Martin Chuzzlewit by Charles Dickens (ebooks children's books free TXT) 📕

making a great business of picking it up again.

‘No, sir,’ replied Tom. ‘I do not.’

‘You do not,’ said Mr Pecksniff, glancing at the old gentleman. ‘Oblige me by counting this money, Mr Pinch, and putting your name to this receipt. You do not?’

No, Tom did not. He scorned to deny it. He saw that Mr Pecksniff having overheard his own disgrace, cared not a jot for sinking lower yet in his contempt. He saw that he had devised this fiction as the readiest means of getting rid of him at once, but that it must end in that any way. He saw that Mr Pecksniff reckoned on his not denying it, because his doing so and explaining would incense the old man more than ever against Martin and against Mary; while Pecksniff himself would only have been mistaken in his ‘fragments.’ Deny it! No.

‘You find the amount correct, do you, Mr Pinch?’ said Pecksniff.

‘Quite correct, sir,’ answered Tom.

‘A person is waiting in the kitchen,’ said Mr Pecksniff, ‘to carry your luggage wherever you please. We part, Mr Pinch, at once, and are strangers from this time.’

Something without a name; compassion, sorrow, old tenderness, mistaken gratitude, habit; none of these, and yet all of them; smote upon Tom’s gentle heart at parting. There was no such soul as Pecksniff’s in that carcase; and yet, though his speaking out had not involved the compromise of one he loved, he couldn’t have denounced the very shape and figure of the man. Not even then.

‘I will not say,’ cried Mr Pecksniff, shedding tears, ‘what a blow this is. I will not say how much it tries me; how it works upon my nature; how it grates upon my feelings. I do not care for that. I can endure as well as another man. But what I have to hope, and what you have to hope, Mr Pinch (otherwise a great responsibility rests upon you), is, that this deception may not alter my ideas of humanity; that it may not impair my freshness, or contract, if I may use the expression, my Pinions. I hope it will not; I don’t think it will. It may be a comfort to you, if not now, at some future time, to know that I shall endeavour not to think the worse of my fellow-creatures in general, for what has passed between us. Farewell!’

Tom had meant to spare him one little puncturation with a lancet, which he had it in his power to administer, but he changed his mind on hearing this, and said:

‘I think you left something in the church, sir.’

‘Thank you, Mr Pinch,’ said Pecksniff. ‘I am not aware that I did.’

‘This is your double eye-glass, I believe?’ said Tom.

‘Oh!’ cried Pecksniff, with some degree of confusion. ‘I am obliged to you. Put it down, if you please.’

‘I found it,’ said Tom, slowly—‘when I went to bolt the vestry-window—in the pew.’

So he had. Mr Pecksniff had taken it off when he was bobbing up and down, lest it should strike against the panelling; and had forgotten it. Going back to the church with his mind full of having been watched, and wondering very much from what part, Tom’s attention was caught by the door of the state pew standing open. Looking into it he found the glass. And thus he knew, and by returning it gave Mr Pecksniff the information that he knew, where the listener had been; and that instead of overhearing fragments of the conversation, he must have rejoiced in every word of it.

‘I am glad he’s gone,’ said Martin, drawing a long breath when Tom had left the room.

‘It IS a relief,’ assented Mr Pecksniff. ‘It is a great relief. But having discharged—I hope with tolerable firmness—the duty which I owed to society, I will now, my dear sir, if you will give me leave, retire to shed a few tears in the back garden, as an humble individual.’

Tom went upstairs; cleared his shelf of books; packed them up with his music and an old fiddle in his trunk; got out his clothes (they were not so many that they made his head ache); put them on the top of his books; and went into the workroom for his case of instruments. There was a ragged stool there, with the horsehair all sticking out of the top like a wig: a very Beast of a stool in itself; on which he had taken up his daily seat, year after year, during the whole period of his service. They had grown older and shabbier in company. Pupils had served their time; seasons had come and gone. Tom and the worn-out stool had held together through it all. That part of the room was traditionally called ‘Tom’s Corner.’ It had been assigned to him at first because of its being situated in a strong draught, and a great way from the fire; and he had occupied it ever since. There were portraits of him on the walls, with all his weak points monstrously portrayed. Diabolical sentiments, foreign to his character, were represented as issuing from his mouth in fat balloons. Every pupil had added something, even unto fancy portraits of his father with one eye, and of his mother with a disproportionate nose, and especially of his sister; who always being presented as extremely beautiful, made full amends to Tom for any other jokes. Under less uncommon circumstances, it would have cut Tom to the heart to leave these things and think that he saw them for the last time; but it didn’t now. There was no Pecksniff; there never had been a Pecksniff; and all his other griefs were swallowed up in that.

So, when he returned into the bedroom, and, having fastened his box and a carpetbag, put on his walking gaiters, and his greatcoat, and his hat, and taken his stick in his hand, looked round it for the last time. Early on summer mornings, and by the light of private candle-ends on winter nights, he had read himself half blind in this same room. He had tried in this same room to learn the fiddle under the bedclothes, but yielding to objections from the other pupils, had reluctantly abandoned the design. At any other time he would have parted from it with a pang, thinking of all he had learned there, of the many hours he had passed there; for the love of his very dreams. But there was no Pecksniff; there never had been a Pecksniff, and the unreality of Pecksniff extended itself to the chamber, in which, sitting on one particular bed, the thing supposed to be that Great Abstraction had often preached morality with such effect that Tom had felt a moisture in his eyes, while hanging breathless on the words.

The man engaged to bear his box—Tom knew him well: a Dragon man— came stamping up the stairs, and made a roughish bow to Tom (to whom in common times he would have nodded with a grin) as though he were aware of what had happened, and wished him to perceive it made no difference to HIM. It was clumsily done; he was a mere waterer of horses; but Tom liked the man for it, and felt it more than going away.

Tom would have helped him with the box, but he made no more of it, though it was a heavy one, than an elephant would have made of a castle; just swinging it on his back and bowling downstairs as if, being naturally a heavy sort of fellow, he could carry a box infinitely better than he could go alone. Tom took the carpetbag, and went downstairs along with him. At the outer door stood Jane, crying with all her might; and on the steps was Mrs Lupin, sobbing bitterly, and putting out her hand for Tom to shake.

‘You’re coming to the Dragon, Mr Pinch?’

‘No,’ said Tom, ‘no. I shall walk to Salisbury tonight. I couldn’t stay here. For goodness’ sake, don’t make me so unhappy, Mrs Lupin.’

‘But you’ll come to the Dragon, Mr Pinch. If it’s only for tonight. To see me, you know; not as a traveller.’

‘God bless my soul!’ said Tom, wiping his eyes. ‘The kindness of people is enough to break one’s heart! I mean to go to Salisbury tonight, my dear good creature. If you’ll take care of my box for me till I write for it, I shall consider it the greatest kindness you can do me.’

‘I wish,’ cried Mrs Lupin, ‘there were twenty boxes, Mr Pinch, that I might have ‘em all.’

‘Thank’ee,’ said Tom. ‘It’s like you. Good-bye. Good-bye.’

There were several people, young and old, standing about the door, some of whom cried with Mrs Lupin; while others tried to keep up a stout heart, as Tom did; and others were absorbed in admiration of Mr Pecksniff—a man who could build a church, as one may say, by squinting at a sheet of paper; and others were divided between that feeling and sympathy with Tom. Mr Pecksniff had appeared on the top of the steps, simultaneously with his old pupil, and while Tom was talking with Mrs Lupin kept his hand stretched out, as though he said ‘Go forth!’ When Tom went forth, and had turned the corner Mr Pecksniff shook his head, shut his eyes, and heaving a deep sigh, shut the door. On which, the best of Tom’s supporters said he must have done some dreadful deed, or such a man as Mr Pecksniff never could have felt like that. If it had been a common quarrel (they observed), he would have said something, but when he didn’t, Mr Pinch must have shocked him dreadfully.

Tom was out of hearing of their shrewd opinions, and plodded on as steadily as he could go, until he came within sight of the turnpike where the tollman’s family had cried out ‘Mr Pinch!’ that frosty morning, when he went to meet young Martin. He had got through the village, and this toll-bar was his last trial; but when the infant toll-takers came screeching out, he had half a mind to run for it, and make a bolt across the country.

‘Why, deary Mr Pinch! oh, deary sir!’ cried the tollman’s wife. ‘What an unlikely time for you to be a-going this way with a bag!’

‘I am going to Salisbury,’ said Tom.

‘Why, goodness, where’s the gig, then?’ cried the tollman’s wife, looking down the road, as if she thought Tom might have been upset without observing it.

‘I haven’t got it,’ said Tom. ‘I—’ he couldn’t evade it; he felt she would have him in the next question, if he got over this one. ‘I have left Mr Pecksniff.’

The tollman—a crusty customer, always smoking solitary pipes in a Windsor chair, inside, set artfully between two little windows that looked up and down the road, so that when he saw anything coming up he might hug himself on having toll to take, and when he saw it going down, might hug himself on having taken it—the tollman was out in an instant.

‘Left Mr Pecksniff!’ cried the tollman.

‘Yes,’ said Tom, ‘left him.’

The tollman looked at his wife, uncertain whether to ask her if she had anything to suggest, or to order her to mind the children. Astonishment making him surly, he preferred the latter, and sent her into the toll-house with a flea in her ear.

‘You left Mr Pecksniff!’ cried the tollman, folding his arms, and spreading his legs. ‘I should as soon have thought of his head leaving him.’

‘Aye!’ said Tom, ‘so should I, yesterday. Good night!’

If a heavy drove of oxen hadn’t come by immediately, the tollman would have gone down to the village straight, to inquire into it. As things turned out, he smoked another pipe,