style="font-size:15px;"> “It’s a hard matter to get to see you, lady. If I had taken offence, and gone away, as many would have done, you’d have been sorry for it one day, and not without reason, either.”
“I am very sorry if any one has behaved harshly to you,” replied Rose. “Do not think of it; but tell me why you wished to see me. I am the person you inquired for.”
The kind tone of this answer, the sweet voice, the gentle manner, the absence of any accent of haughtiness or displeasure, took the girl completely by surprise, and she burst into tears.
“Oh, lady, lady!” she said, clasping her hands passionately before her face, “if there was more like you, there would be fewer like me, – there would – there would!”
“Sit down,” said Rose earnestly; “you distress me. If you are in poverty or affliction I shall be truly happy to relieve you if I can, – I shall indeed. Sit down.”
“Let me stand, lady,” said the girl, still weeping, “and do not speak to me so kindly till you know me better. It is growing late. Is – is – that door shut?”
“Yes,” said Rose, recoiling a few steps, as if to be nearer assistance in case she should require it. “Why?”
“Because,” said the girl, “I am about to put my life and the lives of others in your hands. I am the girl that dragged little Oliver back to old Fagin’s, the Jew’s, on the night he went out from the house in Pentonville.”
“You!” said Rose Maylie.
“I, lady,” replied the girl. “I am the infamous creature you have heard of, that lives among the thieves, and that never from the first moment I can recollect my eyes and senses opening on London streets have known any better life, or kinder words than they have given me, so help me God! Do not mind shrinking openly from me, lady. I am younger than you would think, to look at me, but I am well used to it; the poorest women fall back as I make my way along the crowded pavement.”
“What dreadful things are these!” said Rose, involuntarily falling from her strange companion.
“Thank Heaven upon your knees, dear lady,” cried the girl, “that you had friends to care for and keep you in your childhood, and that you were never in the midst of cold and hunger, and riot and drunkenness, and – and something worse than all – as I have been from my cradle; I may use the word, for the alley and the gutter were mine, as they will be my deathbed.”
“I pity you!” said Rose in a broken voice. “It wrings my heart to hear you!”
“God bless you for your goodness!” rejoined the girl. “If you knew what I am sometimes you would pity me, indeed. But I have stolen away from those who would surely murder me if they knew I had been here to tell you what I have overheard. Do you know a man named Monks?”
“No,” said Rose.
“He knows you,” replied the girl; “and knew you were here, for it was by hearing him tell the place that I found you out.”
“I never heard the name,” said Rose.
“Then he goes by some other amongst us,” rejoined the girl, “which I more than thought before. Some time ago, and soon after Oliver was put into your house on the night of the robbery, I – suspecting this man – listened to a conversation held between him and Fagin in the dark. I found out from what I heard that Monks – the man I asked you about, you know – ”
“Yes,” said Rose, “I understand.”
“ – That Monks,” pursued the girl, “had seen him accidentally with two of our boys on the day we first lost him, and had known him directly to be the same child that he was watching for, though I couldn’t make out why. A bargain was struck with Fagin, that if Oliver was got back he should have a certain sum; and he was to have more for making him a thief, which this Monks wanted for some purpose of his own.”
“For what purpose?” asked Rose.
“He caught sight of my shadow on the wall as I listened in the hope of finding out,” said the girl; “and there are not many people besides me that could have got out of their way in time to escape discovery. But I did; and I saw him no more till last night.”
“And what occurred then?”
“I’ll tell you, lady. Last night he came again. Again they went up stairs, and I, wrapping myself up so that my shadow should not betray me, again listened at the door. The first words I heard Monks say were these: ‘So the only proofs of the boy’s identity lie at the bottom of the river, and the old hag that received them from the mother is rotting in her coffin.’ They laughed, and talked of his success in doing this; and Monks, talking on about the boy, and getting very wild, said, that though he had got the young devil’s money safely now, he’d rather have had it the other way; for, what a game it would have been to have brought down the boast of the father’s will, by driving him through every jail in town, and then hauling him up for some capital felony, which Fagin could easily manage, after having made a good profit of him besides.”
“What is all this!” said Rose.
“The truth, lady, though it comes from my lips,” replied the girl. “Then he said with oaths common enough in my ears, but strangers to yours, that if he could gratify his hatred by taking the boy’s life without bringing his own neck in danger, he would; but, as he couldn’t, he’d be upon the watch to meet him at every turn in life and if he took advantage of his birth and history, he might harm him yet. ‘In short, Fagin,’ he says, ‘Jew as you are, you never laid such snares as I’ll contrive for my young brother, Oliver.’”
“His brother!” exclaimed Rose, clasping her hands.
“Those were his words,” said Nancy, glancing uneasily round, as she had scarcely ceased to do, since she began to speak, for a vision of Sikes haunted her perpetually. “And more. When he spoke of you and the other lady, and said it seemed contrived by Heaven, or the devil, against him, that Oliver should come into your hands, he laughed, and said there was some comfort in that too, for how many thousands and hundreds of thousands of pounds would you not give, if you had them, to know who your two-legged spaniel was.”
“You do not mean,” said Rose, turning very pale, “to tell me that this was said in earnest.”
“He spoke in hard and angry earnest, if a man ever did,” replied the girl, shaking her head. “He is an earnest man when his hatred is up. I know many who do worse things; but I’d rather listen to them all a dozen times than to that Monks once. It is growing late, and I have to reach home without suspicion of having been on such an errand as this. I must get back quickly.”
“But what can I do?” said Rose. “To what use can I turn this communication without you? Back! Why do you wish to return to companions you paint in such terrible colours. If you repeat this information to a gentleman whom I can summon in one instant from the next room, you can be consigned to some place of safety without half an hour’s delay.”
“I wish to go back,” said the girl. “I must go back, because – how can I tell such things to an innocent lady like you? – because among the men I have told you of, there is one the most desperate among them all that I can’t leave; no – not even to be saved from the life I am leading now.”
“Your having interfered in this dear boy’s behalf before,” said Rose; “your coming here at so great a risk to tell me what you have heard; your
