“And this is the last, Mr Nadgett!” said that gentleman, drawing a long breath.
“That, sir, is the last.”
“You are a wonderful man, Mr Nadgett!”
“I think it is a pretty good case,” he returned as he gathered up his papers. “It cost some trouble, sir.”
“The trouble shall be well rewarded, Mr Nadgett.”Nadgett bowed. “There is a deeper impression of Somebody's Hoof here, than I had expected, Mr Nadgett. I may congratulate myself upon your being such a good hand at a secret.”
“Oh! nothing has an interest to me that's not a secret,” replied Nadgett, as he tied the string about his pocket-book, and put it up. “It always takes away any pleasure I may have had in this inquiry even to make it known to you.”
“A most invaluable constitution,” Tigg retorted. “A great gift for a gentleman employed as you are, Mr Nadgett. Much better than discretion; though you possess that quality also in an eminent degree. I think I heard a double knock. Will you put your head out of window, and tell me whether there is anybody at the door?”
Mr Nadgett softly raised the sash, and peered out from the very corner, as a man might who was looking down into a street from whence a brisk discharge of musketry might be expected at any moment. Drawing in his head with equal caution, he observed, not altering his voice or manner:
“Mr Jonas Chuzzlewit!”
“I thought so,” Tigg retorted.
“Shall I go?”
“I think you had better. Stay though! No! remain here, Mr Nadgett, if you please.”
It was remarkable how pale and flurried he had become in an instant. There was nothing to account for it. His eye had fallen on his razors; but what of them!
Mr Chuzzlewit was announced.
“Show him up directly. Nadgett! don't you leave us alone together. Mind you don't, now! By the Lord!” he added in a whisper to himself: “We don't know what may happen.”
Saying this, he hurriedly took up a couple of hair-brushes, and began to exercise them on his own head, as if his toilet had not been interrupted. Mr Nadgett withdrew to the stove, in which there was a small fire for the convenience of heating curling-irons; and taking advantage of so favourable an opportunity for drying his pocket-handkerchief, produced it without loss of time. There he stood, during the whole interview, holding it before the bars, and sometimes, but not often, glancing over his shoulder.
“My dear Chuzzlewit!” cried Montague, as Jonas entered. “You rise with the lark. Though you go to bed with the nightingale, you rise with the lark. You have superhuman energy, my dear Chuzzlewit!”
“Ecod!” said Jonas, with an air of langour and ill-humour, as he took a chair, “I should be very glad not to get up with the lark, if I could help it. But I am a light sleeper; and it's better to be up than lying awake, counting the dismal old church-clocks, in bed.”
“A light sleeper!” cried his friend. “Now, what is a light sleeper? I often hear the expression, but upon my life I have not the least conception what a light sleeper is.”
“Hallo!” said Jonas, “Who's that? Oh, old what's-his-name: looking (as usual) as if he wanted to skulk up the chimney.”
“Ha, ha! I have no doubt he does.”
“Well! He's not wanted here, I suppose,” said Jonas. “He may go, mayn't he?”
“Oh, let him stay, let him stay!” said Tigg. “He's a mere piece of furniture. He has been making his report, and is waiting for further orders. He has been told,” said Tigg, raising his voice, “not to lose sight of certain friends of ours, or to think that he has done with them by any means. He understands his business.”
“He need,” replied Jonas; “for of all the precious old dummies in appearance that I ever saw, he's about the worst. He's afraid of me, I think.”
“It's my belief,” said Tigg, “that you are Poison to him. Nadgett! give me that towel!”
He had as little occasion for a towel as Jonas had for a start. But Nadgett brought it quickly; and, having lingered for a moment, fell back upon his old post by the fire.
“You see, my dear fellow,” resumed Tigg, “you are too—what's the matter with your lips? How white they are!”
“I took some vinegar just now,” said Jonas. “I had oysters for my breakfast. Where are they white?” he added, muttering an oath, and rubbing them upon his handkerchief. “I don't believe they ARE white.”
“Now I look again, they are not,” replied his friend. “They are coming right again.”
“Say what you were going to say,” cried Jonas angrily, “and let my face be! As long as I can show my teeth when I want to (and I can do that pretty well), the colour of my lips is not material.”
“Quite true,” said Tigg. “I was only going to say that you are too quick and active for our friend. He is too shy to cope with such a man as you, but does his duty well. Oh, very well! But what is a light sleeper?”
“Hang a light sleeper!” exclaimed Jonas pettishly.
“No, no,” interrupted Tigg. “No. We'll not do that.”
“A light sleeper ain't a heavy one,” said Jonas in his sulky way; “don't sleep much, and don't sleep well, and don't sleep sound.”
“And dreams,” said Tigg, “and cries out in an ugly manner; and when the candle burns down in the night, is in an agony; and all that sort of thing. I see!”
They were silent for a little time. Then Jonas spoke:
“Now we've done with child's talk, I want to have a word with you. I want to have a word with you before we meet up yonder to-day. I am not satisfied with the state of affairs.”
“Not satisfied!” cried Tigg. “The money comes in well.”
“The money comes in well enough,” retorted Jonas, “but it don't come out well enough. It can't be got at easily enough. I haven't sufficient power; it is all in your hands. Ecod! what with one of your by-laws, and another of your by-laws, and your votes in this capacity, and your votes in that capacity, and your official rights, and your individual rights, and other people's rights who are only you again, there are no rights left for me. Everybody else's rights are my wrongs. What's the use of my having a voice if it's always drowned? I might as well be dumb, and it would be much less aggravating. I'm not a-going to stand that, you know.”
“No!” said Tigg in an insinuating tone.
“No!” returned Jonas, “I'm not indeed. I'll play old Gooseberry with the office, and make you glad to buy me out at a good high figure, if you try any of your tricks with me.”
“I give you my honour—” Montague began.
“Oh! confound your honour,” interrupted Jonas, who became more coarse and quarrelsome as the other remonstrated, which may have been a part of Mr Montague's intention; “I want a little more control over the money. You may have all the honour, if you like; I'll never bring you to book for that. But I'm not a-going to stand it, as it is now. If you should take it into your honourable head to go abroad with the bank, I don't see much to prevent you. Well! That won't do. I've had some very good dinners here, but they'd come too dear on such terms; and therefore, that won't do.”
“I am unfortunate to find you in this humour,” said Tigg, with a remarkable kind of smile; “for I was going to propose to you—for your own advantage; solely for your own advantage—that you should venture a little more with us.”
“Was you, by G—?” said Jonas, with a short laugh.
“Yes. And to suggest,” pursued Montague, “that surely you have friends; indeed, I know you have; who would answer our purpose admirably, and whom we should be delighted to receive.”
“How kind of you! You'd be delighted to receive “em, would you?” said Jonas, bantering.
“I give you my sacred honour, quite transported. As your friends, observe!”
“Exactly,” said Jonas; “as my friends, of course. You'll be very much delighted when you get “em, I have no doubt. And it'll be all to my advantage, won't it?”
“It will be very much to your advantage,” answered Monta
gue poising a brush in each hand, and looking steadily upon him. “It will be very much to your advantage, I assure you.”
“And you can tell me how,” said Jonas, “can't you?”
“SHALL I tell you how?” returned the other.
“I think you had better,” said Jonas. “Strange things have been done in the Assurance way before now, by strange sorts of men, and I mean to take care of myself.”
“Chuzzlewit!” replied Montague, leaning forward, with his arms upon his knees, and looking full into his face. “Strange things have been done, and are done every day; not only in our way, but in a variety of other ways; and no one suspects them. But ours, as you say, my good friend, is a strange way; and we strangely happen, sometimes, to come into the knowledge of very strange events.”
He beckoned to Jonas to bring his chair nearer; and looking slightly round, as if to remind him of the presence of Nadgett, whispered in his ear.
From red to white; from white to red again; from red to yellow; then to a cold, dull, awful, sweat-bedabbled blue. In that short whisper, all these changes fell upon the face of Jonas Chuzzlewit; and when at last he laid his hand upon the whisperer's mouth, appalled, lest any syllable of what he said should reach the ears of the third person present, it was as bloodless and as heavy as the hand of Death.
He drew his chair away, and sat a spectacle of terror, misery, and rage. He was afraid to speak, or look, or move, or sit still. Abject, crouching, and miserable, he was a greater degradation to the form he bore, than if he had been a loathsome wound from head to heel.
His companion leisurely resumed his dressing, and completed it, glancing sometimes with a smile at the transformation he had effected, but never speaking once.
“You'll not object,” he said, when he was quite equipped, “to venture further with us, Chuzzlewit, my friend?”
His pale lips faintly stammered out a “No.”
“Well said! That's like yourself. Do you know I was thinking yesterday that your father-in-law, relying on your advice as a man of great sagacity in money matters, as no doubt you are, would join us, if the thing were well presented to him. He has money?”
“Yes, he has money.”
“Shall I leave Mr Pecksniff to you? Will you undertake for Mr Pecksniff.”
“I'll try. I'll do my best.”
“A thousand thanks,” replied the other, clapping him upon the shoulder. “Shall we walk downstairs? Mr Nadgett! Follow us, if you please.”
They went down in that order. Whatever Jonas felt in reference to Montague; whatever sense he had of being caged, and barred, and trapped, and having fallen down into a pit of deepest ruin; whatever thoughts came crowding on his mind even at that early time, of one terrible chance of escape, of one red glimmer in a sky of blackness; he no more thought that the slinking figure half-a-dozen stairs behind him was his pursuing Fate, than that the other figure at his side was his Good Angel.
CHAPTER THIRTY-NINE
CONTAINING SOME FURTHER PARTICULARS OF THE DOMESTIC ECONOMY OF THE PINCHES; WITH STRANGE NEWS FROM THE CITY, NARROWLY CONCERNING TOM
Pleasant little Ruth! Cheerful, tidy, bustling, quiet little Ruth! No doll's house ever yielded greater delight to its young mistress, than little Ruth derived from her glorious dominion over the triangular parlour and the two small bedrooms.
To be Tom's housekeeper. What dignity! Housekeeping, upon the commonest terms, associated itself with elevated responsibilities of all sorts and kinds; but housekeeping for Tom implied the utmost complication of grave trusts and mighty charges. Well might she take the keys out of the little chiffonier which held the tea and sugar; and out of the two little damp cupboards down by the fireplace, where the very black beetles got mouldy, and had the shine taken out of their backs by envious mildew; and jingle them upon a ring before Tom's eyes when he came down to breakfast! Well might she, laughing musically, put them up in that blessed little pocket of hers with a merry pride! For it was such a grand novelty to be mistress of anything, that if she had been the most relentless and despotic of all little housekeepers, she might have pleaded just that much for her excuse, and have been honourably acquitted.
So far from being despotic, however, there was a coyness about her very way of pouring out the tea, which Tom quite revelled in. And when she asked him what he would like to have for dinner, and faltered out “chops” as a reasonably good suggestion after their last night's successful supper, Tom grew quite facetious, and rallied her desperately.
“I don't know, Tom,” said his sister, blushing, “I am not quite confident, but I think I could make a beef-steak pudding, if I tried, Tom.”
“In the whole catalogue of cookery, there is nothing I should like so much as a beef-steak pudding!” cried Tom, slapping his leg to give the greater force to this reply.
“Yes, dear, that's excellent! But if it should happen not to come quite right the first time,” his sister faltered; “if it should happen not to be a pudding exactly, but should turn out a stew, or a soup, or something of that sort, you'll not be vexed, Tom, will you?”
The serious way in which she looked at Tom; the way in which Tom looked at her; and the way in which she gradually broke into a merry laugh at her own expense, would have enchanted you.
“Why,” said Tom “this is capital. It gives us a new, and quite an uncommon interest in the dinner. We put into a lottery for a beefsteak pudding, and it is impossible to say what we may get. We may make some wonderful discovery, perhaps, and produce such a dish as never was known before.”
“I shall not be at all surprised if we do, Tom,” returned his sister, still laughing merrily, “or if it should prove to be such a dish as we shall not feel very anxious to produce again; but the meat must come out of the saucepan at last, somehow or other, you know. We can't cook it into nothing at all; that's a great comfort. So if you like to venture, I will.”
“I have not the least doubt,” rejoined Tom, “that it will come out an excellent pudding, or at all events, I am sure that I shall think it so. There is naturally something so handy and brisk about you, Ruth, that if you said you could make a bowl of faultless turtle soup, I should believe you.”
And Tom was right. She was precisely that sort of person. Nobody ought to have been able to resist her coaxing manner; and nobody had any business to try. Yet she never seemed to know it was her manner at all. That was the best of it.
Well! she washed up the breakfast cups, chatting away the whole time, and telling Tom all sorts of anecdotes about the brass-andcopper founder; put everything in its place; made the room as neat as herself;—you must not suppose its shape was half as neat as hers though, or anything like it—and brushed Tom's old hat round and round and round again, until it was as sleek as Mr Pecksniff. Then she discovered, all in a moment, that Tom's shirt-collar was frayed at the edge; and flying upstairs for a needle and thread, came flying down again with her thimble on, and set it right with wonderful expertness; never once sticking the needle into his face, although she was humming his pet tune from first to last, and beating time with the fingers of her left hand upon his neckcloth. She had no sooner done this, than off she was again; and there she stood once more, as brisk and busy as a bee, tying that compact little chin of hers into an equally compact little bonnet; intent on bustling out to the butcher's, without a minute's loss of time; and inviting Tom to come and see the steak cut, with his own eyes. As to Tom, he was ready to go anywhere; so off they trotted, arm-inarm, as nimbly as you please; saying to each other what a quiet street it was to lodge in, and how very cheap, and what an airy situation.
To see the butcher slap the steak, before he laid it on the block, and give his knife a sharpening, was to forget breakfast instantly. It was agreeable, too—it really was—to see him cut it off, so smooth and juicy. There was nothing savage in the act, although the knife was large and keen; it was a piece of art, high art; there was delicacy of touch, clearness of tone, skillful handling of the subject, fine shading. It was the triumph
of mind over matter; quite.
Perhaps the greenest cabbage-leaf ever grown in a garden was wrapped about this steak, before it was delivered over to Tom. But the butcher had a sentiment for his business, and knew how to refine upon it. When he saw Tom putting the cabbage-leaf into his pocket awkwardly, he begged to be allowed to do it for him; “for meat,” he said with some emotion, “must be humoured, not drove.”
Back they went to the lodgings again, after they had bought some eggs, and flour, and such small matters; and Tom sat gravely down to write at one end of the parlour table, while Ruth prepared to make the pudding at the other end; for there was nobody in the house but an old woman (the landlord being a mysterious sort of man, who went out early in the morning, and was scarcely ever seen); and saving in mere household drudgery, they waited on themselves.
“What are you writing, Tom?” inquired his sister, laying her hand upon his shoulder.
“Why, you see, my dear,” said Tom, leaning back in his chair, and looking up in her face, “I am very anxious, of course, to obtain some suitable employment; and before Mr Westlock comes this afternoon, I think I may as well prepare a little description of myself and my qualifications; such as he could show to any friend of his.”
“You had better do the same for me, Tom, also,” said his sister, casting down her eyes. “I should dearly like to keep house for you and take care of you always, Tom; but we are not rich enough for that.”
“We are not rich,” returned Tom, “certainly; and we may be much poorer. But we will not part if we can help it. No, no; we will make up our minds Ruth, that unless we are so very unfortunate as to render me quite sure that you would be better off away from me than with me, we will battle it out together. I am certain we shall be happier if we can battle it out together. Don't you think we shall?”
“Think, Tom!”
“Oh, tut, tut!” interposed Tom, tenderly. “You mustn't cry.”
Life And Adventures Of Martin Chuzzlewit Page 73
