CHAPTER FORTY-TWO
CONTINUATION OF THE ENTERPRISE OF MR JONAS AND HIS FRIEND
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!'
