Nicholas Nickleby
your recital with so little astonishment. That is easily explained. Your
uncle has been here this morning.’
Nicholas coloured, and drew back a step or two.
‘Yes,’ said the old gentleman, tapping his desk emphatically, ‘here, in
this room. He would listen neither to reason, feeling, nor justice. But
brother Ned was hard upon him; brother Ned, sir, might have melted a
paving-stone.’
‘He came to--’ said Nicholas.
‘To complain of you,’ returned brother Charles, ‘to poison our ears with
calumnies and falsehoods; but he came on a fruitless errand, and went
away with some wholesome truths in his ear besides. Brother Ned, my dear
Mr. Nickleby--brother Ned, sir, is a perfect lion. So is Tim Linkinwater;
Tim is quite a lion. We had Tim in to face him at first, and Tim was at
him, sir, before you could say “Jack Robinson.”’
‘How can I ever thank you for all the deep obligations you impose upon
me every day?’ said Nicholas.
‘By keeping silence upon the subject, my dear sir,’ returned brother
Charles. ‘You shall be righted. At least you shall not be wronged.
Nobody belonging to you shall be wronged. They shall not hurt a hair of
your head, or the boy’s head, or your mother’s head, or your sister’s
head. I have said it, brother Ned has said it, Tim Linkinwater has said
it. We have all said it, and we’ll all do it. I have seen the father--if
he is the father--and I suppose he must be. He is a barbarian and a
hypocrite, Mr. Nickleby. I told him, “You are a barbarian, sir.” I did.
I said, “You’re a barbarian, sir.” And I’m glad of it, I am VERY glad I
told him he was a barbarian, very glad indeed!’
By this time brother Charles was in such a very warm state of
indignation, that Nicholas thought he might venture to put in a word,
but the moment he essayed to do so, Mr. Cheeryble laid his hand softly
upon his arm, and pointed to a chair.
‘The subject is at an end for the present,’ said the old gentleman,
wiping his face. ‘Don’t revive it by a single word. I am going to speak
upon another subject, a confidential subject, Mr. Nickleby. We must be
cool again, we must be cool.’
After two or three turns across the room he resumed his seat, and
drawing his chair nearer to that on which Nicholas was seated, said:
‘I am about to employ you, my dear sir, on a confidential and delicate
mission.’
‘You might employ many a more able messenger, sir,’ said Nicholas, ‘but
a more trustworthy or zealous one, I may be bold to say, you could not
find.’
‘Of that I am well assured,’ returned brother Charles, ‘well assured.
You will give me credit for thinking so, when I tell you that the object
of this mission is a young lady.’
‘A young lady, sir!’ cried Nicholas, quite trembling for the moment with
his eagerness to hear more.
‘A very beautiful young lady,’ said Mr. Cheeryble, gravely.
‘Pray go on, sir,’ returned Nicholas.
‘I am thinking how to do so,’ said brother Charles; sadly, as it
seemed to his young friend, and with an expression allied to pain. ‘You
accidentally saw a young lady in this room one morning, my dear sir, in
a fainting fit. Do you remember? Perhaps you have forgotten.’
‘Oh no,’ replied Nicholas, hurriedly. ‘I--I--remember it very well
indeed.’
‘SHE is the lady I speak of,’ said brother Charles. Like the famous
parrot, Nicholas thought a great deal, but was unable to utter a word.
‘She is the daughter,’ said Mr. Cheeryble, ‘of a lady who, when she was a
beautiful girl herself, and I was very many years younger, I--it seems
a strange word for me to utter now--I loved very dearly. You will smile,
perhaps, to hear a grey-headed man talk about such things. You will not
offend me, for when I was as young as you, I dare say I should have done
the same.’
‘I have no such inclination, indeed,’ said Nicholas.
‘My dear brother Ned,’ continued Mr. Cheeryble, ‘was to have married her
sister, but she died. She is dead too now, and has been for many years.
She married her choice; and I wish I could add that her after-life was
as happy as God knows I ever prayed it might be!’
A short silence intervened, which Nicholas made no effort to break.
‘If trial and calamity had fallen as lightly on his head, as in the
deepest truth of my own heart I ever hoped (for her sake) it would, his
life would have been one of peace and happiness,’ said the old gentleman
calmly. ‘It will be enough to say that this was not the case; that
she was not happy; that they fell into complicated distresses and
difficulties; that she came, twelve months before her death, to appeal
to my old friendship; sadly changed, sadly altered, broken-spirited from
suffering and ill-usage, and almost broken-hearted. He readily availed
himself of the money which, to give her but one hour’s peace of mind,
I would have poured out as freely as water--nay, he often sent her back
for more--and yet even while he squandered it, he made the very success
of these, her applications to me, the groundwork of cruel taunts and
jeers, protesting that he knew she thought with bitter remorse of the
choice she had made, that she had married him from motives of interest
and vanity (he was a gay young man with great friends about him when
she chose him for her husband), and venting in short upon her, by every
unjust and unkind means, the bitterness of that ruin and disappointment
which had been brought about by his profligacy alone. In those times
this young lady was a mere child. I never saw her again until that
morning when you saw her also, but my nephew, Frank--’
Nicholas started, and indistinctly apologising for the interruption,
begged his patron to proceed.
‘--My nephew, Frank, I say,’ resumed Mr. Cheeryble, ‘encountered her by
accident, and lost sight of her almost in a minute afterwards, within
two days after he returned to England. Her father lay in some secret
place to avoid his creditors, reduced, between sickness and poverty, to
the verge of death, and she, a child,--we might almost think, if we did
not know the wisdom of all Heaven’s decrees--who should have blessed a
better man, was steadily braving privation, degradation, and everything
most terrible to such a young and delicate creature’s heart, for the
purpose of supporting him. She was attended, sir,’ said brother Charles,
‘in these reverses, by one faithful creature, who had been, in old
times, a poor kitchen wench in the family, who was then their solitary
servant, but who might have been, for the truth and fidelity of her
heart--who might have been--ah! the wife of Tim Linkinwater himself,
sir!’
Pursuing this encomium upon the poor follower with such energy and
relish as no words can describe, brother Charles leant back in his
chair, and delivered the remainder of his relation with greater
composure.
It was in substance this: That proudly resisting all offers of permanent
aid and support from her late mother’s friends, because they were made
conditional upon her quitting the wretched man, her father, who had no
friends left, and shrinking with instinctive delicacy from appealing
in their behalf to that true and noble heart which he hated, and
had, through its greatest and purest goodness, deeply wronged by
misconstruction and ill report, this young girl had struggled alone and
unassisted to maintain him by the labour of her hands. That through the
utmost depths of poverty and affliction she had toiled, never turning
aside for an instant from her task, never wearied by the petulant gloom
of a sick man sustained by no consoling recollections of the past or
hopes of the future; never repining for the comforts she had rejected,
or bewailing the hard lot she had voluntarily incurred. That every
little accomplishment she had acquired in happier days had been put into
requisition for this purpose, and directed to this one end. That for
two long years, toiling by day and often too by night, working at the
needle, the pencil, and the pen, and submitting, as a daily governess,
to such caprices and indignities as women (with daughters too) too often
love to inflict upon their own sex when they serve in such capacities,
as though in jealousy of the superior intelligence which they are
necessitated to employ,--indignities, in ninety-nine cases out of
every hundred, heaped upon persons immeasurably and incalculably their
betters, but outweighing in comparison any that the most heartless
blackleg would put upon his groom--that for two long years, by dint
of labouring in all these capacities and wearying in none, she had not
succeeded in the sole aim and object of her life, but that, overwhelmed
by accumulated difficulties and disappointments, she had been compelled
to seek out her mother’s old friend, and, with a bursting heart, to
confide in him at last.
‘If I had been poor,’ said brother Charles, with sparkling eyes; ‘if
I had been poor, Mr. Nickleby, my dear sir, which thank God I am not,
I would have denied myself (of course anybody would under such
circumstances) the commonest necessaries of life, to help her. As it is,
the task is a difficult one. If her father were dead, nothing could
be easier, for then she should share and cheer the happiest home that
brother Ned and I could have, as if she were our child or sister. But
he is still alive. Nobody can help him; that has been tried a thousand
times; he was not abandoned by all without good cause, I know.’
‘Cannot she be persuaded to--’ Nicholas hesitated when he had got thus
far.
‘To leave him?’ said brother Charles. ‘Who could entreat a child
to desert her parent? Such entreaties, limited to her seeing him
occasionally, have been urged upon her--not by me--but always with the
same result.’
‘Is he kind to her?’ said Nicholas. ‘Does he requite her affection?’
‘True kindness, considerate self-denying kindness, is not in his
nature,’ returned Mr. Cheeryble. ‘Such kindness as he knows, he regards
her with, I believe. The mother was a gentle, loving, confiding
creature, and although he wounded her from their marriage till her death
as cruelly and wantonly as ever man did, she never ceased to love him.
She commended him on her death-bed to her child’s care. Her child has
never forgotten it, and never will.’
‘Have you no influence over him?’ asked Nicholas.
‘I, my dear sir! The last man in the world. Such are his jealousy and
hatred of me, that if he knew his daughter had opened her heart to me,
he would render her life miserable with his reproaches; although--this
is the inconsistency and selfishness of his character--although if he
knew that every penny she had came from me, he would not relinquish one
personal desire that the most reckless expenditure of her scanty stock
could gratify.’
‘An unnatural scoundrel!’ said Nicholas, indignantly.
‘We will use no harsh terms,’ said brother Charles, in a gentle voice;
‘but accommodate ourselves to the circumstances in which this young lady
is placed. Such assistance as I have prevailed upon her to accept,
I have been obliged, at her own earnest request, to dole out in the
smallest portions, lest he, finding how easily money was procured,
should squander it even more lightly than he is accustomed to do. She
has come to and fro, to and fro, secretly and by night, to take even
this; and I cannot bear that things should go on in this way, Mr
Nickleby, I really cannot bear it.’
Then it came out by little and little, how that the twins had been
revolving in their good old heads manifold plans and schemes for helping
this young lady in the most delicate and considerate way, and so that
her father should not suspect the source whence the aid was derived; and
how they had at last come to the conclusion, that the best course would
be to make a feint of purchasing her little drawings and ornamental work
at a high price, and keeping up a constant demand for the same. For