Our Mutual Friend - The Original Classic Edition. Dickens Charles

ain't you?' demanded the informer. All.

       'Then if I row up under the Fellowship and lay there, no need to whistle. You'll make out that there's a speck of something or another there, and you'll know it's me, and you'll come down that cause'ay to me. Understood all?'

       Understood all.

       'Off she goes then!'

       In a moment, with the wind cutting keenly at him sideways, he was staggering down to his boat; in a few moments he was clear, and

       creeping up the river under their own shore.

       Eugene had raised himself on his elbow to look into the darkness after him. 'I wish the boat of my honourable and gallant friend,' he murmured, lying down again and speaking into his hat, 'may be endowed with philanthropy enough to turn bottom-upward and extinguish him!--Mortimer.'

       'My honourable friend.'

       'Three burglaries, two forgeries, and a midnight assassination.' Yet in spite of having those weights on his conscience, Eugene was somewhat enlivened by the late slight change in the circumstances of affairs. So were his two companions. Its being a change was everything. The suspense seemed to have taken a new lease, and to have begun afresh from a recent date. There was something additional to look for. They were all three more sharply on the alert, and less deadened by the miserable influences of the place and time.

       More than an hour had passed, and they were even dozing, when one of the three--each said it was he, and he had NOT dozed-- made out Riderhood in his boat at the spot agreed on. They sprang up, came out from their shelter, and went down to him. When he saw them coming, he dropped alongside the causeway; so that they, standing on the causeway, could speak with him in whispers, under the shadowy mass of the Six Jolly Fellowship Porters fast asleep.

       'Blest if I can make it out!' said he, staring at them.

       'Make what out? Have you seen him?'

       'No.'

       'What HAVE you seen?' asked Lightwood. For, he was staring at them in the strangest way.

       'I've seen his boat.'

       'Not empty?'

       'Yes, empty. And what's more,--adrift. And what's more,--with one scull gone. And what's more,--with t'other scull jammed in the thowels and broke short off. And what's more,--the boat's drove tight by the tide 'atwixt two tiers of barges. And what's more,-- he's in luck again, by George if he ain't!'

       Chapter 14

       THE BIRD OF PREY BROUGHT DOWN

       Cold on the shore, in the raw cold of that leaden crisis in the four-and-twenty hours when the vital force of all the noblest and prettiest things that live is at its lowest, the three watchers looked each at the blank faces of the other two, and all at the blank face of Riderhood in his boat.

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       'Gaffer's boat, Gaffer in luck again, and yet no Gaffer!' So spake Riderhood, staring disconsolate.

       As if with one accord, they all turned their eyes towards the light of the fire shining through the window. It was fainter and duller. Perhaps fire, like the higher animal and vegetable life it helps to sustain, has its greatest tendency towards death, when the night is dying and the day is not yet born.

       'If it was me that had the law of this here job in hand,' growled Riderhood with a threatening shake of his head, 'blest if I wouldn't

       lay hold of HER, at any rate!'

       'Ay, but it is not you,' said Eugene. With something so suddenly fierce in him that the informer returned submissively; 'Well, well,

       well, t'other governor, I didn't say it was. A man may speak.'

       'And vermin may be silent,' said Eugene. 'Hold your tongue, you water-rat!'

       Astonished by his friend's unusual heat, Lightwood stared too, and then said: 'What can have become of this man?'

       'Can't imagine. Unless he dived overboard.' The informer wiped his brow ruefully as he said it, sitting in his boat and always staring disconsolate.

       'Did you make his boat fast?'

       'She's fast enough till the tide runs back. I couldn't make her faster than she is. Come aboard of mine, and see for your own-selves.'

       There was a little backwardness in complying, for the freight looked too much for the boat; but on Riderhood's protesting 'that he had had half a dozen, dead and alive, in her afore now, and she was nothing deep in the water nor down in the stern even then, to speak of;' they carefully took their places, and trimmed the crazy thing. While they were doing so, Riderhood still sat staring disconsolate.

       'All right. Give way!' said Lightwood.

       'Give way, by George!' repeated Riderhood, before shoving off. 'If he's gone and made off any how Lawyer Lightwood, it's enough to make me give way in a different manner. But he always WAS a cheat, confound him! He always was a infernal cheat, was Gaffer. Nothing straightfor'ard, nothing on the square. So mean, so underhanded. Never going through with a thing, nor carrying it out like a man!'

       'Hallo! Steady!' cried Eugene (he had recovered immediately on embarking), as they bumped heavily against a pile; and then in a lower voice reversed his late apostrophe by remarking ('I wish the boat of my honourable and gallant friend may be endowed with philanthropy enough not to turn bottom-upward and extinguish us!) Steady, steady! Sit close, Mortimer. Here's the hail again. See how it flies, like a troop of wild cats, at Mr Riderhood's eyes!'

       Indeed he had the full benefit of it, and it so mauled him, though he bent his head low and tried to present nothing but the mangy cap to it, that he dropped under the lee of a tier of shipping, and they lay there until it was over. The squall had come up, like a spiteful messenger before the morning; there followed in its wake a ragged tear of light which ripped the dark clouds until they showed a great grey hole of day.

       They were all shivering, and everything about them seemed to be shivering; the river itself; craft, rigging, sails, such early smoke as there yet was on the shore. Black with wet, and altered to the eye by white patches of hail and sleet, the huddled buildings looked lower than usual, as if they were cowering, and had shrunk with the cold. Very little life was to be seen on either bank, windows and doors were shut, and the staring black and white letters upon wharves and warehouses 'looked,' said Eugene to Mortimer, 'like inscriptions over the graves of dead businesses.'

       As they glided slowly on, keeping under the shore and sneaking in and out among the shipping by back-alleys of water, in a pilfering way that seemed to be their boatman's normal manner of progression, all the objects among which they crept were so huge in contrast with their wretched boat, as to threaten to crush it. Not a ship's hull, with its rusty iron links of cable run out of hawse-holes long discoloured with the iron's rusty tears, but seemed to be there with a fell intention. Not a figure-head but had the menacing look of bursting forward to run them down. Not a sluice gate, or a painted scale upon a post or wall, showing the depth of water, but seemed to hint, like the dreadfully facetious Wolf in bed in Grandmamma's cottage, 'That's to drown YOU in, my dears!' Not a lumbering black barge, with its cracked and blistered side impending over them, but seemed to suck at the river with a thirst for sucking

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       them under. And everything so vaunted the spoiling influences of water--discoloured copper, rotten wood, honey-combed stone, green dank deposit--that the after-consequences of being crushed, sucked under, and drawn down, looked as ugly to the imagination as the main event.

       Some half-hour of this work, and Riderhood unshipped his sculls, stood holding on to a barge, and hand over hand longwise along the barge's side gradually worked his boat under her head into a secret little nook of scummy water. And driven into that nook, and wedged as he had described, was Gaffer's boat; that boat with the stain still in it, bearing some resemblance to a muffled human form.

       'Now tell me I'm a liar!' said the honest man.

       ('With a morbid expectation,' murmured Eugene to Lightwood, 'that somebody is always going to tell him the truth.')

       'This is Hexam's boat,' said Mr Inspector. 'I know her well.'

       'Look at the broken scull. Look at the t'other scull