Tales from Dickens - Charles Dickens (free books to read .txt) 📗

almost daft. He would walk and cry and wring his hands and talk so strangely about his master's death that Jonas feared he would cause suspicion that all was not right. So he hired a nurse to come and keep him in his room.

This nurse went by the name of "Sairey" Gamp. She was a fat old woman, with a red face, a husky voice and a moist eye, which often turned up so as to show only the white. Wherever she went she carried a faded umbrella with a round white patch on top, and she always smelled of whisky. Mrs. Gamp was fond of talking of a certain "Mrs. Harris," whom she spoke of as a dear friend, but whom nobody else had ever seen. When she wanted to say something nice of herself she would put it in the mouth of Mrs. Harris. She was always quoting, "I says to Mrs. Harris," or "Mrs. Harris says to me." People used to say there was no such person at all, but this never failed to make Mrs. Gamp very angry.

She was a cruel nurse, and her way of making a sick man swallow a dose of medicine was by choking him till he gasped and then putting the spoon down his throat.

Such was the guardian Jonas chose to keep old Chuffey quiet in London, while he himself courted Pecksniff's daughter at her father's house. And it was not very long before he proposed to Mercy and they were married.

If Pecksniff had searched London he could not have found a worse man for his daughter to marry. But Pecksniff cared for nothing but money, and, as Jonas was now rich, he pretended great love for his new son-in-law and went around with his hands clasped and his eyes lifted to Heaven in pious thankfulness. As for Jonas, he began to treat Mercy brutally and soon she was miserable.

Jonas, meanwhile, had fallen in with a very prosperous individual. This was none other than Montague Tigg, the bold, jaunty, swaggering, shabby-genteel Tigg, who had once been glad to beg a coin from any one he knew. Now he had changed in both appearance and name. His face was covered with glossy black whiskers, his clothes were the costliest and his jewelry the most expensive. He was known now as "Mr. Tigg Montague," and was president of the great "Anglo-Bengalee Company."

The Anglo-Bengalee Company was a business which pretended to insure people's lives. It had fine offices with new furniture, new paper and a big brass plate on the door. It looked most solid and respectable, but it was really a trap, for Tigg and its other officers were only waiting until they had taken in enough money to run away with it to a foreign country. Jonas, sharp as he was, was deceived into believing it an honest enterprise. He came there to get his wife's life insured, and so he met Tigg.

Tigg, however, knowing Jonas of old, knew he had a great deal of money of his own, and thought, too, that he might influence Mr. Pecksniff, now his father-in-law. Tigg flattered Jonas accordingly, telling him what a sharp man he was and offered to make him a director in the company. He assured Jonas that there would be enormous profits and showed him how, by putting his own money into it, he could cheat other people out of much more. This idea tickled Jonas and he agreed.

Having got thus far, Tigg hired a spy named Nadgett to see if he could discover whether Jonas had ever committed any crime, the knowledge of which would put him in their power. Nadgett began his work, got on the right side of Sairey Gamp, the nurse, found out that old Chuffey was locked up for fear he might talk, and soon had a suspicion that Jonas had been concerned in his father's death.

As an experiment Tigg boldly charged him with it one day, and knew in an instant, by the way Jonas's face whitened with fear, that he had stumbled on the truth. He then told Jonas he not only must put into the company more of his own money, but must persuade Pecksniff to do likewise.

Jonas dared not now refuse. He thought of escaping to some other country, but wherever he turned he found Tigg's spies watching, and at last, he determined on a second murder to hide the first—the murder of Tigg, who knew his secret.

Tigg did not forget his plan to ensnare Pecksniff. To do this he took Jonas by carriage from London to Salisbury and, mile by mile, as they sped, the latter laid his plans. Near their destination accident came near assisting him. In the storm the carriage was upset and Tigg was thrown under the horses' feet. Jonas lashed the struggling horses, hoping they would trample and kill his companion, but the driver pulled him out just in time.

They finally reached The Blue Dragon Inn, and there, the next day, Jonas brought Pecksniff to dine with Tigg, and the latter told the architect all about his wonderful company. Though Pecksniff pretended he took the idea as a joke, yet the thought of cheating other people for big profits was very attractive to him. Before the evening was over he had fallen into the trap and had promised next day to give Tigg his money.

Jonas, his part of the bargain finished, hurried back to London. There, after telling Mercy not to disturb him, as he expected to sleep all next day, he locked himself into his room. When it was dark he dressed himself in a rough suit that he had prepared for disguise, let himself out by a rear way and took the stage back again to the village where he had left Tigg with Pecksniff.

He lay in wait in a wood through which Tigg passed after his last call on the architect, and there he killed him with a club. Then he went swiftly back to London and let himself into his room again, thinking no one had noticed his absence.

But there had been an eye at the shutter of the window in the house opposite that did not fail to observe Jonas when he went and when he came. And this eye belonged to Nadgett, the spy.

IV

WHAT CAME OF MARTIN'S TRIP TO AMERICA

While these things were occurring, much had happened to Martin and Mark Tapley far away in America.

The sailing vessel on which they crossed was crowded and dirty, and in order to save their money they had taken passage in the steerage. For a long time Martin was very seasick, and even when he grew better he was so ashamed at having to travel in the worst and cheapest part of the vessel that he would not go on deck.

But Tapley had none of this false pride. He made friends with all, helped every one he could and soon became such a general favorite that (as he thought sadly) he was having much too good a time for him to be jolly with any credit.

The long voyage of so many weeks came to an end at last, and they reached New York. They found it a strange place indeed, and met many strange characters in it. Only one they met pleased them: a gentleman named Bevan, and from him they got much information and advice. There seemed, however, to be little opening for an architect in New York, and Martin at length decided to go West and settle in some newer region.

In the western town where they left the train they found a land agent who was selling lots in a new settlement, on the Mississippi River, called Eden. To buy their railway tickets Martin had already sold the ring Mary Graham had given him, and he had just enough to purchase a tract of land in Eden and to pay their fare there.

Martin looked at the agent's splendid plans of the new town, showing wharves, churches and public buildings, and thought it a capital place for a young architect; so they closed the bargain without more ado and took the next steamer down the desolate Mississippi.

A terrible disappointment awaited them when they found what Eden really was—a handful of rotting log cabins set in a swamp. The wharves and public buildings existed only on the agent's map with which he had so cruelly cheated them. There were only a few wan men alive there—the rest had succumbed to the sickly hot vapor that rose from the swamp and hung in the air. At the sight of what they had come to, Martin lay down and wept in very despair. But for his comrade's cheerfulness he would have wholly given up hope.

Next morning Martin found himself in the grip of the deadly fever with which the place reeked, and for many days thereafter he lay helpless and burning, nursed like a child by the faithful Mark Tapley. When he had begun to recover it came the other's turn to fall ill and Martin took his place at nursing.

Through all Tapley never complained. At last he found himself in circumstances where to be jolly was really a credit to anybody. He always insisted that he was in great spirits, and when he was weakest and could not speak he wrote "jolly" on a slate for Martin to see.

Watching beside his friend day by day, Martin came to know himself truly and to see his own selfishness. As he nursed Tapley to health again he determined to root it out of his nature and to return to England a nobler man. He began to think not of what he had sacrificed for Mary, but of what she would have sacrificed for him, and to wish with all his heart that he had not parted from his grandfather in anger. And even before Tapley was able to sit up Martin had determined to return as soon as possible to England.

He laid aside his pride and wrote to Bevan, who had befriended them in New York, to borrow money enough to bring them both to that city. Once there, Tapley found a position as cook in the same ship that had brought them from England and his wages proved sufficient to pay for Martin's passage.

So Martin started back to the home he had parted from a year before, poorer than he had left it, but at heart a better and a sounder man. His false pride was gone now. He mingled with others and helped them, and by the time they landed he was as popular a passenger as Mark Tapley was a cook.

Almost the first man they saw on landing, curiously enough, was the oily Pecksniff. They saw him escorted along the street, pointed out by the crowds as "the great architect." On that day the corner stone of a splendid public building was to be laid, and Pecksniff's design for this structure had taken the prize. The two comrades went with the crowd to hear Pecksniff's speech, and looking over a gentleman's shoulder at a picture of the building as it was to look, Martin saw that it was the very grammar school he himself had designed when he had first come to Pecksniff's. The old rascal had stolen the plans!

Martin was angry, of course, but there was no help for it, and besides he had other things to think of. Mary Graham, to be sure, was his first thought, and he and Tapley set out at once for The Blue Dragon to learn the latest news.

The rosy landlady laughed and cried together to see them and Mark Tapley kissed her so many times that she was quite out of breath. She cooked the finest dinner in the world for them and