‘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 old Martin.
‘I can’t leave her, poor thing!’ said Chuffey. ‘She has been very good to me. I can’t leave her, Mr Chuzzlewit. Thank you kindly. I’ll remain here. I haven’t long to remain; it’s no great matter.’
As he meekly shook his poor, grey 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 clutches 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 threshold, 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 door way!
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 play-ground rock.