第131章

They raised him up, and fetched a surgeon with all haste, who bled the patient and applied some remedies; but the fits held him so long that it was past midnight when they got him, quiet now, but quite unconscious and exhausted, into bed.

`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!