nned or tongue have uttered. It had about it something
of the articulation of an avenging voice not against Sikes only, but
against all who ever outraged, or ever dreamt of outraging, the sanctity
of human life. And it was precisely this which tended to sublimate an
incident otherwise of the ghastliest horror into a homily of burning
eloquence, the recollection of which among those who once saw it
revealed through the lips, the eyes, the whole aspect of Charles Dickens
will not easily be obliterated. The moral drawn from it--and there
was this moral interpenetrating or impregnating the whole--became
appreciable, it might even have been by Sikes himself, from the
first moment the ruffian realised that the crime had been actually
accomplished. It spoke trumpet-tongued from the very instant when he
recoiled from "it!" Nancy no more, but thenceforth flesh and blood--"But
such flesh, and so much blood!" Nevertheless, in that Experimental
Reading of the 14th of November, 1868, the effect of all this appeared,
in the estimation of the present writer, to have been in a great measure
marred by the abruptness with which, almost the instant after the crime
had been committed, the Reading was terminated. Sikes burnt upon
the hearth the blood-stained weapon with which the murder had been
perpetrated---was startled for a moment by the hair upon the end of the
club shrinking to a light cinder and whirling up the chimney--and then,
dragging the dog (whose very feet were bloody) after him, and locking
the door, left the house. There, the Experimental Reading abruptly
terminated. It seemed not only insufficient, but a lost opportunity.
Insomuch, that the writer, on the following day, remonstrated with the
Novelist as earnestly as possible, urging him to append to the Reading
as it then stood some fragmentary portion, at least, of the chapter
descriptive of the flight, so that the remorseful horror of Sikes
might be more fully realised. Of the reasonableness of this objection,
however, Dickens himself was so wholly unconvinced, that, in the midst
of his arguments against it, he wrote, in a tone of good-humoured
indignation, "My dear fellow, believe me that no audience on earth could
be held for ten minutes after the girl's death. Give them time, and they
would be revengeful for having had such a strain put upon them. Trust
me to be right. I stand there, and I know." Than this nothing could very
well have been more strongly expressed, as ind