and strive to hide

themselves in their glass arteries; may not that subtle liquor of

the blood perceive, by properties within itself, that hands are

raised to waste and spill it; and in the veins of men run cold and

dull as his did, in that hour!

 

So cold, although the air was warm; so dull, although the sky was

bright; that he rose up shivering from his seat, and hastily resumed

his walk. He checked himself as hastily; undecided whether to

pursue the footpath, which was lonely and retired, or to go back by

the road.

 

He took the footpath.

 

The glory of the departing sun was on his face. The music of the

birds was in his ears. Sweet wild flowers bloomed about him.

Thatched roofs of poor men's homes were in the distance; and an old

grey spire, surmounted by a Cross, rose up between him and the

coming night.

 

He had never read the lesson which these things conveyed; he had

ever mocked and turned away from it; but, before going down into a

hollow place, he looked round, once, upon the evening prospect,

sorrowfully. Then he went down, down, down, into the dell.

 

It brought him to the wood; a close, thick, shadowy wood, through

which the path went winding on, dwindling away into a slender sheep-

track. He paused before entering; for the stillness of this spot

almost daunted him.

 

The last rays of the sun were shining in, aslant, making a path of

golden light along the stems and branches in its range, which, even

as he looked, began to die away, yielding gently to the twilight

that came creeping on. It was so very quiet that the soft and

stealthy moss about the trunks of some old trees, seemed to have

grown out of the silence, and to be its proper offspring. Those

other trees which were subdued by blasts of wind in winter time, had

not quite tumbled down, but being caught by others, lay all bare and

scathed across their leafy arms, as if unwilling to disturb the

general repose by the crash of their fall. Vistas of silence opened

everywhere, into the heart and innermost recesses of the wood;

beginning with the likeness of an aisle, a cloister, or a ruin open

to the sky; then tangling off into a deep green rustling mystery,

through which gnarled trunks, and twisted boughs, and ivy-covered

stems, and trembling leaves, and bark-stripped bodies of old trees

stretched out at length, were faintly seen in beautiful confusion.

 

As the sunlight died away, and evening fell upon the wood, he

entered it. Moving, here and there a bramble or a drooping bough

which stretched across his path, he slowly disappeared. At

intervals a narrow opening showed him passing on, or the sharp

cracking of some tender branch denoted where he went; then, he was

seen or heard no more.

 

Never more beheld by mortal eye or heard by mortal ear; one man

excepted. That man, parting the leaves and branches on the other

side, near where the path emerged again, came leaping out soon

afterwards.

 

What had he left within the wood, that he sprang out of it as if

it were a hell!

 

The body of a murdered man. In one thick solitary spot, it lay

among the last year's leaves of oak and beech, just as it had fallen

headlong down. Sopping and soaking in among the leaves that formed

its pillow; oozing down into the boggy ground, as if to cover itself

from human sight; forcing its way between and through the curling

leaves, as if those senseless things rejected and forswore it and

were coiled up in abhorrence; went a dark, dark stain that dyed the

whole summer night from earth to heaven.

 

The doer of this deed came leaping from the wood so fiercely, that

he cast into the air a shower of fragments of young boughs, torn

away in his passage, and fell with violence upon the grass. But he

quickly gained his feet again, and keeping underneath a hedge with

his body bent, went running on towards the road. The road once

reached, he fell into a rapid walk, and set on toward London.

 

And he was not sorry for what he had done. He was frightened when

he thought of it--when did he not think of it!--but he was not

sorry. He had had a terror and dread of the wood when he was in it;

but being out of it, and having committed the crime, his fears were

now diverted, strangely, to the dark room he had left shut up at

home. He had a greater horror, infinitely greater, of that room

than of the wood. Now that he was on his return to it, it seemed

beyond comparison more dismal and more dreadful than the wood. His

hideous secret was shut up in the room, and all its terrors were

there; to his thinking it was not in the wood at all.

 

He walked on for ten miles; and then stopped at an ale-house for a

coach, which he knew would pass through, on its way to London,

before long; and which he also knew was not the coach he had

travelled down by, for it came from another place. He sat down

outside the door here, on a bench, beside a man who was smoking his

pipe. Having called for some beer, and drunk, he offered it to this

companion, who thanked him, and took a draught. He could not help

thinking that, if the man had known all, he might scarcely have

relished drinking out of the same cup with him.

 

'A fine night, master!' said this person. 'And a rare sunset.'

 

'I didn't see it,' was his hasty answer.

 

'Didn't see it?' returned the man.

 

'How the devil could I see it, if I was asleep?'

 

'Asleep! Aye, aye.' The man appeared surprised by his unexpected

irritability, and saying no more, smoked his pipe in silence. They

had not sat very long, when there was a knocking within.

 

'What's that?' cried Jonas.

 

'Can't say, I'm sure,' replied the man.

 

He made no further inquiry, for the last question had escaped him in

spite of himself. But he was thinking, at the moment, of the

closed-up room; of the possibility of their knocking at the door on

some special occasion; of their being alarmed at receiving no

answer; of their bursting it open; of their finding the room empty;

of their fastening the door into the court, and rendering it

impossible for him to get into the house without showing himself in

the garb he wore, which would lead to rumour, rumour to detection,

detection to death. At that instant, as if by some design and order

of circumstances, the knocking had come.

 

It still continued; like a warning echo of the dread reality he had

conjured up. As he could not sit and hear it, he paid for his beer

and walked on again. And having slunk about, in places unknown to

him all day; and being out at night, in a lonely road, in an unusual

dress and in that wandering and unsettled frame of mind; he stopped

more than once to look about him, hoping he might be in a dream.

 

Still he was not sorry. No. He had hated the man too much, and had

been bent, too desperately and too long, on setting himself free.

If the thing could have come over again, he would have done it

again. His malignant and revengeful passions were not so easily

laid. There was no more penitence or remorse within him now than

there had been while the deed was brewing.

 

Dread and fear were upon him, to an extent he had never counted on,

and could not manage in the least degree. He was so horribly afraid

of that infernal room at home. This made him, in a gloomy

murderous, mad way, not only fearful FOR himself, but OF himself;

for being, as it were, a part of the room: a something supposed to

be there, yet missing from it: he invested himself with its

mysterious terrors; and when he pictured in his mind the ugly

chamber, false and quiet, false and quiet, through the dark hours of

two nights; and the tumbled bed, and he not in it, though believed

to be; he became in a manner his own ghost and phantom, and was at

once the haunting spirit and the haunted man.

 

When the coach came up, which it soon did, he got a place outside

and was carried briskly onward towards home. Now, in taking his

seat among the people behind, who were chiefly country people, he

conceived a fear that they knew of the murder, and would tell him

that the body had been found; which, considering the time and place

of the commission of the crime, were events almost impossible to

have happened yet, as he very well knew. But although he did know

it, and had therefore no reason to regard their ignorance as

anything but the natural sequence to the facts, still this very

ignorance of theirs encouraged him. So far encouraged him, that he

began to believe the body never would be found, and began to

speculate on that probability. Setting off from this point, and

measuring time by the rapid hurry of his guilty thoughts, and what

had gone before the bloodshed, and the troops of incoherent and

disordered images of which he was the constant prey; he came by

daylight to regard the murder as an old murder, and to think himself

comparatively safe because it had not been discovered yet. Yet!

When the sun which looked into the wood, and gilded with its rising

light a dead man's lace, had seen that man alive, and sought to win

him to a thought of Heaven, on its going down last night!

 

But here were London streets again. Hush!

 

It was but five o'clock. He had time enough to reach his own house

unobserved, and before there were many people in the streets, if

nothing had happened so far, tending to his discovery. He slipped

down from the coach without troubling the driver to stop his horses;

and hurrying across the road, and in and out of every by-way that

lay near his course, at length approached his own dwelling. He used

additional caution in his immediate neighbourhood; halting first to

look all down the street before him; then gliding swiftly through

that one, and stopping to survey the next, and so on.

 

The passage-way was empty when his murderer's face looked into it.

He stole on, to the door on tiptoe, as if he dreaded to disturb his

own imaginary rest.

 

He listened. Not a sound. As he turned the key with a trembling

hand, and pushed the door softly open with his knee, a monstrous

fear beset his mind.

 

What if the murdered man were there before him!

 

He cast a fearful glance all round. But there was nothing there.

 

He went in, locked the door, drew the key through and through the

dust and damp in the fire-place to sully it again, and hung it up as

of old. He took off his disguise, tied it up in a bundle ready for

carrying away and sinking in the river before night, and locked it

up in a cupboard. These precautions taken, he undressed and went to

bed.

 

The raging thirst, the fire that burnt within him as he lay beneath

the clothes, the augmented horror of the room when they shut it out

from his view; the agony of listening, in which he paid enforced

regard to every sound, and thought the most unlikely one the prelude

to that knocking which should bring the news; the starts with which

he left his couch, and looking in the glass, imagined that his deed

was broadly written in his face, and lying down and burying himself

once more beneath the blankets, heard his own heart beating Murder,

Murder, Murder, in the bed; what words can paint tremendous truths

like these!

 

The morning advanced. There were footsteps in the house. He heard

the blinds drawn up, and shutters opened; and now and then a

stealthy tread outside his own door. He tried to call out, more

than once, but his mouth was dry as if it had been filled with sand.

At last he sat up in his bed, and cried:

 

'Who's there?'

 

It was his wife.

 

He asked her what it was o'clock? Nine.

 

'Did--did no one knock at my door yesterday?' he faltered.

'Something disturbed me; but unless you had knocked the door down,

you would have got no notice from me.'

 

'No one,' she replied. That was well. He had waited, almost

breathless, for her answer. It was a relief to him, if anything

could be.

 

'Mr Nadgett wanted to see you,' she said, 'but I told him you were

tired, and had requested not to be disturbed. He said it was of

little consequence, and went away. As I was opening my window to

let in the cool air, I saw him passing through the street this

morning, very early; but he hasn't been again.'

 

Passing through the street that morning? Very early! Jonas trembled

at the thought of having had a narrow chance of seeing him himself;

even him, who had no object but to avoid people, and sneak on

unobserved, and keep his own secrets; and who saw nothing.

 

He called to her to get his breakfast ready, and prepared to go

upstairs; attiring himself in the clothes he had taken off when he

came into that room, which had been, ever since, outside the door.

In his secret dread of meeting the household for the first time,

after what he had done, he lingered at the door on slight pretexts

that they might see him without looking in his face; and left it

ajar while he dressed; and called out to have the windows opened,

and the pavement watered, that they might become accustomed to his

voice. Even when he had put off the time, by one means or other, so

that he had seen or spoken to them all, he could not muster courage

for a long while to go in among them, but stood at his own door

listening to the murmur of their distant conversation.

 

He could not stop there for ever, and so joined them. His last

glance at the glass had seen a tell-tale face, but that might have

been because of his anxious looking in it. He dared not look at

them to see if they observed him, but he thought them very silent.

 

And whatsoever guard he kept upon himself, he could not help

listening, and showing that he listened. Whether he attended to

their talk, or tried to think of other things, or talked himself, or

held his peace, or resolutely counted the dull tickings of a hoarse

clock at his back, he always lapsed, as if a spell were on him, into

eager listening. For he knew it must come. And his present

punishment, and torture and distraction, were, to listen for its

coming.

 

Hush! _

Read next: CHAPTER FORTY-EIGHT

Read previous: CHAPTER FORTY-SIX

Table of content of Martin Chuzzlewit


GO TO TOP OF SCREEN

Post your review
Your review will be placed after the table of content of this book