Oliver Twist (Penguin Classics) by Charles Dickens

Author:Charles Dickens [Dickens, Charles]
Language: eng
Format: azw3
Publisher: Penguin Books Ltd
Published: 2007-10-24T16:00:00+00:00

Oliver waited on by the Bow Street Runners

‘I don’t know what to think,’ replied poor Giles. ‘I don’t think it is the boy; indeed I’m almost certain that it isn’t. You know it can’t be.’

‘Has this man been a-drinking, sir?’ inquired Blathers, turning to the doctor.

‘What a precious muddle-headed chap you are!’ said Duff, addressing Mr Giles with supreme contempt.

Mr Losberne had been feeling the patient’s pulse during this short dialogue; but he now rose from the chair by the bedside, and remarked, that if the officers had any doubts upon the subject they would perhaps like to step into the next room, and have Brittles before them.

Acting upon this suggestion, they accordingly adjourned to a neighbouring apartment, where Mr Brittles being called in, involved himself and his respected superior in such a wonderful maze of fresh contradictions and impossibilities as tended to throw no particular light upon anything save the fact of his own strong mystification; except, indeed, his declarations that he shouldn’t know the real boy if he were put before him that instant; that he had only taken Oliver to be he because Mr Giles had said he was, and that Mr Giles had five minutes previously admitted in the kitchen that he began to be very much afraid he had been a little too hasty.

Among other ingenious surmises, the question was then raised whether Mr Giles had really hit anybody, and upon examination of the fellow pistol to that which he had fired, it turned out to have no more destructive loading than gunpowder and brown paper: – a discovery which made a considerable impression on everybody but the doctor, who had drawn the ball about ten minutes before. Upon no one, however, did it make a greater impression than on Mr Giles himself, who, after labouring for some hours under the fear of having mortally wounded a fellow-creature, eagerly caught at this new idea, and favoured it to the utmost. Finally, the officers, without troubling themselves very much about Oliver, left the Chertsey constable in the house, and took up their rest for that night in the town, promising to return next morning.

With the next morning there came a rumour that two men and a boy were in the cage at Kingston,4 who had been apprehended overnight under suspicious circumstances; and to Kingston Messrs Blathers and Duff journeyed accordingly. The suspicious circumstances, however, resolving themselves, on investigation, into the one fact that they had been discovered sleeping under a haystack, which, although a great crime, is only punishable by imprisonment,5 and is, in the merciful eye of the English law, and its comprehensive love of all the King’s subjects, held to be no satisfactory proof in the absence of all other evidence, that the sleeper or sleepers have committed burglary accompanied with violence, and have therefore rendered themselves liable to the punishment of death, – Messrs Blathers and Duff came back again as wise as they went.

In short, after some more examination, and a great

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