Jonas gave a short, dry cough; and, changing his position for an easier one, folded his arms without looking at them, though they could now see his face.
“Mr. Chuzzlewit wrote to her father; I mean the father of the poor thing who’s his wife,” said Chuffey; “and got him to come up, intending to hasten on the marriage. But his mind, like mine, went a little wrong through grief, and then his heart broke. He sank and altered from the time when he came to me in the night; and never held up his head again. It was only a few days, but he had never changed so much in twice the years. ‘Spare him, Chuff!’ he said, before he died. They were the only words he could speak. ‘Spare him, Chuff!’ I promised him I would. I’ve tried to do it. He’s his only son.”
On his recollection of the last scene in his old friend’s life, poor Chuffey’s voice, which had grown weaker and weaker, quite deserted him. Making a motion with his hand, as if he would have said that Anthony had taken it, and had died with it in his, he retreated to the corner where he usually concealed his sorrows; and was silent.
Jonas could look at his company now, and vauntingly too. “Well!” he said, after a pause. “Are you satisfied? or have you any more of your plots to broach? Why that fellow, Lewsome, can invent ’em for you by the score. Is this all? Have you nothing else?”
Old Martin looked at him steadily.
“Whether you are what you seemed to be at Pecksniff’s, or are something else and a mountebank, I don’t know and I don’t care,” said Jonas, looking downward with a smile, “but I don’t want you here. You were here so often when your brother was alive, and were always so fond of him (your dear, dear brother, and you would have been cuffing one another before this, ecod!), that I am not surprised at your being attached to the place; but the place is not attached to you, and you can’t leave it too soon, though you may leave it too late. And for my wife, old man, send her home straight, or it will be the worse for her. Ha, ha! You carry it with a high hand, too! But it isn’t hanging yet for a man to keep a penn’orth of poison for his own purposes, and have it taken from him by two old crazy jolter-heads who go and act a play about it. Ha, ha! Do you see the door?”
His base triumph, struggling with his cowardice, and shame, and guilt, was so detestable, that they turned away from him, as if he were some obscene and filthy animal, repugnant to the sight. And here that last black crime was busy with him too; working within him to his perdition. But for that, the old clerk’s story might have touched him, though never so lightly; but for that, the sudden removal of so great a load might have brought about some wholesome change even in him. With that deed done, however; with that unnecessary wasteful danger haunting him; despair was in his very triumph and relief; wild, ungovernable, raging despair, for the uselessness of the peril into which he had plunged; despair that hardened him and maddened him, and set his teeth a-grinding in a moment of his exultation.
“My good friend!” said old Martin, laying his hand on Chuffey’s sleeve. “This is no place for you to remain in. Come with me.”
“Just his old way!” cried Chuffey, looking up into his face. “I almost believe it’s Mr. Chuzzlewit alive again. Yes! Take me with you! Stay, though, stay.”
“For what?” asked old Martin.
“I can’t leave her, poor thing!” said Chuffey. “She has been very good to me. I can’t leave her, Mr. Chuzzlewit. Thank you kindly. I’ll remain here. I haven’t long to remain; it’s no great matter.”
As he meekly shook his poor, grey head, and thanked old Martin in these words, Mrs. Gamp, now entirely in the room, was affected to tears.
“The mercy as it is!” she said, “as sech a dear, good, reverend creetur never got into the clutches of Betsey Prig, which but for me he would have done, undoubted, facts bein’ stubborn and not easy drove!”
“You heard me speak to you just now, old man,” said Jonas to his uncle. “I’ll have no more tampering with my people, man or woman. Do you see the door?”
“Do you see the door?” returned the voice of Mark, coming from that direction. “Look at it!”
He looked, and his gaze was nailed there. Fatal, ill-omened blighted threshold, cursed by his father’s footsteps in his dying hour, cursed by his young wife’s sorrowing tread, cursed by the daily shadow of the old clerk’s figure, cursed by the crossing of his murderer’s feet—what men were standing in the doorway!
Nadgett foremost.
Hark! It came on, roaring like a sea! Hawkers burst into the street, crying it up and down; windows were thrown open that the inhabitants might hear it; people stopped to listen in the road and on the pavement; the bells, the same bells, began to ring; tumbling over one another in a dance of boisterous joy at the discovery (that was the sound they had in his distempered thoughts), and making their airy playground rock.
“That is the man,” said Nadgett. “By the window!”
Three others came in, laid hands upon him,
