The Life and Adventures of Nicholas Nickleby by Charles Dickens (classic novels txt) 📖

‘He only returned to town on Saturday, and I knew nothing of his arrival until late last night.’

‘And did you see him?’ asked Miss La Creevy.

‘No,’ replied Nicholas. ‘He had gone out.’

‘Hah!’ said Miss La Creevy; ‘on some kind, charitable business, I dare say.’

‘I have reason to believe,’ pursued Nicholas, ‘from what has been told me, by a friend of mine who is acquainted with his movements, that he intends seeing my mother and sister today, and giving them his version of the occurrences that have befallen me. I will meet him there.’

‘That’s right,’ said Miss La Creevy, rubbing her hands. ‘And yet, I don’t know,’ she added, ‘there is much to be thought of—others to be considered.’

‘I have considered others,’ rejoined Nicholas; ‘but as honesty and honour are both at issue, nothing shall deter me.’

‘You should know best,’ said Miss La Creevy.

‘In this case I hope so,’ answered Nicholas. ‘And all I want you to do for me, is, to prepare them for my coming. They think me a long way off, and if I went wholly unexpected, I should frighten them. If you can spare time to tell them that you have seen me, and that I shall be with them in a quarter of an hour afterwards, you will do me a great service.’

‘I wish I could do you, or any of you, a greater,’ said Miss La Creevy; ‘but the power to serve, is as seldom joined with the will, as the will is with the power, I think.’

Talking on very fast and very much, Miss La Creevy finished her breakfast with great expedition, put away the tea-caddy and hid the key under the fender, resumed her bonnet, and, taking Nicholas’s arm, sallied forth at once to the city. Nicholas left her near the door of his mother’s house, and promised to return within a quarter of an hour.

It so chanced that Ralph Nickleby, at length seeing fit, for his own purposes, to communicate the atrocities of which Nicholas had been guilty, had (instead of first proceeding to another quarter of the town on business, as Newman Noggs supposed he would) gone straight to his sister-in-law. Hence, when Miss La Creevy, admitted by a girl who was cleaning the house, made her way to the sitting-room, she found Mrs Nickleby and Kate in tears, and Ralph just concluding his statement of his nephew’s misdemeanours. Kate beckoned her not to retire, and Miss La Creevy took a seat in silence.

‘You are here already, are you, my gentleman?’ thought the little woman. ‘Then he shall announce himself, and see what effect that has on you.’

‘This is pretty,’ said Ralph, folding up Miss Squeers’s note; ‘very pretty. I recommend him—against all my previous conviction, for I knew he would never do any good—to a man with whom, behaving himself properly, he might have remained, in comfort, for years. What is the result? Conduct for which he might hold up his hand at the Old Bailey.’

‘I never will believe it,’ said Kate, indignantly; ‘never. It is some base conspiracy, which carries its own falsehood with it.’

‘My dear,’ said Ralph, ‘you wrong the worthy man. These are not inventions. The man is assaulted, your brother is not to be found; this boy, of whom they speak, goes with him—remember, remember.’

‘It is impossible,’ said Kate. ‘Nicholas!—and a thief too! Mama, how can you sit and hear such statements?’

Poor Mrs Nickleby, who had, at no time, been remarkable for the possession of a very clear understanding, and who had been reduced by the late changes in her affairs to a most complicated state of perplexity, made no other reply to this earnest remonstrance than exclaiming from behind a mass of pocket-handkerchief, that she never could have believed it—thereby most ingeniously leaving her hearers to suppose that she did believe it.

‘It would be my duty, if he came in my way, to deliver him up to justice,’ said Ralph, ‘my bounden duty; I should have no other course, as a man of the world and a man of business, to pursue. And yet,’ said Ralph, speaking in a very marked manner, and looking furtively, but fixedly, at Kate, ‘and yet I would not. I would spare the feelings of his—of his sister. And his mother of course,’ added Ralph, as though by an afterthought, and with far less emphasis.

Kate very well understood that this was held out as an additional inducement to her to preserve the strictest silence regarding the events of the preceding night. She looked involuntarily towards Ralph as he ceased to speak, but he had turned his eyes another way, and seemed for the moment quite unconscious of her presence.

‘Everything,’ said Ralph, after a long silence, broken only by Mrs Nickleby’s sobs, ‘everything combines to prove the truth of this letter, if indeed there were any possibility of disputing it. Do innocent men steal away from the sight of honest folks, and skulk in hiding-places, like outlaws? Do innocent men inveigle nameless vagabonds, and prowl with them about the country as idle robbers do? Assault, riot, theft, what do you call these?’

‘A lie!’ cried a voice, as the door was dashed open, and Nicholas came into the room.

In the first moment of surprise, and possibly of alarm, Ralph rose from his seat, and fell back a few paces, quite taken off his guard by this unexpected apparition. In another moment, he stood, fixed and immovable with folded arms, regarding his nephew with a scowl; while Kate and Miss La Creevy threw themselves between the two, to prevent the personal violence which the fierce excitement of Nicholas appeared to threaten.

‘Dear Nicholas,’ cried his sister, clinging to him. ‘Be calm, consider—’

‘Consider, Kate!’ cried Nicholas, clasping her hand so tight in the tumult of his anger, that she could scarcely bear the pain. ‘When I consider all, and think of what has passed, I need be made of iron to stand before him.’

‘Or bronze,’ said Ralph, quietly; ‘there is not hardihood enough in flesh and blood to face it out.’

‘Oh dear, dear!’ cried Mrs Nickleby, ‘that things should have come to such a pass as this!’

‘Who speaks in a tone, as if I had done wrong, and brought disgrace on them?’ said Nicholas, looking round.

‘Your mother, sir,’ replied Ralph, motioning towards her.

‘Whose ears have been poisoned by you,’ said Nicholas; ‘by you—who, under pretence of deserving the thanks she poured upon you, heaped every insult, wrong, and indignity upon my head. You, who sent me to a den where sordid cruelty, worthy of yourself, runs wanton, and youthful misery stalks precocious; where the lightness of childhood shrinks into the heaviness of age, and its every promise blights, and withers as it grows. I call Heaven to witness,’ said Nicholas, looking eagerly round, ‘that I have seen all this, and that he knows it.’

‘Refute these calumnies,’ said Kate, ‘and be more patient, so that you may give them no advantage. Tell us what you really did, and show that they are untrue.’

‘Of what do they—or of what does he—accuse me?’ said Nicholas.

‘First, of attacking your master, and being within an ace of qualifying yourself to be tried for murder,’ interposed Ralph. ‘I speak plainly, young man, bluster as you will.’

‘I interfered,’ said Nicholas, ‘to save a miserable creature from the vilest cruelty. In so doing, I inflicted such punishment upon a wretch as he will not readily forget, though far less than he deserved from me. If the same scene were renewed before me now, I would take the same part; but I would strike harder and heavier, and brand him with such marks as he should carry to his grave, go to it when he would.’

‘You hear?’ said Ralph, turning to Mrs Nickleby. ‘Penitence, this!’

‘Oh dear me!’ cried Mrs Nickleby, ‘I don’t know what to think, I really don’t.’

‘Do not speak just now, mama, I entreat you,’ said Kate. ‘Dear Nicholas, I only tell you, that you may know what wickedness can prompt, but they accuse you of—a ring is missing, and they dare to say that—’

‘The woman,’ said Nicholas, haughtily, ‘the wife of the fellow from whom these charges come, dropped—as I suppose—a worthless ring among some clothes of mine, early in the morning on which I left the house. At least, I know that she was in the bedroom where they lay, struggling with an unhappy child, and that I found it when I opened my bundle on the road. I returned it, at once, by coach, and they have it now.’

‘I knew, I knew,’ said Kate, looking towards her uncle. ‘About this boy, love, in whose company they say you left?’

‘The boy, a silly, helpless creature, from brutality and hard usage, is with me now,’ rejoined Nicholas.

‘You hear?’ said Ralph, appealing to the mother again, ‘everything proved, even upon his own confession. Do you choose to restore that boy, sir?’

‘No, I do not,’ replied Nicholas.

‘You do not?’ sneered Ralph.

‘No,’ repeated Nicholas, ‘not to the man with whom I found him. I would that I knew on whom he has the claim of birth: I might wring something from his sense of shame, if he were dead to every tie of nature.’

‘Indeed!’ said Ralph. ‘Now, sir, will you hear a word or two from me?’

‘You can speak when and what you please,’ replied Nicholas, embracing his sister. ‘I take little heed of what you say or threaten.’

‘Mighty well, sir,’ retorted Ralph; ‘but perhaps it may concern others, who may think it worth their while to listen, and consider what I tell them. I will address your mother, sir, who knows the world.’

‘Ah! and I only too dearly wish I didn’t,’ sobbed Mrs Nickleby.

There really was no necessity for the good lady to be much distressed upon this particular head; the extent of her worldly knowledge being, to say the least, very questionable; and so Ralph seemed to think, for he smiled as she spoke. He then glanced steadily at her and Nicholas by turns, as he delivered himself in these words:

‘Of what I have done, or what I meant to do, for you, ma’am, and my niece, I say not one syllable. I held out no promise, and leave you to judge for yourself. I hold out no threat now, but I say that this boy, headstrong, wilful and disorderly as he is, should not have one penny of my money, or one crust of my bread, or one grasp of my hand, to save him from the loftiest gallows in all Europe. I will not meet him, come where he comes, or hear his name. I will not help him, or those who help him. With a full knowledge of what he brought upon you by so doing, he has come back in his selfish sloth, to be an aggravation of your wants, and a burden upon his sister’s scanty wages. I regret to leave you, and more to leave her, now, but I will not encourage this compound of meanness and cruelty, and, as I will not ask you to renounce him, I see you no more.’

If Ralph had not known and felt his power in wounding those he hated, his glances at Nicholas would have shown it him, in all its force, as he proceeded in the above address. Innocent as the young man was of all wrong, every artful insinuation stung, every well-considered sarcasm cut him to the quick; and when Ralph noted his pale face and quivering lip, he hugged himself to mark how well he had chosen the taunts best calculated to strike deep into a young and ardent spirit.

‘I can’t help it,’ cried Mrs Nickleby. ‘I know you have been very good to us,