The other assented at the moment, but presently stooped
down in quick alarm, and looked at the prisoner.
’Stop the coach! He has poisoned himself!
The smell comes from this bottle in his hand!’
The hand had shut upon it tight. With that rigidity
of grasp with which no living man, in the full strength
and energy of life, can clutch a prize he has won.
They dragged him out into the dark street; but jury,
judge, and hangman, could have done no more, and could
do nothing now. Dead, dead, dead.
IN WHICH THE TABLES ARE TURNED, COMPLETELY UPSIDE DOWN
Old Martin’s cherished projects, so long hidden
in his own breast, so frequently in danger of abrupt
disclosure through the bursting forth of the indignation
he had hoarded up during his residence with Mr Pecksniff,
were retarded, but not beyond a few hours, by the occurrences
just now related. Stunned, as he had been at first
by the intelligence conveyed to him through Tom Pinch
and John Westlock, of the supposed manner of his brother’s
death; overwhelmed as he was by the subsequent narratives
of Chuffey and Nadgett, and the forging of that chain
of circumstances ending in the death of Jonas, of
which catastrophe he was immediately informed; scattered
as his purposes and hopes were for the moment, by
the crowding in of all these incidents between him
and his end; still their very intensity and the tumult
of their assemblage nerved him to the rapid and unyielding
execution of his scheme. In every single circumstance,
whether it were cruel, cowardly, or false, he saw
the flowering of the same pregnant seed. Self;
grasping, eager, narrow-ranging, overreaching self;
with its long train of suspicions, lusts, deceits,
and all their growing consequences; was the root of
the vile tree. Mr Pecksniff had so presented
his character before the old man’s eyes, that
he—the good, the tolerant, enduring Pecksniff—had
become the incarnation of all selfishness and treachery;
and the more odious the shapes in which those vices
ranged themselves before him now, the sterner consolation
he had in his design of setting Mr Pecksniff right
and Mr Pecksniff’s victims too.
To this work he brought, not only the energy and determination
natural to his character (which, as the reader may
have observed in the beginning of his or her acquaintance
with this gentleman, was remarkable for the strong
development of those qualities), but all the forced
and unnaturally nurtured energy consequent upon their
long suppression. And these two tides of resolution
setting into one and sweeping on, became so strong
and vigorous, that, to prevent themselves from being
carried away before it, Heaven knows where, was as
much as John Westlock and Mark Tapley together (though
they were tolerably energetic too) could manage to
effect.
