Oliver Twist. Volume 3 of 3

“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.”