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

nothing. Stay,’ he added, looking round again. ‘He broke a leg or an arm, or put his shoulder out, or fractured his collar-bone, or ground a rib or two? His neck was saved for the halter, but he got some painful and slow-healing injury for his trouble? Did he? You must have heard that, at least.’

‘No,’ rejoined Mantalini, shaking his head again. ‘Unless he was dashed into such little pieces that they blew away, he wasn’t hurt, for he went off as quiet and comfortable as—as—as demnition,’ said Mr Mantalini, rather at a loss for a simile.

‘And what,’ said Ralph, hesitating a little, ‘what was the cause of quarrel?’

‘You are the demdest, knowing hand,’ replied Mr Mantalini, in an admiring tone, ‘the cunningest, rummest, superlativest old fox—oh dem!—to pretend now not to know that it was the little bright-eyed niece—the softest, sweetest, prettiest—’

‘Alfred!’ interposed Madame Mantalini.

‘She is always right,’ rejoined Mr Mantalini soothingly, ‘and when she says it is time to go, it is time, and go she shall; and when she walks along the streets with her own tulip, the women shall say, with envy, she has got a demd fine husband; and the men shall say with rapture, he has got a demd fine wife; and they shall both be right and neither wrong, upon my life and soul—oh demmit!’

With which remarks, and many more, no less intellectual and to the purpose, Mr Mantalini kissed the fingers of his gloves to Ralph Nickleby, and drawing his lady’s arm through his, led her mincingly away.

‘So, so,’ muttered Ralph, dropping into his chair; ‘this devil is loose again, and thwarting me, as he was born to do, at every turn. He told me once there should be a day of reckoning between us, sooner or later. I’ll make him a true prophet, for it shall surely come.’

‘Are you at home?’ asked Newman, suddenly popping in his head.

‘No,’ replied Ralph, with equal abruptness.

Newman withdrew his head, but thrust it in again.

‘You’re quite sure you’re not at home, are you?’ said Newman.

‘What does the idiot mean?’ cried Ralph, testily.

‘He has been waiting nearly ever since they first came in, and may have heard your voice—that’s all,’ said Newman, rubbing his hands.

‘Who has?’ demanded Ralph, wrought by the intelligence he had just heard, and his clerk’s provoking coolness, to an intense pitch of irritation.

The necessity of a reply was superseded by the unlooked-for entrance of a third party—the individual in question—who, bringing his one eye (for he had but one) to bear on Ralph Nickleby, made a great many shambling bows, and sat himself down in an armchair, with his hands on his knees, and his short black trousers drawn up so high in the legs by the exertion of seating himself, that they scarcely reached below the tops of his Wellington boots.’

‘Why, this IS a surprise!’ said Ralph, bending his gaze upon the visitor, and half smiling as he scrutinised him attentively; ‘I should know your face, Mr Squeers.’

‘Ah!’ replied that worthy, ‘and you’d have know’d it better, sir, if it hadn’t been for all that I’ve been a-going through. Just lift that little boy off the tall stool in the back-office, and tell him to come in here, will you, my man?’ said Squeers, addressing himself to Newman. ‘Oh, he’s lifted hisself off. My son, sir, little Wackford. What do you think of him, sir, for a specimen of the Dotheboys Hall feeding? Ain’t he fit to bust out of his clothes, and start the seams, and make the very buttons fly off with his fatness? Here’s flesh!’ cried Squeers, turning the boy about, and indenting the plumpest parts of his figure with divers pokes and punches, to the great discomposure of his son and heir. ‘Here’s firmness, here’s solidness! Why you can hardly get up enough of him between your finger and thumb to pinch him anywheres.’

In however good condition Master Squeers might have been, he certainly did not present this remarkable compactness of person, for on his father’s closing his finger and thumb in illustration of his remark, he uttered a sharp cry, and rubbed the place in the most natural manner possible.

‘Well,’ remarked Squeers, a little disconcerted, ‘I had him there; but that’s because we breakfasted early this morning, and he hasn’t had his lunch yet. Why you couldn’t shut a bit of him in a door, when he’s had his dinner. Look at them tears, sir,’ said Squeers, with a triumphant air, as Master Wackford wiped his eyes with the cuff of his jacket, ‘there’s oiliness!’

‘He looks well, indeed,’ returned Ralph, who, for some purposes of his own, seemed desirous to conciliate the schoolmaster. ‘But how is Mrs Squeers, and how are you?’

‘Mrs Squeers, sir,’ replied the proprietor of Dotheboys, ‘is as she always is—a mother to them lads, and a blessing, and a comfort, and a joy to all them as knows her. One of our boys—gorging hisself with vittles, and then turning in; that’s their way—got a abscess on him last week. To see how she operated upon him with a pen-knife! Oh Lor!’ said Squeers, heaving a sigh, and nodding his head a great many times, ‘what a member of society that woman is!’

Mr Squeers indulged in a retrospective look, for some quarter of a minute, as if this allusion to his lady’s excellences had naturally led his mind to the peaceful village of Dotheboys near Greta Bridge in Yorkshire; and then looked at Ralph, as if waiting for him to say something.

‘Have you quite recovered that scoundrel’s attack?’ asked Ralph.

‘I’ve only just done it, if I’ve done it now,’ replied Squeers. ‘I was one blessed bruise, sir,’ said Squeers, touching first the roots of his hair, and then the toes of his boots, ‘from HERE to THERE. Vinegar and brown paper, vinegar and brown paper, from morning to night. I suppose there was a matter of half a ream of brown paper stuck upon me, from first to last. As I laid all of a heap in our kitchen, plastered all over, you might have thought I was a large brown-paper parcel, chock full of nothing but groans. Did I groan loud, Wackford, or did I groan soft?’ asked Mr Squeers, appealing to his son.

‘Loud,’ replied Wackford.

‘Was the boys sorry to see me in such a dreadful condition, Wackford, or was they glad?’ asked Mr Squeers, in a sentimental manner.

‘Gl—’

‘Eh?’ cried Squeers, turning sharp round.

‘Sorry,’ rejoined his son.

‘Oh!’ said Squeers, catching him a smart box on the ear. ‘Then take your hands out of your pockets, and don’t stammer when you’re asked a question. Hold your noise, sir, in a gentleman’s office, or I’ll run away from my family and never come back any more; and then what would become of all them precious and forlorn lads as would be let loose on the world, without their best friend at their elbers?’

‘Were you obliged to have medical attendance?’ inquired Ralph.

‘Ay, was I,’ rejoined Squeers, ‘and a precious bill the medical attendant brought in too; but I paid it though.’

Ralph elevated his eyebrows in a manner which might be expressive of either sympathy or astonishment—just as the beholder was pleased to take it.

‘Yes, I paid it, every farthing,’ replied Squeers, who seemed to know the man he had to deal with, too well to suppose that any blinking of the question would induce him to subscribe towards the expenses; ‘I wasn’t out of pocket by it after all, either.’

‘No!’ said Ralph.

‘Not a halfpenny,’ replied Squeers. ‘The fact is, we have only one extra with our boys, and that is for doctors when required—and not then, unless we’re sure of our customers. Do you see?’

‘I understand,’ said Ralph.

‘Very good,’ rejoined Squeers. ‘Then, after my bill was run up, we picked out five little boys (sons of small tradesmen, as was sure pay) that had never had the scarlet fever, and we sent one to a cottage where they’d got it, and he took it, and then we put the four others to sleep with him, and THEY took it, and then the doctor came and attended ‘em once all round, and we divided my total among ‘em, and added it on to their little bills, and the parents paid it. Ha! ha! ha!’

‘And a good plan too,’ said Ralph, eyeing the schoolmaster stealthily.

‘I believe you,’ rejoined Squeers. ‘We always do it. Why, when Mrs Squeers was brought to bed with little Wackford here, we ran the hooping-cough through half-a-dozen boys, and charged her expenses among ‘em, monthly nurse included. Ha! ha! ha!’

Ralph never laughed, but on this occasion he produced the nearest approach to it that he could, and waiting until Mr Squeers had enjoyed the professional joke to his heart’s content, inquired what had brought him to town.

‘Some bothering law business,’ replied Squeers, scratching his head, ‘connected with an action, for what they call neglect of a boy. I don’t know what they would have. He had as good grazing, that boy had, as there is about us.’

Ralph looked as if he did not quite understand the observation.

‘Grazing,’ said Squeers, raising his voice, under the impression that as Ralph failed to comprehend him, he must be deaf. ‘When a boy gets weak and ill and don’t relish his meals, we give him a change of diet—turn him out, for an hour or so every day, into a neighbour’s turnip field, or sometimes, if it’s a delicate case, a turnip field and a piece of carrots alternately, and let him eat as many as he likes. There an’t better land in the country than this perwerse lad grazed on, and yet he goes and catches cold and indigestion and what not, and then his friends brings a lawsuit against ME! Now, you’d hardly suppose,’ added Squeers, moving in his chair with the impatience of an illused man, ‘that people’s ingratitude would carry them quite as far as that; would you?’

‘A hard case, indeed,’ observed Ralph.

‘You don’t say more than the truth when you say that,’ replied Squeers. ‘I don’t suppose there’s a man going, as possesses the fondness for youth that I do. There’s youth to the amount of eight hundred pound a year at Dotheboys Hall at this present time. I’d take sixteen hundred pound worth if I could get ‘em, and be as fond of every individual twenty pound among ‘em as nothing should equal it!’

‘Are you stopping at your old quarters?’ asked Ralph.

‘Yes, we are at the Saracen,’ replied Squeers, ‘and as it don’t want very long to the end of the half-year, we shall continney to stop there till I’ve collected the money, and some new boys too, I hope. I’ve brought little Wackford up, on purpose to show to parents and guardians. I shall put him in the advertisement, this time. Look at that boy—himself a pupil. Why he’s a miracle of high feeding, that boy is!’

‘I should like to have a word with you,’ said Ralph, who had both spoken and listened mechanically for some time, and seemed to have been thinking.

‘As many words as you like, sir,’ rejoined Squeers. ‘Wackford, you go and play in the back office, and don’t move about too much or you’ll get thin, and that won’t do. You haven’t got such a thing as twopence, Mr Nickleby, have you?’ said Squeers, rattling a bunch of keys in his coat pocket, and muttering something about its being all silver.

‘I—think I have,’ said Ralph, very slowly, and producing, after much rummaging in an old drawer, a penny, a halfpenny, and two farthings.

‘Thankee,’ said Squeers, bestowing it upon his son. ‘Here! You go and buy a tart—Mr Nickleby’s man will show you where—and mind