Nicholas Nickleby
The brothers conferred apart for a short time: their manner showing
that they were agitated. Ralph glanced at them twice or thrice, and
ultimately said, with a great effort to recover his self-possession,
‘Now, what is this? If I am brought from home at this time of night, let
it be for something. What have you got to tell me?’ After a short pause,
he added, ‘Is my niece dead?’
He had struck upon a key which rendered the task of commencement an
easier one. Brother Charles turned, and said that it was a death of
which they had to tell him, but that his niece was well.
‘You don’t mean to tell me,’ said Ralph, as his eyes brightened, ‘that
her brother’s dead? No, that’s too good. I’d not believe it, if you told
me so. It would be too welcome news to be true.’
‘Shame on you, you hardened and unnatural man,’ cried the other brother,
warmly. ‘Prepare yourself for intelligence which, if you have any human
feeling in your breast, will make even you shrink and tremble. What if
we tell you that a poor unfortunate boy: a child in everything but never
having known one of those tender endearments, or one of those lightsome
hours which make our childhood a time to be remembered like a happy
dream through all our after life: a warm-hearted, harmless, affectionate
creature, who never offended you, or did you wrong, but on whom you have
vented the malice and hatred you have conceived for your nephew, and
whom you have made an instrument for wreaking your bad passions upon
him: what if we tell you that, sinking under your persecution, sir, and
the misery and ill-usage of a life short in years but long in suffering,
this poor creature has gone to tell his sad tale where, for your part in
it, you must surely answer?’
‘If you tell me,’ said Ralph; ‘if you tell me that he is dead, I forgive
you all else. If you tell me that he is dead, I am in your debt and
bound to you for life. He is! I see it in your faces. Who triumphs now?
Is this your dreadful news; this your terrible intelligence? You see
how it moves me. You did well to send. I would have travelled a hundred
miles afoot, through mud, mire, and darkness, to hear this news just at
this time.’
Even then, moved as he was by this savage joy, Ralph could see in the
faces of the two brothers, mingling with their look of disgust and
horror, something of that indefinable compassion for himself which he
had noticed before.
‘And HE brought you the intelligence, did he?’ said Ralph, pointing
with his finger towards the recess already mentioned; ‘and sat there,
no doubt, to see me prostrated and overwhelmed by it! Ha, ha, ha! But I
tell him that I’ll be a sharp thorn in his side for many a long day to
come; and I tell you two, again, that you don’t know him yet; and that
you’ll rue the day you took compassion on the vagabond.’
‘You take me for your nephew,’ said a hollow voice; ‘it would be better
for you, and for me too, if I were he indeed.’
The figure that he had seen so dimly, rose, and came slowly down. He
started back, for he found that he confronted--not Nicholas, as he had
supposed, but Brooker.
Ralph had no reason, that he knew, to fear this man; he had never feared
him before; but the pallor which had been observed in his face when he
issued forth that night, came upon him again. He was seen to tremble,
and his voice changed as he said, keeping his eyes upon him,
‘What does this fellow here? Do you know he is a convict, a felon, a
common thief?’
‘Hear what he has to tell you. Oh, Mr. Nickleby, hear what he has to
tell you, be he what he may!’ cried the brothers, with such emphatic
earnestness, that Ralph turned to them in wonder. They pointed to
Brooker. Ralph again gazed at him: as it seemed mechanically.
‘That boy,’ said the man, ‘that these gentlemen have been talking of--’
‘That boy,’ repeated Ralph, looking vacantly at him.
‘Whom I saw, stretched dead and cold upon his bed, and who is now in his
grave--’
‘Who is now in his grave,’ echoed Ralph, like one who talks in his
sleep.
The man raised his eyes, and clasped his hands solemnly together:
‘--Was your only son, so help me God in heaven!’
In the midst of a dead silence, Ralph sat down, pressing his two hands
upon his temples. He removed them, after a minute, and never was there
seen, part of a living man undisfigured by any wound, such a ghastly
face as he then disclosed. He looked at Brooker, who was by this time
standing at a short distance from him; but did not say one word, or make
the slightest sound or gesture.
‘Gentlemen,’ said the man, ‘I offer no excuses for myself. I am long
past that. If, in telling you how this has happened, I tell you that I
was harshly used, and perhaps driven out of my real nature, I do it only
as a necessary part of my story, and not to shield myself. I am a guilty
man.’
He stopped, as if to recollect, and looking away from Ralph, and
addressing himself to the brothers, proceeded in a subdued and humble
tone:
‘Among those who once had dealings with this man, gentlemen--that’s from
twenty to five-and-twenty years ago--there was one: a rough fox-hunting,
hard-drinking gentleman, who had run through his own fortune, and wanted
to squander away that of his sister: they were both orphans, and she
lived with him and managed his house. I don’t know whether it was,
originally, to back his influence and try to over-persuade the young
woman or not, but he,’ pointing, to Ralph, ‘used to go down to the house
in Leicestershire pretty often, and stop there many days at a time. They
had had a great many dealings together, and he may have gone on some
of those, or to patch up his client’s affairs, which were in a ruinous
state; of course he went for profit. The gentlewoman was not a girl,
but she was, I have heard say, handsome, and entitled to a pretty large
property. In course of time, he married her. The same love of gain
which led him to contract this marriage, led to its being kept strictly
private; for a clause in her father’s will declared that if she married
without her brother’s consent, the property, in which she had only some
life interest while she remained single, should pass away altogether to
another branch of the family. The brother would give no consent that the
sister didn’t buy, and pay for handsomely; Mr. Nickleby would consent to
no such sacrifice; and so they went on, keeping their marriage secret,
and waiting for him to break his neck or die of a fever. He did neither,
and meanwhile the result of this private marriage was a son. The child
was put out to nurse, a long way off; his mother never saw him but once
or twice, and then by stealth; and his father--so eagerly did he thirst
after the money which seemed to come almost within his grasp now,
for his brother-in-law was very ill, and breaking more and more every
day--never went near him, to avoid raising any suspicion. The brother
lingered on; Mr. Nickleby’s wife constantly urged him to avow their
marriage; he peremptorily refused. She remained alone in a dull country
house: seeing little or no company but riotous, drunken sportsmen.
He lived in London and clung to his business. Angry quarrels and
recriminations took place, and when they had been married nearly seven
years, and were within a few weeks of the time when the brother’s death
would have adjusted all, she eloped with a younger man, and left him.’
Here he paused, but Ralph did not stir, and the brothers signed to him
to proceed.
‘It was then that I became acquainted with these circumstances from his
own lips. They were no secrets then; for the brother, and others, knew
them; but they were communicated to me, not on this account, but because
I was wanted. He followed the fugitives. Some said to make money of his
wife’s shame, but, I believe, to take some violent revenge, for that was
as much his character as the other; perhaps more. He didn’t find them,
and she died not long after. I don’t know whether he began to think he
might like the child, or whether he wished to make sure that it should
never fall into its mother’s hands; but, before he went, he intrusted me
with the charge of bringing it home. And I did so.’
He went on, from this point, in a still more humble tone, and spoke in a
very low voice; pointing to Ralph as he resumed.
‘He had used me ill--cruelly--I reminded him in what, not long ago when
I met him in the street--and I hated him. I brought the child home to
his own house, and lodged him in the front garret. Neglect had made him
very sickly, and I was obliged to call in a doctor, who said he must be
removed for change of air, or he would die. I think that first put it in
my head. I did it then. He was gone six weeks, and when he came back, I
told him--with every circumstance well planned and proved; nobody could
have suspected me--that the child was dead and buried. He might have
been disappointed in some intention he had formed, or he might have had
some natural affection, but he WAS grieved at THAT, and I was confirmed
in my design of opening up the secret one day, and making it a means of
getting money from him. I had heard, like most other men, of Yorkshire
schools. I took the child to one kept by a man named Squeers, and left
it there. I gave him the name of Smike. Year by year, I paid twenty
pounds a-year for him for six years; never breathing the secret all the
time; for I had left his father’s service after more hard usage, and
quarrelled with him again. I was sent away from this country. I have
been away nearly eight years. Directly I came home again, I travelled
down into Yorkshire, and, skulking in the village of an evening-time,
made inquiries about the boys at the school, and found that this one,
whom I had placed there, had run away with a young man bearing the name
of his own father. I sought his father out in London, and hinting at
what I could tell him, tried for a little money to support life; but he
repulsed me with threats. I then found out his clerk, and, going on
from little to little, and showing him that there were good reasons for
communicating with me, learnt what was going on; and it was I who told
him that the boy was no son of the man who claimed to be his father. All
this time I had never seen the boy. At length, I heard from this same
source that he was very ill, and where he was. I travelled down there,
that I might recall myself, if possible, to his recollection and confirm
my story. I came upon him unexpectedly; but before I could speak he knew
me--he had good cause to remember me, poor lad!--and I would have sworn
to him if I had met him in the Indies. I knew the piteous face I had
seen in the little child. After a few days’ indecision, I applied to the
young gentleman in whose care he was, and I found that he was dead. He
knows how quickly he recognised me again, how often he had described
me and my leaving him at the school, and how he told him of a garret
he recollected: which is the one I have spoken of, and in his father’s
house to this day. This is my story. I demand to be brought face to face
with the schoolmaster, and put to any possible proof of any part of it,
and I will show that it’s too true, and that I have this guilt upon my
soul.’
‘Unhappy man!’ said the brothers. ‘What reparation can you make for
this?’
‘None, gentlemen, none! I have none to make, and nothing to hope now. I
am old in years, and older still in misery and care. This confession can
bring nothing upon me but new suffering and punishment; but I make it,
and will abide by it whatever comes. I have been made the instrument of
working out this dreadful retribution upon the head of a man who, in
the hot pursuit of his bad ends, has persecuted and hunted down his own
child to death. It must descend upon me too. I know it must fall. My