haunting him; despair was in his very triumph and relief: wild, ungovernable, raging despair, for the uselessness of the peril into which he had plunged; despair that hardened him and maddened him, and set his teeth a grinding in the moment of his exultation.
"My good friend!" said Martin, laying his hand on Chuffey's sleeve. "This is no place for you to remain in. Come with me."
"Just his old way!" cried Chuffey, looking up into his face. "I almost believe it's Mr. Chuzzlewit alive again. Yes! Take me with you! Stay though, stay."
"For what?" asked Martin.
"I can't leave her, poor thing!" said Chuifey, "She has been very good to me. I can't leave her, Mr. Chuzzlewit. Thank you kindly. I'll remain here. I hav'n't long to remain; it's no great matter."
As he meekly shook his poor, gray head, and thanked old Martin in these words, Mrs. Gamp, now entirely in the room, was affected to tears.
"The mercy as it is!" she said, "as sech a dear, good, reverend creetur, never got into the cludges of Betsey Prig, which but for me he would have done, undoubted: facts bein stubborn and not easy drove!"
"You heard me speak to you just now, old man," said Jonas to his uncle. "I 'll have no more tampering with my people, man or woman. Do you see the door?"
"Do you see the door?" returned the voice of Mark, coming from that direction. "Look at it!"
He looked, and his gaze was nailed there. Fatal, ill-omened, blighted thresh-hold, cursed by his father's footsteps in his dying hour, cursed by his young wife's sorrowing tread, cursed by the daily shadow of the old clerk's figure, cursed by the crossing of his murderer's feet—what men were standing in the doorway!
Nadgett, foremost.
Hark! It came on, roaring like a sea! Hawkers burst into the street, crying it up and down; windows were thrown open that the inhabitants might hear it; people stopped to listen in the road and on the pavement; the bells, the same bells began to ring: tumbling over one another in a dance of boisterous joy at the discovery (that was the sound they had in his distempered thoughts), and making their airy playground rock.
"That is the man," said Nadgett. "By the window!"
Three others came in, laid hands upon him, and secured him. It was so quickly done, that he had not lost sight of the informer's face for an instant when his wrists were manacled together.
"Murder," said Nadgett, looking round on the astonished group. "Let no one interfere."
The sounding street repeated Murder. Barbarous and dreadful Murder; Murder, Murder, Murder. Rolling on from house to house, and echoing from stone to stone, until the voices died away into the distant hum, which seemed to mutter the same word.
They all stood silent; listening, and gazing in each other's faces, as the noise passed on.
