Chapter-7
Mr Bumble sat in the workhouse parlour with his eyes moodily fixed on the cheerless grate, whence, as it was summer time, no brighter gleam proceeded than the reflection of certain sickly rays of the sun which were sent back from its cold and shining surface.
Mr Bumble’s laced coat and cocked hat, where were they? He still wore knee-breeches and dark cotton stockings on his nether limbs, but they were not the breeches. The coat was wide-skirted and in that respect like the coat, but, oh, how different! The mighty cocked hat was replaced by a modest round one. Mr Bumble was no longer a beadle. In fact, he had married Mrs Corney and was master of the workhouse. Another beadle had come into power. On him the cocked hat, gold-laced coat, and staff had all three descended.
‘And tomorrow two months it was done!’ said Mr Bumble with a sigh, ‘It seems a age. I sold myself for six teaspoons, a pair of sugar tongs, and a milk-pot, with a small quantity of second-hand furniture and twenty pounds in money. I went very reasonable. Cheap, dirt cheap!’
‘Cheap!’ cried a shrill voice in Mr Bumble’s ear: ‘you would have been dear at any price; and dear enough I paid for you, Lord above knows that!’
‘Mrs Bumble, ma’am!’ said Mr Bumble with sentimental sternness.
‘Well!’ cried the lady.
‘Have the goodness to look at me,’ said Mr Bumble, fixing his eyes upon her.
The matter of fact is that the matron was in no way overpowered by Mr Bumble’s scowl, but on the contrary, treated it with great disdain, and even raised a loud threat which sounded as if it were genuine.
On hearing this most unexpected sound, Mr Bumble looked, first incredulous, and afterwards amazed. He then relapsed into his former state, nor did he arouse himself until his attention was again awakened by the voice of his partner.
‘Are you going to sit snoring there all day?’ inquired Mrs Bumble.
‘I shall sit here as long as I think proper, ma’am, and I shall snore, gape, sneeze, laugh, or cry, as the humour strikes me.’
Mrs Bumble, seeing that a blow for mastership must be struck, dropped into a chair and with a loud scream that Mr Bumble was a hard-hearted brute, fell into a paroxysm of tears.
But tears were not the things to find their way to Mr Bumble’s soul; his heart was waterproof.
‘Cry away,’ he said, ‘It opens the lungs, washes the countenance, exercises the eyes, and softens down the temper.’
Now, Mrs Corney that was, had tried the tears because they were less troublesome than a manual assault; but she was quite prepared to make trial of the latter mode of proceeding, as Mr Bumble was not long in discovering.
Clasping him tightly round the throat with one hand, the expect lady inflicted a shower of blows upon his head with the other. This done, she created a little variety by scratching his face and tearing his hair, before pushing him over with a chair.
‘Get up!’ said Mrs Bumble in a voice of command, ‘And take yourself away from here unless you want me to do something desperate.’
Mr Bumble rose with a very rueful countenance, wondering much what something desperate might be. Picking up his hat he looked towards the door.
‘Are you going?’ demanded Mrs Bumble.
‘Certainly, my dear, certainly,’ rejoined Mr Bumble, making a quicker motion towards the door.
Mr Bumhle was fairly taken by surprise and fairly beaten. He had a decided propensity for bullying, derived no inconsiderable pleasure from the exercise of petty cruelty, and consequently was (it is needless to say) a coward. He walked distractedly into the street and, after passing a great many public-houses, at length stepped into one whose parlour was deserted save by one solitary customer.
He had the air of a stranger, and seemed, by a certain haggardness in his look, as well as by the dusty soils on his dress, to have travelled some distance. He eyed Bumble askance.
‘I have seen you before, I think,’ said he eventually, ‘You were differently dressed at that time, and I only passed you in the street, but I should know you again. You were beadle here once, were you not?’
‘I was,’ said Mr Bumble in some surprise, ‘porochial beadle.’
‘Just so,’ rejoined the other, nodding his head, ‘it was in that character I saw you. What are you now?’
‘Master of the workhouse,’ rejoined Mr Bumble.
‘You have the same eye to your own interest that you always had, I doubt not,’ resumed the stranger, looking keenly into Mr Bumble’s eyes, as he raised them in astonishment at the question, ‘Don’t scruple to answer freely, man, I know you pretty well, you see.’
‘I suppose a married man,’ replied Mr Bumble, shading his eyes with his hand, and surveying the stranger from head to foot, in evident perplexity, ‘is not more averse to turning an honest penny when he can, than a single one. Porochial officers are not so well paid that they can afford to refuse any little extra fee, when it comes to them in a civil and proper manner.’
The stranger smiled and nodded his head again, as if to say he had not mistaken his man, then rang the bell and ordered Mr Bumble a drink.
‘Now listen to me,’ said the stranger, after closing the door and window, ‘I came down to this place today to find you out; and, by one of those chances which the devil throws in the way of his friends sometimes, you walked into the very room I was sitting in, while you were uppermost in my mind. I want some information from you. I don’t ask you to give it for nothing, slight as it is. Put up that, to begin with.’
As he spoke he pushed a couple of sovereigns across the table to his companion, carefully, as though unwilling that the clinking of money should be heard without. When Mr Bumble had scrupulously examined the coins to see if they were genuine, and had put them up, with much satisfaction, in his waistcoat pocket, he went on:
‘Carry your memory back—let me see—twelve years last winter. A boy was born in the workhouse.’
‘Many boys,’ observed Mr Bumble, shaking his head despondingly.
‘A murrain on the young devils!’ cried the stranger, ‘I speak of one—a meek-looking, pale-faced boy, who was apprenticed down here to a coffin-maker—I wish he had made his coffin and screwed his body in it—and who afterwards ran away to London, as it was supposed.’
‘Why, you mean Oliver! Young Twist!’ said Mr Bumble, ‘I remember him of course. There wasn’t a obstinater young rascal.’
‘It’s not of him I want to hear; I’ve heard enough of him,’ said the stranger, ‘It’s of a woman—the hag that nursed his mother. Where is she?’
‘She died last winter,’ rejoined Mr Bumble.
For a while the stranger seemed lost in thought; then he rose, as if to depart.
But Mr Bumble was cunning enough; and he at once saw that an opportunity was opened for the lucrative disposal of some secret in the possession of his better half. Hastily calling this circumstance to mind, he informed the stranger with an air of mystery that one woman had been closeted with the old harridan shortly before she died, and that she could, as he had reason to believe, throw some light on the subject of his inquiry. Only through him could he meet her.
‘Right,’ said the stranger, producing a scrap of paper and writing down upon it an obscure address by the water-side, ‘Bring her to me there tomorrow, at nine—in the evening. I needn’t tell you to be secret. It’s your interest.’
‘What name am I to ask for?’ said Mr Bumble.
‘Monks!’ rejoined the man, and strode away.
It was a dull, close, overcast summer evening. The clouds seemed to presage a violent thunderstorm, when Mr and Mrs Bumble, turning out of the main street of the town, directed their course towards a scattered little colony of ruinous houses, distant from it some mile and a half, or thereabouts, and erected on a low unwholesome swamp bordering upon the river. They reached a ruined building, which had been a factory, and paused as the first peal of distant thunder reverberated in the air, and the rain commenced pouring violently down.
‘The place should be somewhere here,’ said Bumble, consulting a scrap of paper he held in his hand.
‘Hello there!’ cried a voice from above, ‘I’ll be with you directly,’ with which the head disappeared and the door closed.
‘Is that the man?’ asked Mr Bumble’s good lady.
Mr Bumble nodded in the affirmative.
‘Then mind what I told you,’ said the matron, ‘and be careful to say as little as you can, or you’ll betray us at once.’
Mr Bumble, who had eyed the building with very rueful looks, was apparently about to express some doubts when Monks opened a small door near which they stood and beckoned them inwards.
‘Come in!’ he cried impatiently, stamping his foot upon the ground, ‘Don’t keep me here! This is the woman, is it?’
‘Hem! That is the woman,’ replied Mr Bumble, mindful of his wife’s caution.
Bestowing something halfway between a smile and a frown upon his two companions, and again beckoning them to follow him, the man hastened across the apartment, which was of considerable extent, but low in the roof. He led the way up a ladder and, hastily dosing the window-shutter of the room into which it led, lowered a lantern which hung at the end of a rope and pulley passed through one of the heavy beams in the ceiling, and which cast a dim light up on an old table and three chairs that were placed beneath it.
Now,’ said Monks, when they had all three seated themselves, ‘the sooner we come to our business the better for all. The woman knows what it is, does she?’
The question was addressed to Bumble, but his wife anticipated the reply by intimating that she was perfectly acquainted with it.
‘He is right in saying that you were with this hag the night she died, and that she told you something.’
‘About the mother of the boy you named,’ replied the matron interrupting him, ‘yes.’
‘The question is, of what nature was her communication?’ said Monks.
‘That’s the second,’ observed the woman, with much deliberation, ‘The first is, what may the communication be worth?’
‘Who the devil can tell that, without knowing of what kind it is?’ asked Monks.
‘Nobody better than you, I am persuaded,’ answered Mrs Bumble, who did not want for spirit, as her yoke-fellow could abundantly testify.
‘Humph!’ said Monks significantly, and with a look of eager inquiry, ‘there may be money’s worth to get, oh?’
‘What’s it worth to you?’ asked the woman collectedly.
‘It may be nothing; it may be twenty pounds,’ replied Monks. ‘Speak out and let me know which.’
‘Add five pounds to the sum you have named; give me five-and-twenty pounds in gold; and I’ll tell you all I know but not before.’
‘Five-and-twenty pounds!’ exclaimed Monks, drawing back.
‘I spoke as plainly as I could,’ replied Mrs Bumble. ‘It’s not a large sum, either.’
‘Not a large sum for a paltry secret that may be nothing when it’s told!’ cried Monks impatiently, ‘and which has been lying dead for twelve years past, or more!’
‘Such matters keep well and, like good wine, often double their value in course of time,’ answered the matron, still preserving the resolute indifference she had assumed. ‘As to lying dead, there are those who will lie dead for twelve thousand years to come, or twelve million, for anything you or I know, who will tell strange tales at last!’
‘What if I pay it for nothing?’ asked Monks, hesitating.
‘You can easily take it away again,’ replied the matron, ‘I am but a woman, alone here and unprotected.’
He thrust his hand into a side-pocket and, producing a canvas bag, put out twenty-five sovereigns on the table and pushed them over to the woman.
‘Now,’ he said, ‘gather them up and let’s hear your story.’
‘When this woman that we called old Sally died,’ the matron began, ‘she and I were alone. I stood alone beside the body when death came over it.’
‘Good,’ said Monks, regarding her attentively, ‘go on.’
‘She spoke of a young creature,’ resumed the matron, ‘who had brought a child into the world some years before, not merely in the same room, but in the same bed in which she then lay dying. The child was the one you named to him last night,’ said the matron, nodding carelessly towards her husband, ‘the mother this nurse had robbed. She stole from the corpse, when it had hardly turned to one, that which the dead mother had prayed her, with her last breath, to keep for the infant’s sake.’
‘She sold it?’ cried Monks, with desperate eagerness, ‘Did she sell it? Where? When? To whom? How long before?’
‘As she told me, with great difficulty, that she had done this,’ said the matron, ‘she fell back and died. But she clutched my gown violently, with one hand, which was partly closed; and when I saw that she was dead, and so removed the hand by force, I found it clasped a scrap of dirty paper, a pawnbroker’s duplicate.’
‘For what?’ demanded Monks.
‘In good time I’ll tell you.’ said the woman, ‘I judge that she had kept the trinket for some time in the hope of turning it to better account, and then had pawned it. The time was out in two days; I thought something might one day come of it too, and so redeemed the pledge.’
‘Where is it now?’ asked Monks quickly.
‘There,’ replied the woman. And as if glad to be relieved of it, she hastily threw upon the table a small kid bag scarcely large enough for a French watch, which Monks pouncing upon, tore open with trembling hands. It contained a little gold locket, in which were two locks of hair and a plain gold wedding ring.
‘It has the word “Agnes” engraved on the inside,’ said the woman, ‘There is a blank left for the surname, and then follows the date, which is within a year before the child was born. I found out that.’
‘And this is all?’ said Monks, after a dose and eager scrutiny of the contents of the little packet.
‘All,’ replied the woman, ‘I know nothing of the story beyond what I can guess at,’ she said, addressing Monks after a short silence, ‘and I want to know nothing, for it’s safer not. But I may ask you two questions, may I?’
‘You may ask,’ said Monks, with some show of surprise, but whether I answer or not, is another question.’
‘Which makes three?’ observed Mr Bumble, essaying a stroke of facetiousness.
‘Is that what you expected to get from me?’ demanded the matron.
‘It is,’ replied Monks, ‘The other question?’
‘What do you propose to do with it? Can it be used against me?’
‘Never,’ rejoined Monks, ‘nor against me either. See here! But don’t move a step forward, or your life is not worth a bulrush.’
With these words he suddenly wheeled the table aside and, pulling an iron ring in the boarding, threw back a large trap-door which opened close at Mr Bumble’s feet and caused that gentleman to retire several paces backward with great precipitation.
‘Look down,’ said Monks, lowering the lantern into the gulf, ‘Don’t fear me; I could have let you down quietly enough, when you were seated over it, if that had been my game.’
They could see the water below them.
Monks drew the little packet from his breast where he had hurriedly thrust it, and tying it to a leaden weight which had formed a part of some pulley and was lying on the floor, dropped it into the stream. It fell straight and true as a die, clove the water with a scarcely audible splash, and was gone.
The three, looking into one another’s faces, seemed to breathe more freely.
‘There!’ said Monks, closing the trap-door, which fell heavily back into its former position. ‘If the sea ever gives up its dead, as books say it will, it will keep its gold and silver to itself, and that trash among it. We have nothing more to say, and may break up our pleasant party.’
‘By all means,’ said Mr Bumble, with great alacrity.
‘You’ll keep a quiet tongue in your head, will you?’
Monks said with a threatening look.
‘You may depend upon me, young man,’ answered Mr Bumble, bowing himself gradually towards the ladder, with excessive politeness, ‘On everybody’s account, young man; on my own, you know, Mr Monks.’
‘I am glad for your sake to hear it,’ remarked Monks, ‘Light your lantern and get away from here as fast as you can.’
They were no sooner gone than Monks, who appeared to entertain an invincible repugnance to being left alone, called to a boy who had been hidden somewhere below. Bidding him go first and bear the light, he returned to the chamber he had just quitted.
