CHAPTER XLIII. THE TIME ARRIVES FOR NANCY TO REDEEM HER PLEDGE TO ROSE MAYLIE. SHE FAILS. NOAH CLAYPOLE IS EMPLOYED BY FAGIN ON A SECRET MISSION.

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, worked 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; and vile as those schemes were, desperate as were their originators, and bitter as were her feelings towards the Jew, 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 encompassed her—and what more could she do? She was resolved.

Though every mental struggle 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 others she laughed without merriment, and was noisy without cause or meaning. At others—often within 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 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, intently. 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 the Jew. “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.”

The Jew 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 the Jew, 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 the Jew, as if he were relieved by even this concession. “You’re like yourself to-night, 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 makes you nervous, Bill,—reminds you of being nabbed, does it?” said the Jew, determined not to be offended.

“Reminds me of being nabbed by the devil,” returned Sikes, “not by a trap. 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?” returned Sikes. “Where are you going?”

“I say, not far.”

“And I say where?” retorted Sikes in a loud voice. “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, and take it there,” 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 to 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!” roared 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. “Ay, 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’re 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 the Jew.

“Phew!” said the housebreaker, wiping the perspiration from his face. “Wot a precious strange gal that is!”

“You may say that, Bill,” replied the Jew thoughtfully. “You may say that.”

“Wot did she take it into her head to go out to-night 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,” replied the Jew shrugging his shoulders.

“Well, I suppose it is,” growled Sikes. “I thought I had tamed her, but she’s as bad as ever.”

“Worse,” said the Jew 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,” replied the Jew.

“I’ll let her a little blood without troubling the doctor, if she’s took that way again,” said Sikes.

The Jew 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 black-hearted wolf as you are, kept yourself aloof,” said Sikes. “We was very 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 upon his companion.

The Jew 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 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 sightseers. There; show him a light.”

Nancy followed the old man down stairs with the 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 forefinger 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,” said the Jew; “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—of old.”

“I know you well,” replied the girl, without manifesting the least emotion. “Good night.”

She shrunk 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 own 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 a 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 the Jew 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 the 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 the Jew, as he crept homewards, “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.

He rose betimes next morning, and waited impatiently for the appearance of his new associate, who, after a delay which seemed interminable, at length presented himself, and commenced a voracious assault upon the breakfast.

“Bolter,” said the Jew, drawing up a chair and seating himself opposite to him.

“Well, here I am,” returned Noah. “What’s the matter? Don’t yer ask me to do anything till I have done eating. That’s a great fault in this place. Yer never get time enough over yer meals.”

“You can talk as you eat, can’t you?” said Fagin, cursing his dear young friend’s greediness from the very bottom of his heart.

“Oh yes, I can talk; I get on better when I talk,” said Noah, cutting a monstrous slice of bread. “Where’s Charlotte?”

“Out,” said Fagin. “I sent her out this morning with the other young woman, because I wanted us to be alone.”

“Oh!” said Noah, “I wish yer’d ordered her to make some buttered toast first. Well. Talk away. Yer won’t interrupt me.”

There seemed indeed no great fear of anything interrupting him, as he had evidently sat down with a determination to do a great deal of business.

“You did well yesterday, my dear,” said the Jew, “beautiful! Six shillings and ninepence halfpenny on the very first day! The kinchin lay will be a fortune to you.”

“Don’t yer forget to add three pint-pots and a milk-can,” said Mr. Bolter.

“No, no, my dear,” replied the Jew. “The pint-pots were great strokes of genius, but the milk-can was a perfect masterpiece.”

“Pretty well, I think, for a beginner,” remarked Mr. Bolter complacently. “The pots I took off airy railings, and the milk-can was standing by itself outside a public-house, so I thought it might get rusty with the rain, or catch cold, yer know. Ha! ha! ha!”

The Jew affected to laugh very heartily; and Mr. Bolter, having had his laugh out, took a series of large bites, which finished his first hunk of bread and butter, and assisted himself to a second.

“I want you, Bolter,” said Fagin, leaning over the table, “to do a piece of work for me, my dear, that needs great care and caution.”

“I say,” rejoined Bolter, “don’t yer go shoving me into danger, or sending me to any more police-offices. That don’t suit me, that don’t; and so I tell yer.”

“There’s not the smallest danger in it—not the very smallest,” said the Jew; “it’s only to dodge a woman.”

“An old woman?” demanded Mr. Bolter.

“A young one,” replied Fagin.

“I can do that pretty well, I know,” said Bolter. “I was a regular cunning sneak when I was at school. What am I to dodge her for? not to—”

“Not to do anything,” interrupted the Jew, “but to tell me where she goes to, who she sees, and, if possible, what she says; to remember the street, if it is a street, or the house, if it is a house, and to bring me back all the information you can.”

“What’ll yer give me?” asked Noah, setting down his cup, and looking his employer eagerly in the face.

“If you do it well, a pound, my dear—one pound,” said Fagin, wishing to interest him in the scent as much as possible. “And that’s what I never gave yet for any job of work where there wasn’t valuable consideration to be gained.”

“Who is she?” inquired Noah.

“One of us.”

“Oh Lor!” cried Noah, curling up his nose. “Yer doubtful of her, are yer?”

“She has found out some new friends, my dear, and I must know who they are,” replied the Jew.

“I see,” said Noah. “Just to have the pleasure of knowing them, if they’re respectable people, eh?—Ha! ha! ha! I’m your man.”

“I knew you would be,” cried Fagin, elated by the success of his proposal.

“Of course, of course,” replied Noah. “Where is she? Where am I to wait for her? When am I to go?”

“All that, my dear, you shall hear from me. I’ll point her out at the proper time,” said Fagin. “You keep ready, and leave the rest to me.”

That night, and the next, and the next again, the spy sat booted and equipped in his carter’s dress, ready to turn out at a word from Fagin. Six nights passed,—six long weary nights,—and on each Fagin came home with a disappointed face, and briefly intimated that it was not yet time. On the seventh he returned earlier, and with an exultation he could not conceal. It was Sunday.

“She goes abroad to-night,” said Fagin, “and on the right errand, I’m sure; for she has been alone all day, and the man she is afraid of will not be back much before daybreak. Come with me. Quick!”

Noah started up without saying a word, for the Jew was in a state of such intense excitement that it infected him. They left the house stealthily, and, hurrying through a labyrinth of streets, arrived at length before a public-house, which Noah recognised as the same in which he had slept on the night of his arrival in London.

It was past eleven o’clock, and the door was closed. It opened softly on its hinges as the Jew gave a low whistle. They entered without noise, and the door was closed behind them.

Scarcely venturing to whisper, but substituting dumb show for words, Fagin and the young Jew who had admitted them pointed out the pane of glass to Noah, and signed to him to climb up and observe the person in the adjoining room.

“Is that the woman?” he asked, scarcely above his breath.

The Jew nodded yes.

“I can’t see her face well,” whispered Noah. “She is looking down, and the candle is behind her.”

“Stay there,” whispered Fagin. He signed to Barney, who withdrew. In an instant the lad entered the room adjoining, and, under pretence of snuffing the candle, moved it into the required position, and, speaking to the girl, caused her to raise her face.

“I see her now,” cried the spy.

“Plainly?” asked the Jew.

“I should know her among a thousand.”

He hastily descended as the room-door opened, and the girl came out. Fagin drew him behind a small partition which was curtained off, and they held their breaths as she passed within a few feet of their place of concealment, and emerged by the door at which they had entered.

“Hist!” cried the lad who held the door. “Now.”

Noah exchanged a look with Fagin, and darted out.

“To the left,” whispered the lad; “take the left hand, and keep on the other side.”

He did so, and by the light of the lamps saw the girl’s retreating figure already at some distance before him. He advanced as near as he considered prudent, and kept on the opposite side of the street, the better to observe her motions. She looked nervously round twice or thrice, and once stopped to let two men who were following close behind her pass on. She seemed to gather courage as she advanced, and to walk with a steadier and firmer step. The spy preserved the same relative distance between them, and followed with his eye upon her.

---