The doctor’s prognostication in reference to the weather was speedily
verified. Although the weather was not a patient of his, and no third
party had required him to give an opinion on the case, the quick
fulfilment of his prophecy may be taken as an instance of his
professional tact; for, unless the threatening aspect of the night
had been perfectly plain and unmistakable, Mr Jobling would never have
compromised his reputation by delivering any sentiments on the subject.
He used this principle in Medicine with too much success to be unmindful
of it in his commonest transactions.
It was one of those hot, silent nights, when people sit at windows
listening for the thunder which they know will shortly break; when
they recall dismal tales of hurricanes and earthquakes; and of lonely
travellers on open plains, and lonely ships at sea, struck by lightning.
Lightning flashed and quivered on the black horizon even now; and hollow
murmurings were in the wind, as though it had been blowing where the
thunder rolled, and still was charged with its exhausted echoes. But the
storm, though gathering swiftly, had not yet come up; and the prevailing
stillness was the more solemn, from the dull intelligence that seemed to
hover in the air, of noise and conflict afar off.
It was very dark; but in the murky sky there were masses of cloud which
shone with a lurid light, like monstrous heaps of copper that had been
heated in a furnace, and were growing cold. These had been advancing
steadily and slowly, but they were now motionless, or nearly so. As the
carriage clattered round the corners of the streets, it passed at every
one a knot of persons who had come there--many from their houses close
at hand, without hats--to look up at that quarter of the sky. And now a
very few large drops of rain began to fall, and thunder rumbled in the
distance.
Jonas sat in a corner of the carriage with his bottle resting on his
knee, and gripped as tightly in his hand as if he would have ground its
neck to powder if he could. Instinctively attracted by the night, he
had laid aside the pack of cards upon the cushion; and with the same
involuntary impulse, so intelligible to both of them as not to occasion
a remark on either side, his companion had extinguished the lamp. The
front glasses were down; and they sat looking silently out upon the
gloomy scene before them.
They were clear of London, or as clear of it as travellers can be whose
way lies on the Western Road, within a stage of that enormous city.
Occasionally they encountered a foot-passenger, hurrying to the nearest
place of shelter; or some unwieldy cart proceeding onward at a heavy
trot, with the same end in view. Little clusters of such vehicles were
gathered round the stable-yard or baiting-place of every wayside tavern;
while their drivers watched the weather from the doors and open windows,
or made merry within. Everywhere the people were disposed to bear each
other company rather than sit alone; so that groups of watchful faces
seemed to be looking out upon the night AND THEM, from almost every
house they passed.
It may appear strange that this should have disturbed Jonas, or rendered
him uneasy; but it did. After muttering to himself, and often changing
his position, he drew up the blind on his side of the carriage, and
turned his shoulder sulkily towards it. But he neither looked at his
companion, nor broke the silence which prevailed between them, and which
had fallen so suddenly upon himself, by addressing a word to him.
The thunder rolled, the lightning flashed; the rain poured down like
Heaven’s wrath. Surrounded at one moment by intolerable light, and
at the next by pitchy darkness, they still pressed forward on their
journey. Even when they arrived at the end of the stage, and might have
tarried, they did not; but ordered horses out immediately. Nor had this
any reference to some five minutes’ lull, which at that time seemed to
promise a cessation of the storm. They held their course as if they were
impelled and driven by its fury. Although they had not exchanged a dozen
words, and might have tarried very well, they seemed to feel, by joint
consent, that onward they must go.
Louder and louder the deep thunder rolled, as through the myriad
halls of some vast temple in the sky; fiercer and brighter became the
lightning, more and more heavily the rain poured down. The horses (they
were travelling now with a single pair) plunged and started from the
rills of quivering fire that seemed to wind along the ground before
them; but there these two men sat, and forward they went as if they were
led on by an invisible attraction.
The eye, partaking of the quickness of the flashing light, saw in its
every gleam a multitude of objects which it could not see at steady noon
in fifty times that period. Bells in steeples, with the rope and wheel
that moved them; ragged nests of birds in cornices and nooks; faces full
of consternation in the tilted waggons that came tearing past; their
frightened teams ringing out a warning which the thunder drowned;
harrows and ploughs left out in fields; miles upon miles of
hedge-divided country, with the distant fringe of trees as obvious as
the scarecrow in the bean-field close at hand; in a trembling, vivid,
flickering instant, everything was clear and plain; then came a flush
of red into the yellow light; a change to blue; a brightness so
intense that there was nothing else but light; and then the deepest and
profoundest darkness.
The lightning being very crooked and very dazzling may have presented
or assisted a curious optical illusion, which suddenly rose before the
startled eyes of Montague in the carriage, and as rapidly disappeared.
He thought he saw Jonas with his hand lifted, and the bottle clenched in
it like a hammer, making as if he would aim a blow at his head. At the
same time he observed (or so believed) an expression in his face--a
combination of the unnatural excitement he had shown all day, with a
wild hatred and fear--which might have rendered a wolf a less terrible
companion.
He uttered an involuntary exclamation, and called to the driver, who
brought his horses to a stop with all speed.
It could hardly have been as he supposed, for although he had not taken
his eyes off his companion, and had not seen him move, he sat reclining
in his corner as before.
‘What’s the matter?’ said Jonas. ‘Is that your general way of waking out
of your sleep?’
‘I could swear,’ returned the other, ‘that I have not closed my eyes!’
‘When you have sworn it,’ said Jonas, composedly, ‘we had better go on
again, if you have only stopped for that.’
He uncorked the bottle with the help of his teeth; and putting it to his
lips, took a long draught.
‘I wish we had never started on this journey. This is not,’ said
Montague, recoiling instinctively, and speaking in a voice that betrayed
his agitation; ‘this is not a night to travel in.’
‘Ecod! you’re right there,’ returned Jonas, ‘and we shouldn’t be out
in it but for you. If you hadn’t kept me waiting all day, we might have
been at Salisbury by this time; snug abed and fast asleep. What are we
stopping for?’
His companion put his head out of window for a moment, and drawing it in
again, observed (as if that were his cause of anxiety), that the boy was
drenched to the skin.
‘Serve him right,’ said Jonas. ‘I’m glad of it. What the devil are we
stopping for? Are you going to spread him out to dry?’
‘I have half a mind to take him inside,’ observed the other with some
hesitation.
‘Oh! thankee!’ said Jonas. ‘We don’t want any damp boys here; especially
a young imp like him. Let him be where he is. He ain’t afraid of a
little thunder and lightning, I dare say; whoever else is. Go on,
driver. We had better have HIM inside perhaps,’ he muttered with a
laugh; ‘and the horses!’
‘Don’t go too fast,’ cried Montague to the postillion; ‘and take care
how you go. You were nearly in the ditch when I called to you.’
This was not true; and Jonas bluntly said so, as they moved forward
again. Montague took little or no heed of what he said, but repeated
that it was not a night for travelling, and showed himself, both then
and afterwards, unusually anxious.
From this time Jonas recovered his former spirits, if such a term may be
employed to express the state in which he had left the city. He had his
bottle often at his mouth; roared out snatches of songs, without the
least regard to time or tune or voice, or anything but loud discordance;
and urged his silent friend to be merry with him.
‘You’re the best company in the world, my good fellow,’ said Montague
with an effort, ‘and in general irresistible; but to-night--do you hear
it?’
‘Ecod! I hear and see it too,’ cried Jonas, shading his eyes, for the
moment, from the lightning which was flashing, not in any one direction,
but all around them. ‘What of that? It don’t change you, nor me, nor our
affairs. Chorus, chorus,
It may lighten and storm,
Till it hunt the red worm
From the grass where the gibbet is driven;
But it can’t hurt the dead,
And it won’t save the head
That is doom’d to be rifled and riven.
That must be a precious old song,’ he added with an oath, as he stopped
short in a kind of wonder at himself. ‘I haven’t heard it since I was
a boy, and how it comes into my head now, unless the lightning put it
there, I don’t know. “Can’t hurt the dead”! No, no. “And won’t save the
head”! No, no. No! Ha, ha, ha!’
His mirth was of such a savage and extraordinary character, and was,
in an inexplicable way, at once so suited to the night, and yet such
a coarse intrusion on its terrors, that his fellow-traveller, always
a coward, shrunk from him in positive fear. Instead of Jonas being his
tool and instrument, their places seemed to be reversed. But there was
reason for this too, Montague thought; since the sense of his debasement
might naturally inspire such a man with the wish to assert a noisy
independence, and in that licence to forget his real condition. Being
quick enough, in reference to such subjects of contemplation, he was not
long in taking this argument into account and giving it its full weight.
But still, he felt a vague sense of alarm, and was depressed and uneasy.
He was certain he had not been asleep; but his eyes might have deceived
him; for, looking at Jonas now in any interval of darkness, he could
represent his figure to himself in any attitude his state of mind
suggested. On the other hand, he knew full well that Jonas had no
reason to love him; and even taking the piece of pantomime which had
so impressed his mind to be a real gesture, and not the working of
his fancy, the most that could be said of it was, that it was quite in
keeping with the rest of his diabolical fun, and had the same impotent
expression of truth in it. ‘If he could kill me with a wish,’ thought
the swindler, ‘I should not live long.’
He resolved that when he should have had his use of Jonas, he would
restrain him with an iron curb; in the meantime, that he could not do
better than leave him to take his own way, and preserve his own peculiar
description of good-humour, after his own uncommon manner. It was no
great sacrifice to bear with him; ‘for when all is got that can be got,’
thought Montague, ‘I shall decamp across the water, and have the laugh
on my side--and the gains.’
Such were his reflections from hour to hour; his state of mind being one
in which the same thoughts constantly present themselves over and
over again in wearisome repetition; while Jonas, who appeared to have
dismissed reflection altogether, entertained himself as before.
They agreed that they would go to Salisbury, and would cross to Mr
Pecksniff’s in the morning; and at the prospect of deluding that worthy
gentleman, the spirits of his amiable son-in-law became more boisterous
than ever.
As the night wore on, the thunder died away, but still rolled
gloomily and mournfully in the distance. The lightning too, though now
comparatively harmless, was yet bright and frequent. The rain was quite
as violent as it had ever been.
It was their ill-fortune, at about the time of dawn and in the last
stage of their journey, to have a restive pair of horses. These animals
had been greatly terrified in their stable by the tempest; and coming
out into the dreary interval between night and morning, when the glare
of the lightning was yet unsubdued by day, and the various objects in
their view were presented in indistinct and exaggerated shapes which
they would not have worn by night, they gradually became less and less
capable of control; until, taking a sudden fright at something by the
roadside, they dashed off wildly down a steep hill, flung the driver
from his saddle, drew the carriage to the brink of a ditch, stumbled
headlong down, and threw it crashing over.
The travellers had opened the carriage door, and had either jumped or
fallen out. Jonas was the first to stagger to his feet. He felt sick and
weak, and very giddy, and reeling to a five-barred gate, stood holding
by it; looking drowsily about as the whole landscape swam before his
eyes. But, by degrees, he grew more conscious, and presently observed
that Montague was lying senseless in the road, within a few feet of the
horses.
In an instant, as if his own faint body were suddenly animated by a
demon, he ran to the horses’ heads; and pulling at their bridles with
all his force, set them struggling and plunging with such mad violence
as brought their hoofs at every effort nearer to the skull of the
prostrate man; and must have led in half a minute to his brains being
dashed out on the highway.
As he did this, he fought and contended with them like a man possessed,
making them wilder by his cries.
‘Whoop!’ cried Jonas. ‘Whoop! again! another! A little more, a little
more! Up, ye devils! Hillo!’
As he heard the driver, who had risen and was hurrying up, crying to him
to desist, his violence increased.
‘Hiilo! Hillo!’ cried Jonas.
‘For God’s sake!’ cried the driver. ‘The gentleman--in the road--he’ll
be killed!’
The same shouts and the same struggles were his only answer. But the man
darting in at the peril of his own life, saved Montague’s, by dragging
him through the mire and water out of the reach of present harm. That
done, he ran to Jonas; and with the aid of his knife they very shortly
disengaged the horses from the broken chariot, and got them, cut and
bleeding, on their legs again. The postillion and Jonas had now leisure
to look at each other, which they had not had yet.
‘Presence of mind, presence of mind!’ cried Jonas, throwing up his hands
wildly. ‘What would you have done without me?’
‘The other gentleman would have done badly without ME,’ returned the
man, shaking his head. ‘You should have moved him first. I gave him up
for dead.’
‘Presence of mind, you croaker, presence of mind’ cried Jonas with a
harsh loud laugh. ‘Was he struck, do you think?’
They both turned to look at him. Jonas muttered something to himself,
when he saw him sitting up beneath the hedge, looking vacantly around.
‘What’s the matter?’ asked Montague. ‘Is anybody hurt?’
‘Ecod!’ said Jonas, ‘it don’t seem so. There are no bones broken, after
all.’
They raised him, and he tried to walk. He was a good deal shaken, and
trembled very much. But with the exception of a few cuts and bruises
this was all the damage he had sustained.
‘Cuts and bruises, eh?’ said Jonas. ‘We’ve all got them. Only cuts and
bruises, eh?’
‘I wouldn’t have given sixpence for the gentleman’s head in half-a-dozen
seconds more, for all he’s only cut and bruised,’ observed the post-boy.
‘If ever you’re in an accident of this sort again, sir; which I hope
you won’t be; never you pull at the bridle of a horse that’s down, when
there’s a man’s head in the way. That can’t be done twice without there
being a dead man in the case; it would have ended in that, this time, as
sure as ever you were born, if I hadn’t come up just when I did.’
Jonas replied by advising him with a curse to hold his tongue, and to go
somewhere, whither he was not very likely to go of his own accord. But
Montague, who had listened eagerly to every word, himself diverted the
subject, by exclaiming: ‘Where’s the boy?’
‘Ecod! I forgot that monkey,’ said Jonas. ‘What’s become of him?’ A very
brief search settled that question. The unfortunate Mr Bailey had been
thrown sheer over the hedge or the five-barred gate; and was lying in
the neighbouring field, to all appearance dead.
‘When I said to-night, that I wished I had never started on this
journey,’ cried his master, ‘I knew it was an ill-fated one. Look at
this boy!’
‘Is that all?’ growled Jonas. ‘If you call THAT a sign of it--’
‘Why, what should I call a sign of it?’ asked Montague, hurriedly. ‘What
do you mean?’
‘I mean,’ said Jonas, stooping down over the body, ‘that I never heard
you were his father, or had any particular reason to care much about
him. Halloa. Hold up there!’
But the boy was past holding up, or being held up, or giving any other
sign of life than a faint and fitful beating of the heart. After some
discussion the driver mounted the horse which had been least injured,
and took the lad in his arms as well as he could; while Montague and
Jonas, leading the other horse, and carrying a trunk between them,
walked by his side towards Salisbury.
‘You’d get there in a few minutes, and be able to send assistance to
meet us, if you went forward, post-boy,’ said Jonas. ‘Trot on!’
‘No, no,’ cried Montague; ‘we’ll keep together.’
‘Why, what a chicken you are! You are not afraid of being robbed; are
you?’ said Jonas.
‘I am not afraid of anything,’ replied the other, whose looks and manner
were in flat contradiction to his words. ‘But we’ll keep together.’
‘You were mighty anxious about the boy, a minute ago,’ said Jonas. ‘I
suppose you know that he may die in the meantime?’
‘Aye, aye. I know. But we’ll keep together.’
As it was clear that he was not to be moved from this determination,
Jonas made no other rejoinder than such as his face expressed; and they
proceeded in company. They had three or four good miles to travel; and
the way was not made easier by the state of the road, the burden by
which they were embarrassed, or their own stiff and sore condition.
After a sufficiently long and painful walk, they arrived at the Inn; and
having knocked the people up (it being yet very early in the morning),
sent out messengers to see to the carriage and its contents, and roused
a surgeon from his bed to tend the chief sufferer. All the service he
could render, he rendered promptly and skillfully. But he gave it as
his opinion that the boy was labouring under a severe concussion of the
brain, and that Mr Bailey’s mortal course was run.
If Montague’s strong interest in the announcement could have been
considered as unselfish in any degree, it might have been a redeeming
trait in a character that had no such lineaments to spare. But it was
not difficult to see that, for some unexpressed reason best appreciated
by himself, he attached a strange value to the company and presence of
this mere child. When, after receiving some assistance from the surgeon
himself, he retired to the bedroom prepared for him, and it was broad
day, his mind was still dwelling on this theme.
‘I would rather have lost,’ he said, ‘a thousand pounds than lost the
boy just now. But I’ll return home alone. I am resolved upon that.
Chuzzlewit shall go forward first, and I will follow in my own time.
I’ll have no more of this,’ he added, wiping his damp forehead.
‘Twenty-four hours of this would turn my hair grey!’
After examining his chamber, and looking under the bed, and in the
cupboards, and even behind the curtains, with unusual caution (although
it was, as has been said, broad day), he double-locked the door by which
he had entered, and retired to rest. There was another door in the
room, but it was locked on the outer side; and with what place it
communicated, he knew not.
His fears or evil conscience reproduced this door in all his dreams. He
dreamed that a dreadful secret was connected with it; a secret which he
knew, and yet did not know, for although he was heavily responsible
for it, and a party to it, he was harassed even in his vision by
a distracting uncertainty in reference to its import. Incoherently
entwined with this dream was another, which represented it as the
hiding-place of an enemy, a shadow, a phantom; and made it the business
of his life to keep the terrible creature closed up, and prevent it
from forcing its way in upon him. With this view Nadgett, and he, and a
strange man with a bloody smear upon his head (who told him that he
had been his playfellow, and told him, too, the real name of an old
schoolmate, forgotten until then), worked with iron plates and nails to
make the door secure; but though they worked never so hard, it was all
in vain, for the nails broke, or changed to soft twigs, or what was
worse, to worms, between their fingers; the wood of the door splintered
and crumbled, so that even nails would not remain in it; and the iron
plates curled up like hot paper. All this time the creature on the other
side--whether it was in the shape of man, or beast, he neither knew nor
sought to know--was gaining on them. But his greatest terror was when
the man with the bloody smear upon his head demanded of him if he knew
this creatures name, and said that he would whisper it. At this the
dreamer fell upon his knees, his whole blood thrilling with inexplicable
fear, and held his ears. But looking at the speaker’s lips, he saw that
they formed the utterance of the letter ‘J’; and crying out aloud that
the secret was discovered, and they were all lost, he awoke.
Awoke to find Jonas standing at his bedside watching him. And that very
door wide open.
As their eyes met, Jonas retreated a few paces, and Montague sprang out
of bed.
‘Heyday!’ said Jonas. ‘You’re all alive this morning.’
‘Alive!’ the other stammered, as he pulled the bell-rope violently.
‘What are you doing here?’
‘It’s your room to be sure,’ said Jonas; ‘but I’m almost inclined to ask
you what YOU are doing here? My room is on the other side of that
door. No one told me last night not to open it. I thought it led into a
passage, and was coming out to order breakfast. There’s--there’s no bell
in my room.’
Montague had in the meantime admitted the man with his hot water and
boots, who hearing this, said, yes, there was; and passed into the
adjoining room to point it out, at the head of the bed.
‘I couldn’t find it, then,’ said Jonas; ‘it’s all the same. Shall I
order breakfast?’
Montague answered in the affirmative. When Jonas had retired, whistling,
through his own room, he opened the door of communication, to take out
the key and fasten it on the inner side. But it was taken out already.
He dragged a table against the door, and sat down to collect himself, as
if his dreams still had some influence upon his mind.
‘An evil journey,’ he repeated several times. ‘An evil journey. But I’ll
travel home alone. I’ll have no more of this.’
His presentiment, or superstition, that it was an evil journey, did
not at all deter him from doing the evil for which the journey was
undertaken. With this in view, he dressed himself more carefully than
usual to make a favourable impression on Mr Pecksniff; and, reassured by
his own appearance, the beauty of the morning, and the flashing of
the wet boughs outside his window in the merry sunshine, was soon
sufficiently inspirited to swear a few round oaths, and hum the fag-end
of a song.
But he still muttered to himself at intervals, for all that: ‘I’ll
travel home alone!’