Charles Dickens - Life And Adventures Of Martin Chuzzlewit

Uncouth and unsatisfactory as this short interview had been, it had furnished Mr Pecksniff with a hint which, supposing nothing further were imparted to him, repaid the journey up and home again. For the good gentleman had never (for want of an opportunity) dived into the depths of Mr Jonas's nature; and any recipe for catching such a sonin-law (much more one written on a leaf out of his own father's book) was worth the having. In order that he might lose no chance of improving so fair an opportunity by allowing Anthony to fall asleep before he had finished all he had to say, Mr Pecksniff, in the disposal of the refreshments on the table, a work to which he now applied himself in earnest, resorted to many ingenious contrivances for attracting his attention; such as coughing, sneezing, clattering the teacups, sharpening the knives, dropping the loaf, and so forth. But all in vain, for Mr Jonas returned, and Anthony had said no more.

“What! My father asleep again?” he cried, as he hung up his hat, and cast a look at him. “Ah! and snoring. Only hear!”

“He snores very deep,” said Mr Pecksniff.

“Snores deep?” repeated Jonas. “Yes; let him alone for that. He'll snore for six, at any time.”

“Do you know, Mr Jonas,” said Pecksniff, “that I think your father is—don't let me alarm you—breaking?”

“Oh, is he though?” replied Jonas, with a shake of the head which expressed the closeness of his dutiful observation. “Ecod, you don't know how tough he is. He ain't upon the move yet.”

“It struck me that he was changed, both in his appearance and manner,” said Mr Pecksniff.

“That's all you know about it,” returned Jonas, seating himself with a melancholy air. “He never was better than he is now. How are they all at home? How's Charity?”

“Blooming, Mr Jonas, blooming.”

“And the other one; how's she?”

“Volatile trifler!” said Mr Pecksniff, fondly musing. “She is well, she is well. Roving from parlour to bedroom, Mr Jonas, like a bee, skimming from post to pillar, like the butterfly; dipping her young beak into our currant wine, like the humming-bird! Ah! were she a little less giddy than she is; and had she but the sterling qualities of Cherry, my young friend!”

“Is she so very giddy, then?” asked Jonas.

“Well, well!” said Mr Pecksniff, with great feeling; “let me not be hard upon my child. Beside her sister Cherry she appears so. A strange noise that, Mr Jonas!”

“Something wrong in the clock, I suppose,” said Jonas, glancing towards it. “So the other one ain't your favourite, ain't she?”

The fond father was about to reply, and had already summoned into his face a look of most intense sensibility, when the sound he had already noticed was repeated.

“Upon my word, Mr Jonas, that is a very extraordinary clock,” said Pecksniff.

It would have been, if it had made the noise which startled them; but another kind of time-piece was fast running down, and from that the sound proceeded. A scream from Chuffey, rendered a hundred times more loud and formidable by his silent habits, made the house ring from roof to cellar; and, looking round, they saw Anthony Chuzzlewit extended on the floor, with the old clerk upon his knees beside him.

He had fallen from his chair in a fit, and lay there, battling for each gasp of breath, with every shrivelled vein and sinew starting in its place, as if it were bent on bearing witness to his age, and sternly pleading with Nature against his recovery. It was frightful to see how the principle of life, shut up within his withered frame, fought like a strong devil, mad to be released, and rent its ancient prison-house. A young man in the fullness of his vigour, struggling with so much strength of desperation, would have been a dismal sight; but an old, old, shrunken body, endowed with preternatural might, and giving the lie in every motion of its every limb and joint to its enfeebled aspect, was a hideous spectacle indeed.

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.”