Kabanata Kabanata 44 · THE TIME ARRIVES FOR NANCY TO REDEEM HER PLEDGE TO ROSE MAYLIE. SHE FAILS.

. THE TIME ARRIVES FOR NANCY TO REDEEM HER PLEDGE TO ROSE MAYLIE. SHE FAILS.

THE TIME ARRIVES FOR NANCY TO REDEEM HER PLEDGE TO ROSE MAYLIE. SHE

FAILS.

Adept as she was, in all the arts of cunning and dissimulation, the

girl Nancy could not wholly conceal the effect which the knowledge of

the step she had taken, wrought upon her mind. She remembered that both

the crafty Jew and the brutal Sikes had confided to her schemes, which

had been hidden from all others: in the full confidence that she was

trustworthy and beyond the reach of their suspicion. Vile as those

schemes were, desperate as were their originators, and bitter as were

her feelings towards Fagin, who had led her, step by step, deeper and

deeper down into an abyss of crime and misery, whence was no escape;

still, there were times when, even towards him, she felt some

relenting, lest her disclosure should bring him within the iron grasp

he had so long eluded, and he should fall at last—richly as he merited

such a fate—by her hand.

But, these were the mere wanderings of a mind unable wholly to detach

itself from old companions and associations, though enabled to fix

itself steadily on one object, and resolved not to be turned aside by

any consideration. Her fears for Sikes would have been more powerful

inducements to recoil while there was yet time; but she had stipulated

that her secret should be rigidly kept, she had dropped no clue which

could lead to his discovery, she had refused, even for his sake, a

refuge from all the guilt and wretchedness that encompasses her—and

what more could she do! She was resolved.

Though all her mental struggles terminated in this conclusion, they

forced themselves upon her, again and again, and left their traces too.

She grew pale and thin, even within a few days. At times, she took no

heed of what was passing before her, or no part in conversations where

once, she would have been the loudest. At other times, she laughed

without merriment, and was noisy without a moment afterwards—she sat

silent and dejected, brooding with her head upon her hands, while the

very effort by which she roused herself, told, more forcibly than even

these indications, that she was ill at ease, and that her thoughts were

occupied with matters very different and distant from those in the

course of discussion by her companions.

It was Sunday night, and the bell of the nearest church struck the

hour. Sikes and the Jew were talking, but they paused to listen. The

girl looked up from the low seat on which she crouched, and listened

too. Eleven.

“An hour this side of midnight,” said Sikes, raising the blind to look

out and returning to his seat. “Dark and heavy it is too. A good night

for business this.”

“Ah!” replied Fagin. “What a pity, Bill, my dear, that there’s none

quite ready to be done.”

“You’re right for once,” replied Sikes gruffly. “It is a pity, for I’m

in the humour too.”

Fagin sighed, and shook his head despondingly.

“We must make up for lost time when we’ve got things into a good train.

That’s all I know,” said Sikes.

“That’s the way to talk, my dear,” replied Fagin, venturing to pat him

on the shoulder. “It does me good to hear you.”

“Does you good, does it!” cried Sikes. “Well, so be it.”

“Ha! ha! ha!” laughed Fagin, as if he were relieved by even this

concession. “You’re like yourself tonight, Bill. Quite like yourself.”

“I don’t feel like myself when you lay that withered old claw on my

shoulder, so take it away,” said Sikes, casting off the Jew’s hand.

“It make you nervous, Bill,—reminds you of being nabbed, does it?” said

Fagin, determined not to be offended.

“Reminds me of being nabbed by the devil,” returned Sikes. “There never

was another man with such a face as yours, unless it was your father,

and I suppose _he_ is singeing his grizzled red beard by this time,

unless you came straight from the old ’un without any father at all

betwixt you; which I shouldn’t wonder at, a bit.”

Fagin offered no reply to this compliment: but, pulling Sikes by the

sleeve, pointed his finger towards Nancy, who had taken advantage of

the foregoing conversation to put on her bonnet, and was now leaving

the room.

“Hallo!” cried Sikes. “Nance. Where’s the gal going to at this time of

night?”

“Not far.”

“What answer’s that?” retorted Sikes. “Do you hear me?”

“I don’t know where,” replied the girl.

“Then I do,” said Sikes, more in the spirit of obstinacy than because

he had any real objection to the girl going where she listed. “Nowhere.

Sit down.”

“I’m not well. I told you that before,” rejoined the girl. “I want a

breath of air.”

“Put your head out of the winder,” replied Sikes.

“There’s not enough there,” said the girl. “I want it in the street.”

“Then you won’t have it,” replied Sikes. With which assurance he rose,

locked the door, took the key out, and pulling her bonnet from her

head, flung it up to the top of an old press. “There,” said the robber.

“Now stop quietly where you are, will you?”

“It’s not such a matter as a bonnet would keep me,” said the girl

turning very pale. “What do you mean, Bill? Do you know what you’re

doing?”

“Know what I’m—Oh!” cried Sikes, turning to Fagin, “she’s out of her

senses, you know, or she daren’t talk to me in that way.”

“You’ll drive me on the something desperate,” muttered the girl placing

both hands upon her breast, as though to keep down by force some

violent outbreak. “Let me go, will you,—this minute—this instant.”

“No!” said Sikes.

“Tell him to let me go, Fagin. He had better. It’ll be better for him.

Do you hear me?” cried Nancy stamping her foot upon the ground.

“Hear you!” repeated Sikes turning round in his chair to confront her.

“Aye! And if I hear you for half a minute longer, the dog shall have

such a grip on your throat as’ll tear some of that screaming voice out.

Wot has come over you, you jade! Wot is it?”

“Let me go,” said the girl with great earnestness; then sitting herself

down on the floor, before the door, she said, “Bill, let me go; you

don’t know what you are doing. You don’t, indeed. For only one

hour—do—do!”

“Cut my limbs off one by one!” cried Sikes, seizing her roughly by the

arm, “If I don’t think the gal’s stark raving mad. Get up.”

“Not till you let me go—not till you let me go—Never—never!” screamed

the girl. Sikes looked on, for a minute, watching his opportunity, and

suddenly pinioning her hands dragged her, struggling and wrestling with

him by the way, into a small room adjoining, where he sat himself on a

bench, and thrusting her into a chair, held her down by force. She

struggled and implored by turns until twelve o’clock had struck, and

then, wearied and exhausted, ceased to contest the point any further.

With a caution, backed by many oaths, to make no more efforts to go out

that night, Sikes left her to recover at leisure and rejoined Fagin.

“Whew!” said the housebreaker wiping the perspiration from his face.

“Wot a precious strange gal that is!”

“You may say that, Bill,” replied Fagin thoughtfully. “You may say

that.”

“Wot did she take it into her head to go out tonight for, do you

think?” asked Sikes. “Come; you should know her better than me. Wot

does it mean?”

“Obstinacy; woman’s obstinacy, I suppose, my dear.”

“Well, I suppose it is,” growled Sikes. “I thought I had tamed her, but

she’s as bad as ever.”

“Worse,” said Fagin thoughtfully. “I never knew her like this, for such

a little cause.”

“Nor I,” said Sikes. “I think she’s got a touch of that fever in her

blood yet, and it won’t come out—eh?”

“Like enough.”

“I’ll let her a little blood, without troubling the doctor, if she’s

took that way again,” said Sikes.

Fagin nodded an expressive approval of this mode of treatment.

“She was hanging about me all day, and night too, when I was stretched

on my back; and you, like a blackhearted wolf as you are, kept yourself

aloof,” said Sikes. “We was poor too, all the time, and I think, one

way or other, it’s worried and fretted her; and that being shut up here

so long has made her restless—eh?”

“That’s it, my dear,” replied the Jew in a whisper. “Hush!”

As he uttered these words, the girl herself appeared and resumed her

former seat. Her eyes were swollen and red; she rocked herself to and

fro; tossed her head; and, after a little time, burst out laughing.

“Why, now she’s on the other tack!” exclaimed Sikes, turning a look of

excessive surprise on his companion.

Fagin nodded to him to take no further notice just then; and, in a few

minutes, the girl subsided into her accustomed demeanour. Whispering

Sikes that there was no fear of her relapsing, Fagin took up his hat

and bade him good-night. He paused when he reached the room-door, and

looking round, asked if somebody would light him down the dark stairs.

“Light him down,” said Sikes, who was filling his pipe. “It’s a pity he

should break his neck himself, and disappoint the sight-seers. Show him

a light.”

Nancy followed the old man downstairs, with a candle. When they reached

the passage, he laid his finger on his lip, and drawing close to the

girl, said, in a whisper.

“What is it, Nancy, dear?”

“What do you mean?” replied the girl, in the same tone.

“The reason of all this,” replied Fagin. “If _he_”—he pointed with his

skinny fore-finger up the stairs—“is so hard with you (he’s a brute,

Nance, a brute-beast), why don’t you—”

“Well?” said the girl, as Fagin paused, with his mouth almost touching

her ear, and his eyes looking into hers.

“No matter just now. We’ll talk of this again. You have a friend in me,

Nance; a staunch friend. I have the means at hand, quiet and close. If

you want revenge on those that treat you like a dog—like a dog! worse

than his dog, for he humours him sometimes—come to me. I say, come to

me. He is the mere hound of a day, but you know me of old, Nance.”

“I know you well,” replied the girl, without manifesting the least

emotion. “Good-night.”

She shrank back, as Fagin offered to lay his hand on hers, but said

good-night again, in a steady voice, and, answering his parting look

with a nod of intelligence, closed the door between them.

Fagin walked towards his home, intent upon the thoughts that were

working within his brain. He had conceived the idea—not from what had

just passed though that had tended to confirm him, but slowly and by

degrees—that Nancy, wearied of the housebreaker’s brutality, had

conceived an attachment for some new friend. Her altered manner, her

repeated absences from home alone, her comparative indifference to the

interests of the gang for which she had once been so zealous, and,

added to these, her desperate impatience to leave home that night at a

particular hour, all favoured the supposition, and rendered it, to him

at least, almost matter of certainty. The object of this new liking was

not among his myrmidons. He would be a valuable acquisition with such

an assistant as Nancy, and must (thus Fagin argued) be secured without

delay.

There was another, and a darker object, to be gained. Sikes knew too

much, and his ruffian taunts had not galled Fagin the less, because the

wounds were hidden. The girl must know, well, that if she shook him

off, she could never be safe from his fury, and that it would be surely

wreaked—to the maiming of limbs, or perhaps the loss of life—on the

object of her more recent fancy.

“With a little persuasion,” thought Fagin, “what more likely than that

she would consent to poison him? Women have done such things, and

worse, to secure the same object before now. There would be the

dangerous villain: the man I hate: gone; another secured in his place;

and my influence over the girl, with a knowledge of this crime to back

it, unlimited.”

These things passed through the mind of Fagin, during the short time he

sat alone, in the housebreaker’s room; and with them uppermost in his

thoughts, he had taken the opportunity afterwards afforded him, of

sounding the girl in the broken hints he threw out at parting. There

was no expression of surprise, no assumption of an inability to

understand his meaning. The girl clearly comprehended it. Her glance at

parting showed _that_.

But perhaps she would recoil from a plot to take the life of Sikes, and

that was one of the chief ends to be attained. “How,” thought Fagin, as

he crept homeward, “can I increase my influence with her? What new

power can I acquire?”

Such brains are fertile in expedients. If, without extracting a

confession from herself, he laid a watch, discovered the object of her

altered regard, and threatened to reveal the whole history to Sikes (of

whom she stood in no common fear) unless she entered into his designs,

could he not secure her compliance?

“I can,” said Fagin, almost aloud. “She durst not refuse me then. Not

for her life, not for her life! I have it all. The means are ready, and

shall be set to work. I shall have you yet!”

He cast back a dark look, and a threatening motion of the hand, towards

the spot where he had left the bolder villain; and went on his way:

busying his bony hands in the folds of his tattered garment, which he

wrenched tightly in his grasp, as though there were a hated enemy

crushed with every motion of his fingers.