“What is all this?” cried the girl, involuntarily.
“What is it?” pursued Fagin, mad with rage. “This—When the boy’s worth hundreds of pounds to me, am I to lose what chance threw me in the way of getting safely, through the whims of a drunken gang that I could whistle away the lives of,—and me bound, too, to a born devil that only wants the will, and has got the power to, to——”
Panting for breath, the old man stammered for a word, and in that one instant checked the torrent of his wrath, and changed his whole demeanour. A moment before, his clenched hands grasped the air, his eyes had dilated, and his face grown livid with passion; but now he shrunk into a chair, and, cowering together, trembled with the apprehension of having himself disclosed some hidden villany. After a short silence, he ventured to look round at his companion, and appeared somewhat reassured on beholding her in the same listless attitude from which he had first roused her.
“Nancy, dear!” croaked the Jew, in his usual voice. “Did you mind me, dear?”
“Don’t worry me, now, Fagin!” replied the girl, raising her head languidly. “If Bill has not done it this time, he will another. He has done many a good job for you, and will do many more when he can; and when he can’t, he wont; so no more about that.”
“Regarding this boy, my dear?” said the Jew, rubbing the palms of his hands nervously together.
“The boy must take his chance with the rest,” interrupted Nancy, hastily; “and I say again, I hope he is dead, and out of harm’s way, and out of yours,—that is, if Bill comes to no harm, and if Toby got clear off, he’s pretty sure to, for he’s worth two of him any time.”
“And about what I was saying, my dear?” observed the Jew, keeping his glistening eye steadily upon her.
“You must say it all over again if it’s any thing you want me to do,” rejoined Nancy: “and if it is, you had better wait till to-morrow. You put me up for a minute, but now I’m stupid again.”
Fagin put several other questions, all with the same drift of ascertaining whether the girl had profited by his unguarded hints; but she answered them so readily, and was withal so utterly unmoved by his searching looks, that his original impression of her being more than a trifle in liquor was fully confirmed. Nancy, indeed, was not exempt from a failing which was very common among the Jew’s female pupils, and in which, in their tenderer years, they were rather encouraged than checked. Her disordered appearance, and a wholesale perfume of Geneva which pervaded the apartment, afforded strong confirmatory evidence of the justice of the Jew’s supposition; and when, after indulging in the temporary display of violence above described, she subsided, first into dulness, and afterwards into a compound of feelings, under the influence of which she shed tears one minute, and in the next gave utterance to various exclamations of “Never say die!” and divers calculations as to what might be the amount of the odds so long as a lady or gentleman were happy, Mr. Fagin, who had had considerable experience of such matters in his time, saw, with great satisfaction, that she was very far gone indeed.