Part 67

“I _did not_,” replied Mr. Brownlow, rising too; “but within the last fortnight I have learnt it all. You have a brother; you know it, and him. There was a will, which your mother destroyed, leaving the secret and the gain to you at her own death. It contained a reference to some child likely to be the result of this sad connection, which child was born, and accidentally encountered by you, when your suspicions were first awakened by his resemblance to your father. You repaired to the place of his birth. There existed proofs—proofs long suppressed—of his birth and parentage. Those proofs were destroyed by you, and now, in your own words to your accomplice the Jew, ‘_the only proofs of the boy’s identity lie at the bottom of the river, and the old hag that received them from the mother is rotting in her coffin_.’ Unworthy son, coward, liar,—you, who hold your councils with thieves and murderers in dark rooms at night,—you, whose plots and wiles have brought a violent death upon the head of one worth millions such as you,—you, who from your cradle were gall and bitterness to your own father’s heart, and in whom all evil passions, vice, and profligacy, festered, till they found a vent in a hideous disease which had made your face an index even to your mind—you, Edward Leeford, do you still brave me!” “No, no, no!” returned the coward, overwhelmed by these accumulated charges. “Every word!” cried the gentleman, “every word that has passed between you and this detested villain, is known to me. Shadows on the wall have caught your whispers, and brought them to my ear; the sight of the persecuted child has turned vice itself, and given it the courage and almost the attributes of virtue. Murder has been done, to which you were morally if not really a party.” “No, no,” interposed Monks. “I—I knew nothing of that; I was going to inquire the truth of the story when you overtook me. I didn’t know the cause. I thought it was a common quarrel.” “It was the partial disclosure of your secrets,” replied Mr. Brownlow. “Will you disclose the whole?” “Yes, I will.” “Set your hand to a statement of truth and facts, and repeat it before witnesses?” “That I promise too.” “Remain quietly here, until such a document is drawn up, and proceed with me to such a place as I may deem most advisable, for the purpose of attesting it?” “If you insist upon that, I’ll do that also,” replied Monks. “You must do more than that,” said Mr. Brownlow. “Make restitution to an innocent and unoffending child, for such he is, although the offspring of a guilty and most miserable love. You have not forgotten the provisions of the will. Carry them into execution so far as your brother is concerned, and then go where you please. In this world you need meet no more.” While Monks was pacing up and down, meditating with dark and evil looks on this proposal and the possibilities of evading it: torn by his fears on the one hand and his hatred on the other: the door was hurriedly unlocked, and a gentleman (Mr. Losberne) entered the room in violent agitation. “The man will be taken,” he cried. “He will be taken tonight!” “The murderer?” asked Mr. Brownlow. “Yes, yes,” replied the other. “His dog has been seen lurking about some old haunt, and there seems little doubt that his master either is, or will be, there, under cover of the darkness. Spies are hovering about in every direction. I have spoken to the men who are charged with his capture, and they tell me he cannot escape. A reward of a hundred pounds is proclaimed by Government tonight.” “I will give fifty more,” said Mr. Brownlow, “and proclaim it with my own lips upon the spot, if I can reach it. Where is Mr. Maylie?” “Harry? As soon as he had seen your friend here, safe in a coach with you, he hurried off to where he heard this,” replied the doctor, “and mounting his horse sallied forth to join the first party at some place in the outskirts agreed upon between them.” “Fagin,” said Mr. Brownlow; “what of him?” “When I last heard, he had not been taken, but he will be, or is, by this time. They’re sure of him.” “Have you made up your mind?” asked Mr. Brownlow, in a low voice, of Monks. “Yes,” he replied. “You—you—will be secret with me?” “I will. Remain here till I return. It is your only hope of safety.” They left the room, and the door was again locked. “What have you done?” asked the doctor in a whisper. “All that I could hope to do, and even more. Coupling the poor girl’s intelligence with my previous knowledge, and the result of our good friend’s inquiries on the spot, I left him no loophole of escape, and laid bare the whole villainy which by these lights became plain as day. Write and appoint the evening after tomorrow, at seven, for the meeting. We shall be down there, a few hours before, but shall require rest: especially the young lady, who _may_ have greater need of firmness than either you or I can quite foresee just now. But my blood boils to avenge this poor murdered creature. Which way have they taken?” “Drive straight to the office and you will be in time,” replied Mr. Losberne. “I will remain here.” The two gentlemen hastily separated; each in a fever of excitement wholly uncontrollable. CHAPTER L. THE PURSUIT AND ESCAPE Near to that part of the Thames on which the church at Rotherhithe abuts, where the buildings on the banks are dirtiest and the vessels on the river blackest with the dust of colliers and the smoke of close-built low-roofed houses, there exists the filthiest, the strangest, the most extraordinary of the many localities that are hidden in London, wholly unknown, even by name, to the great mass of its inhabitants. To reach this place, the visitor has to penetrate through a maze of close, narrow, and muddy streets, thronged by the roughest and poorest of waterside people, and devoted to the traffic they may be supposed to occasion. The cheapest and least delicate provisions are heaped in the shops; the coarsest and commonest articles of wearing apparel dangle at the salesman’s door, and stream from the house-parapet and windows. Jostling with unemployed labourers of the lowest class, ballast-heavers, coal-whippers, brazen women, ragged children, and the raff and refuse of the river, he makes his way with difficulty along, assailed by offensive sights and smells from the narrow alleys which branch off on the right and left, and deafened by the clash of ponderous waggons that bear great piles of merchandise from the stacks of warehouses that rise from every corner. Arriving, at length, in streets remoter and less-frequented than those through which he has passed, he walks beneath tottering house-fronts projecting over the pavement, dismantled walls that seem to totter as he passes, chimneys half crushed half hesitating to fall, windows guarded by rusty iron bars that time and dirt have almost eaten away, every imaginable sign of desolation and neglect. In such a neighborhood, beyond Dockhead in the Borough of Southwark, stands Jacob’s Island, surrounded by a muddy ditch, six or eight feet deep and fifteen or twenty wide when the tide is in, once called Mill Pond, but known in the days of this story as Folly Ditch. It is a creek or inlet from the Thames, and can always be filled at high water by opening the sluices at the Lead Mills from which it took its old name. At such times, a stranger, looking from one of the wooden bridges thrown across it at Mill Lane, will see the inhabitants of the houses on either side lowering from their back doors and windows, buckets, pails, domestic utensils of all kinds, in which to haul the water up; and when his eye is turned from these operations to the houses themselves, his utmost astonishment will be excited by the scene before him. Crazy wooden galleries common to the backs of half a dozen houses, with holes from which to look upon the slime beneath; windows, broken and patched, with poles thrust out, on which to dry the linen that is never there; rooms so small, so filthy, so confined, that the air would seem too tainted even for the dirt and squalor which they shelter; wooden chambers thrusting themselves out above the mud, and threatening to fall into it—as some have done; dirt-besmeared walls and decaying foundations; every repulsive lineament of poverty, every loathsome indication of filth, rot, and garbage; all these ornament the banks of Folly Ditch. In Jacob’s Island, the warehouses are roofless and empty; the walls are crumbling down; the windows are windows no more; the doors are falling into the streets; the chimneys are blackened, but they yield no smoke. Thirty or forty years ago, before losses and chancery suits came upon it, it was a thriving place; but now it is a desolate island indeed. The houses have no owners; they are broken open, and entered upon by those who have the courage; and there they live, and there they die. They must have powerful motives for a secret residence, or be reduced to a destitute condition indeed, who seek a refuge in Jacob’s Island. In an upper room of one of these houses—a detached house of fair size, ruinous in other respects, but strongly defended at door and window: of which house the back commanded the ditch in manner already described—there were assembled three men, who, regarding each other every now and then with looks expressive of perplexity and expectation, sat for some time in profound and gloomy silence. One of these was Toby Crackit, another Mr. Chitling, and the third a robber of fifty years, whose nose had been almost beaten in, in some old scuffle, and whose face bore a frightful scar which might probably be traced to the same occasion. This man was a returned transport, and his name was Kags. “I wish,” said Toby turning to Mr. Chitling, “that you had picked out some other crib when the two old ones got too warm, and had not come here, my fine feller.” “Why didn’t you, blunder-head!” said Kags. “Well, I thought you’d have been a little more glad to see me than this,” replied Mr. Chitling, with a melancholy air. “Why, look’e, young gentleman,” said Toby, “when a man keeps himself so very ex-clusive as I have done, and by that means has a snug house over his head with nobody a prying and smelling about it, it’s rather a startling thing to have the honour of a wisit from a young gentleman (however respectable and pleasant a person he may be to play cards with at conweniency) circumstanced as you are.” “Especially, when the exclusive young man has got a friend stopping with him, that’s arrived sooner than was expected from foreign parts, and is too modest to want to be presented to the Judges on his return,” added Mr. Kags. There was a short silence, after which Toby Crackit, seeming to abandon as hopeless any further effort to maintain his usual devil-may-care swagger, turned to Chitling and said, “When was Fagin took then?” “Just at dinner-time—two o’clock this afternoon. Charley and I made our lucky up the wash-us chimney, and Bolter got into the empty water-butt, head downwards; but his legs were so precious long that they stuck out at the top, and so they took him too.” “And Bet?” “Poor Bet! She went to see the Body, to speak to who it was,” replied Chitling, his countenance falling more and more, “and went off mad, screaming and raving, and beating her head against the boards; so they put a strait-weskut on her and took her to the hospital—and there she is.” “Wot’s come of young Bates?” demanded Kags. “He hung about, not to come over here afore dark, but he’ll be here soon,” replied Chitling. “There’s nowhere else to go to now, for the people at the Cripples are all in custody, and the bar of the ken—I went up there and see it with my own eyes—is filled with traps.” “This is a smash,” observed Toby, biting his lips. “There’s more than one will go with this.” “The sessions are on,” said Kags: “if they get the inquest over, and Bolter turns King’s evidence: as of course he will, from what he’s said already: they can prove Fagin an accessory before the fact, and get the trial on on Friday, and he’ll swing in six days from this, by G—!”