Nicholas Nickleby
with holding out sundry vague and mysterious hopes of preferment to the
servant girl, who received these obscure hints of dawning greatness with
much veneration and respect.
Punctual to its time came the promised vehicle, which was no hackney
coach, but a private chariot, having behind it a footman, whose legs,
although somewhat large for his body, might, as mere abstract legs,
have set themselves up for models at the Royal Academy. It was quite
exhilarating to hear the clash and bustle with which he banged the door
and jumped up behind after Mrs. Nickleby was in; and as that good lady
was perfectly unconscious that he applied the gold-headed end of his
long stick to his nose, and so telegraphed most disrespectfully to the
coachman over her very head, she sat in a state of much stiffness and
dignity, not a little proud of her position.
At the theatre entrance there was more banging and more bustle, and
there were also Messrs Pyke and Pluck waiting to escort her to her box;
and so polite were they, that Mr. Pyke threatened with many oaths to
‘smifligate’ a very old man with a lantern who accidentally stumbled
in her way--to the great terror of Mrs. Nickleby, who, conjecturing
more from Mr. Pyke’s excitement than any previous acquaintance with the
etymology of the word that smifligation and bloodshed must be in
the main one and the same thing, was alarmed beyond expression, lest
something should occur. Fortunately, however, Mr. Pyke confined himself
to mere verbal smifligation, and they reached their box with no more
serious interruption by the way, than a desire on the part of the same
pugnacious gentleman to ‘smash’ the assistant box-keeper for happening
to mistake the number.
Mrs. Nickleby had scarcely been put away behind the curtain of the box in
an armchair, when Sir Mulberry and Lord Verisopht arrived, arrayed from
the crowns of their heads to the tips of their gloves, and from the
tips of their gloves to the toes of their boots, in the most elegant and
costly manner. Sir Mulberry was a little hoarser than on the previous
day, and Lord Verisopht looked rather sleepy and queer; from which
tokens, as well as from the circumstance of their both being to a
trifling extent unsteady upon their legs, Mrs. Nickleby justly concluded
that they had taken dinner.
‘We have been--we have been--toasting your lovely daughter, Mrs
Nickleby,’ whispered Sir Mulberry, sitting down behind her.
‘Oh, ho!’ thought that knowing lady; ‘wine in, truth out.--You are very
kind, Sir Mulberry.’
‘No, no upon my soul!’ replied Sir Mulberry Hawk. ‘It’s you that’s kind,
upon my soul it is. It was so kind of you to come tonight.’
‘So very kind of you to invite me, you mean, Sir Mulberry,’ replied Mrs
Nickleby, tossing her head, and looking prodigiously sly.
‘I am so anxious to know you, so anxious to cultivate your good opinion,
so desirous that there should be a delicious kind of harmonious family
understanding between us,’ said Sir Mulberry, ‘that you mustn’t think
I’m disinterested in what I do. I’m infernal selfish; I am--upon my soul
I am.’
‘I am sure you can’t be selfish, Sir Mulberry!’ replied Mrs. Nickleby.
‘You have much too open and generous a countenance for that.’
‘What an extraordinary observer you are!’ said Sir Mulberry Hawk.
‘Oh no, indeed, I don’t see very far into things, Sir Mulberry,’ replied
Mrs. Nickleby, in a tone of voice which left the baronet to infer that
she saw very far indeed.
‘I am quite afraid of you,’ said the baronet. ‘Upon my soul,’ repeated
Sir Mulberry, looking round to his companions; ‘I am afraid of Mrs
Nickleby. She is so immensely sharp.’
Messrs Pyke and Pluck shook their heads mysteriously, and observed
together that they had found that out long ago; upon which Mrs. Nickleby
tittered, and Sir Mulberry laughed, and Pyke and Pluck roared.
‘But where’s my brother-in-law, Sir Mulberry?’ inquired Mrs. Nickleby. ‘I
shouldn’t be here without him. I hope he’s coming.’
‘Pyke,’ said Sir Mulberry, taking out his toothpick and lolling back in
his chair, as if he were too lazy to invent a reply to this question.
‘Where’s Ralph Nickleby?’
‘Pluck,’ said Pyke, imitating the baronet’s action, and turning the lie
over to his friend, ‘where’s Ralph Nickleby?’
Mr. Pluck was about to return some evasive reply, when the hustle caused
by a party entering the next box seemed to attract the attention of all
four gentlemen, who exchanged glances of much meaning. The new party
beginning to converse together, Sir Mulberry suddenly assumed the
character of a most attentive listener, and implored his friends not to
breathe--not to breathe.
‘Why not?’ said Mrs. Nickleby. ‘What is the matter?’
‘Hush!’ replied Sir Mulberry, laying his hand on her arm. ‘Lord
Frederick, do you recognise the tones of that voice?’
‘Deyvle take me if I didn’t think it was the voice of Miss Nickleby.’
‘Lor, my lord!’ cried Miss Nickleby’s mama, thrusting her head round the
curtain. ‘Why actually--Kate, my dear, Kate.’
‘YOU here, mama! Is it possible!’
‘Possible, my dear? Yes.’
‘Why who--who on earth is that you have with you, mama?’ said Kate,
shrinking back as she caught sight of a man smiling and kissing his
hand.
‘Who do you suppose, my dear?’ replied Mrs. Nickleby, bending towards Mrs
Wititterly, and speaking a little louder for that lady’s edification.
‘There’s Mr. Pyke, Mr. Pluck, Sir Mulberry Hawk, and Lord Frederick
Verisopht.’
‘Gracious Heaven!’ thought Kate hurriedly. ‘How comes she in such
society?’
Now, Kate thought thus SO hurriedly, and the surprise was so great, and
moreover brought back so forcibly the recollection of what had passed at
Ralph’s delectable dinner, that she turned extremely pale and appeared
greatly agitated, which symptoms being observed by Mrs. Nickleby, were
at once set down by that acute lady as being caused and occasioned by
violent love. But, although she was in no small degree delighted by
this discovery, which reflected so much credit on her own quickness of
perception, it did not lessen her motherly anxiety in Kate’s behalf; and
accordingly, with a vast quantity of trepidation, she quitted her own
box to hasten into that of Mrs. Wititterly. Mrs. Wititterly, keenly
alive to the glory of having a lord and a baronet among her visiting
acquaintance, lost no time in signing to Mr. Wititterly to open the door,
and thus it was that in less than thirty seconds Mrs. Nickleby’s party
had made an irruption into Mrs. Wititterly’s box, which it filled to the
very door, there being in fact only room for Messrs Pyke and Pluck to
get in their heads and waistcoats.
‘My dear Kate,’ said Mrs. Nickleby, kissing her daughter affectionately.
‘How ill you looked a moment ago! You quite frightened me, I declare!’
‘It was mere fancy, mama,--the--the--reflection of the lights perhaps,’
replied Kate, glancing nervously round, and finding it impossible to
whisper any caution or explanation.
‘Don’t you see Sir Mulberry Hawk, my dear?’
Kate bowed slightly, and biting her lip turned her head towards the
stage.
But Sir Mulberry Hawk was not to be so easily repulsed, for he advanced
with extended hand; and Mrs. Nickleby officiously informing Kate of this
circumstance, she was obliged to extend her own. Sir Mulberry detained
it while he murmured a profusion of compliments, which Kate, remembering
what had passed between them, rightly considered as so many aggravations
of the insult he had already put upon her. Then followed the recognition
of Lord Verisopht, and then the greeting of Mr. Pyke, and then that of Mr
Pluck, and finally, to complete the young lady’s mortification, she
was compelled at Mrs. Wititterly’s request to perform the ceremony
of introducing the odious persons, whom she regarded with the utmost
indignation and abhorrence.
‘Mrs. Wititterly is delighted,’ said Mr. Wititterly, rubbing his hands;
‘delighted, my lord, I am sure, with this opportunity of contracting an
acquaintance which, I trust, my lord, we shall improve. Julia, my dear,
you must not allow yourself to be too much excited, you must not.
Indeed you must not. Mrs. Wititterly is of a most excitable nature, Sir
Mulberry. The snuff of a candle, the wick of a lamp, the bloom on a
peach, the down on a butterfly. You might blow her away, my lord; you
might blow her away.’
Sir Mulberry seemed to think that it would be a great convenience if the
lady could be blown away. He said, however, that the delight was mutual,
and Lord Verisopht added that it was mutual, whereupon Messrs Pyke and
Pluck were heard to murmur from the distance that it was very mutual
indeed.
‘I take an interest, my lord,’ said Mrs. Wititterly, with a faint smile,
‘such an interest in the drama.’
‘Ye--es. It’s very interesting,’ replied Lord Verisopht.
‘I’m always ill after Shakespeare,’ said Mrs. Wititterly. ‘I scarcely
exist the next day; I find the reaction so very great after a tragedy,
my lord, and Shakespeare is such a delicious creature.’
‘Ye--es!’ replied Lord Verisopht. ‘He was a clayver man.’
‘Do you know, my lord,’ said Mrs. Wititterly, after a long silence, ‘I
find I take so much more interest in his plays, after having been to
that dear little dull house he was born in! Were you ever there, my
lord?’
‘No, nayver,’ replied Verisopht.
‘Then really you ought to go, my lord,’ returned Mrs. Wititterly, in very
languid and drawling accents. ‘I don’t know how it is, but after you’ve
seen the place and written your name in the little book, somehow or
other you seem to be inspired; it kindles up quite a fire within one.’
‘Ye--es!’ replied Lord Verisopht, ‘I shall certainly go there.’
‘Julia, my life,’ interposed Mr. Wititterly, ‘you are deceiving his
lordship--unintentionally, my lord, she is deceiving you. It is
your poetical temperament, my dear--your ethereal soul--your fervid
imagination, which throws you into a glow of genius and excitement.
There is nothing in the place, my dear--nothing, nothing.’
‘I think there must be something in the place,’ said Mrs. Nickleby, who
had been listening in silence; ‘for, soon after I was married, I went
to Stratford with my poor dear Mr. Nickleby, in a post-chaise
from Birmingham--was it a post-chaise though?’ said Mrs. Nickleby,
considering; ‘yes, it must have been a post-chaise, because I recollect
remarking at the time that the driver had a green shade over his
left eye;--in a post-chaise from Birmingham, and after we had seen
Shakespeare’s tomb and birthplace, we went back to the inn there, where
we slept that night, and I recollect that all night long I dreamt of
nothing but a black gentleman, at full length, in plaster-of-Paris,
with a lay-down collar tied with two tassels, leaning against a post
and thinking; and when I woke in the morning and described him to Mr
Nickleby, he said it was Shakespeare just as he had been when he was
alive, which was very curious indeed. Stratford--Stratford,’ continued
Mrs. Nickleby, considering. ‘Yes, I am positive about that, because I
recollect I was in the family way with my son Nicholas at the time,
and I had been very much frightened by an Italian image boy that very
morning. In fact, it was quite a mercy, ma’am,’ added Mrs. Nickleby, in
a whisper to Mrs. Wititterly, ‘that my son didn’t turn out to be a
Shakespeare, and what a dreadful thing that would have been!’
When Mrs. Nickleby had brought this interesting anecdote to a close,
Pyke and Pluck, ever zealous in their patron’s cause, proposed the
adjournment of a detachment of the party into the next box; and with so
much skill were the preliminaries adjusted, that Kate, despite all
she could say or do to the contrary, had no alternative but to suffer
herself to be led away by Sir Mulberry Hawk. Her mother and Mr. Pluck