Martin Chuzzlewit by Charles Dickens (ebooks children's books free TXT) 📕
- Author: Charles Dickens
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‘Don’t go,’ said Jonas, putting his ashy lips to Mr Pecksniff’s ear and whispered across the bed. ‘It was a mercy you were present when he was taken ill. Some one might have said it was my doing.’
‘YOUR doing!’ cried Mr Pecksniff.
‘I don’t know but they might,’ he replied, wiping the moisture from his white face. ‘People say such things. How does he look now?’
Mr Pecksniff shook his head.
‘I used to joke, you know,’ said. Jonas: ‘but I—I never wished him dead. Do you think he’s very bad?’
‘The doctor said he was. You heard,’ was Mr Pecksniff’s answer.
‘Ah! but he might say that to charge us more, in case of his getting well’ said Jonas. ‘You mustn’t go away, Pecksniff. Now it’s come to this, I wouldn’t be without a witness for a thousand pound.’
Chuffey said not a word, and heard not a word. He had sat himself down in a chair at the bedside, and there he remained, motionless; except that he sometimes bent his head over the pillow, and seemed to listen. He never changed in this. Though once in the dreary night Mr Pecksniff, having dozed, awoke with a confused impression that he had heard him praying, and strangely mingling figures—not of speech, but arithmetic—with his broken prayers.
Jonas sat there, too, all night; not where his father could have seen him, had his consciousness returned, but hiding, as it were, behind him, and only reading how he looked, in Mr Pecksniff’s eyes. HE, the coarse upstart, who had ruled the house so long—that craven cur, who was afraid to move, and shook so, that his very shadow fluttered on the wall!
It was broad, bright, stirring day when, leaving the old clerk to watch him, they went down to breakfast. People hurried up and down the street; windows and doors were opened; thieves and beggars took their usual posts; workmen bestirred themselves; tradesmen set forth their shops; bailiffs and constables were on the watch; all kinds of human creatures strove, in their several ways, as hard to live, as the one sick old man who combated for every grain of sand in his fast-emptying glass, as eagerly as if it were an empire.
‘If anything happens Pecksniff,’ said Jonas, ‘you must promise me to stop here till it’s all over. You shall see that I do what’s right.’
‘I know that you will do what’s right, Mr Jonas,’ said Pecksniff.
‘Yes, yes, but I won’t be doubted. No one shall have it in his power to say a syllable against me,’ he returned. ‘I know how people will talk. Just as if he wasn’t old, or I had the secret of keeping him alive!’
Mr Pecksniff promised that he would remain, if circumstances should render it, in his esteemed friend’s opinion, desirable; they were finishing their meal in silence, when suddenly an apparition stood before them, so ghastly to the view that Jonas shrieked aloud, and both recoiled in horror.
Old Anthony, dressed in his usual clothes, was in the room—beside the table. He leaned upon the shoulder of his solitary friend; and on his livid face, and on his horny hands, and in his glassy eyes, and traced by an eternal finger in the very drops of sweat upon his brow, was one word—Death.
He spoke to them—in something of his own voice too, but sharpened and made hollow, like a dead man’s face. What he would have said, God knows. He seemed to utter words, but they were such as man had never heard. And this was the most fearful circumstance of all, to see him standing there, gabbling in an unearthly tongue.
‘He’s better now,’ said Chuffey. ‘Better now. Let him sit in his old chair, and he’ll be well again. I told him not to mind. I said so, yesterday.’
They put him in his easy-chair, and wheeled it near the window; then, swinging open the door, exposed him to the free current of morning air. But not all the air that is, nor all the winds that ever blew ‘twixt Heaven and Earth, could have brought new life to him.
Plunge him to the throat in golden pieces now, and his heavy fingers shall not close on one!
THE READER IS BROUGHT INTO COMMUNICATION WITH SOME PROFESSIONAL PERSONS, AND SHEDS A TEAR OVER THE FILAIL PIETY OF GOOD MR JONAS
Mr Pecksniff was in a hackney cabriolet, for Jonas Chuzzlewit had said ‘Spare no expense.’ Mankind is evil in its thoughts and in its base constructions, and Jonas was resolved it should not have an inch to stretch into an ell against him. It never should be charged upon his father’s son that he had grudged the money for his father’s funeral. Hence, until the obsequies should be concluded, Jonas had taken for his motto ‘Spend, and spare not!’
Mr Pecksniff had been to the undertaker, and was now upon his way to another officer in the train of mourning—a female functionary, a nurse, and watcher, and performer of nameless offices about the persons of the dead—whom he had recommended. Her name, as Mr Pecksniff gathered from a scrap of writing in his hand, was Gamp; her residence in Kingsgate Street, High Holborn. So Mr Pecksniff, in a hackney cab, was rattling over Holborn stones, in quest of Mrs Gamp.
This lady lodged at a bird-fancier’s, next door but one to the celebrated mutton-pie shop, and directly opposite to the original cat’s-meat warehouse; the renown of which establishments was duly heralded on their respective fronts. It was a little house, and this was the more convenient; for Mrs Gamp being, in her highest walk of art, a monthly nurse, or, as her signboard boldly had it, ‘Midwife,’ and lodging in the first-floor front, was easily assailable at night by pebbles, walking-sticks, and fragments of tobacco-pipe; all much more efficacious than the street-door knocker, which was so constructed as to wake the street with ease, and even spread alarms of fire in Holborn, without making the smallest impression on the premises to which it was addressed.
It chanced on this particular occasion, that Mrs Gamp had been up all the previous night, in attendance upon a ceremony to which the usage of gossips has given that name which expresses, in two syllables, the curse pronounced on Adam. It chanced that Mrs Gamp had not been regularly engaged, but had been called in at a crisis, in consequence of her great repute, to assist another professional lady with her advice; and thus it happened that, all points of interest in the case being over, Mrs Gamp had come home again to the bird-fancier’s and gone to bed. So when Mr Pecksniff drove up in the hackney cab, Mrs Gamp’s curtains were drawn close, and Mrs Gamp was fast asleep behind them.
If the bird-fancier had been at home, as he ought to have been, there would have been no great harm in this; but he was out, and his shop was closed. The shutters were down certainly; and in every pane of glass there was at least one tiny bird in a tiny bird-cage, twittering and hopping his little ballet of despair, and knocking his head against the roof; while one unhappy goldfinch who lived outside a red villa with his name on the door, drew the water for his own drinking, and mutely appealed to some good man to drop a farthing’s-worth of poison in it. Still, the door was shut. Mr Pecksniff tried the latch, and shook it, causing a cracked bell inside to ring most mournfully; but no one came. The bird-fancier was an easy shaver also, and a fashionable hairdresser also, and perhaps he had been sent for, express, from the court end of the town, to trim a lord, or cut and curl a lady; but however that might be, there, upon his own ground, he was not; nor was there any more distinct trace of him to assist the imagination of an inquirer, than a professional print or emblem of his calling (much favoured in the trade), representing a hairdresser of easy manners curling a lady of distinguished fashion, in the presence of a patent upright grand pianoforte.
Noting these circumstances, Mr Pecksniff, in the innocence of his heart, applied himself to the knocker; but at the first double knock every window in the street became alive with female heads; and before he could repeat the performance whole troops of married ladies (some about to trouble Mrs Gamp themselves very shortly) came flocking round the steps, all crying out with one accord, and with uncommon interest, ‘Knock at the winder, sir, knock at the winder. Lord bless you, don’t lose no more time than you can help—knock at the winder!’
Acting upon this suggestion, and borrowing the driver’s whip for the purpose, Mr Pecksniff soon made a commotion among the first floor flower-pots, and roused Mrs Gamp, whose voice—to the great satisfaction of the matrons—was heard to say, ‘I’m coming.’
‘He’s as pale as a muffin,’ said one lady, in allusion to Mr Pecksniff.
‘So he ought to be, if he’s the feelings of a man,’ observed another.
A third lady (with her arms folded) said she wished he had chosen any other time for fetching Mrs Gamp, but it always happened so with HER.
It gave Mr Pecksniff much uneasiness to find, from these remarks, that he was supposed to have come to Mrs Gamp upon an errand touching—not the close of life, but the other end. Mrs Gamp herself was under the same impression, for, throwing open the window, she cried behind the curtains, as she hastily attired herself—
‘Is it Mrs Perkins?’
‘No!’ returned Mr Pecksniff, sharply. ‘Nothing of the sort.’
‘What, Mr Whilks!’ cried Mrs Gamp. ‘Don’t say it’s you, Mr Whilks, and that poor creetur Mrs Whilks with not even a pincushion ready. Don’t say it’s you, Mr Whilks!’
‘It isn’t Mr Whilks,’ said Pecksniff. ‘I don’t know the man. Nothing of the kind. A gentleman is dead; and some person being wanted in the house, you have been recommended by Mr Mould the undertaker.’
As she was by this time in a condition to appear, Mrs Gamp, who had a face for all occasions, looked out of the window with her mourning countenance, and said she would be down directly. But the matrons took it very ill that Mr Pecksniff’s mission was of so unimportant a kind; and the lady with her arms folded rated him in good round terms, signifying that she would be glad to know what he meant by terrifying delicate females ‘with his corpses;’ and giving it as her opinion that he was quite ugly enough to know better. The other ladies were not at all behind-hand in expressing similar sentiments; and the children, of whom some scores had now collected, hooted and defied Mr Pecksniff quite savagely. So when Mrs Gamp appeared, the unoffending gentleman was glad to hustle her with very little ceremony into the cabriolet, and drive off, overwhelmed with popular execration.
Mrs Gamp had a large bundle with her, a pair of pattens, and a species of gig umbrella; the latter article in colour like a faded leaf, except where a circular patch of a lively blue had been dexterously let in at the top. She was much flurried by the haste she had made, and laboured under the most erroneous views of cabriolets, which she appeared to confound with mail-coaches or stage-wagons, inasmuch as she was constantly endeavouring for the first half mile to force her luggage through the little front window, and clamouring to the driver to ‘put it in the boot.’ When she was disabused
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