Nicholas Nickleby
was a nice lady too, and talked, perhaps more, but certainly louder,
than Miss La Creevy.
At length the door opened again, and a lady in mourning came in; and
Nicholas kissing the lady in mourning affectionately, and calling her
his mother, led her towards the chair from which Smike had risen when
she entered the room.
‘You are always kind-hearted, and anxious to help the oppressed, my dear
mother,’ said Nicholas, ‘so you will be favourably disposed towards him,
I know.’
‘I am sure, my dear Nicholas,’ replied Mrs. Nickleby, looking very hard
at her new friend, and bending to him with something more of majesty
than the occasion seemed to require: ‘I am sure any friend of yours
has, as indeed he naturally ought to have, and must have, of course, you
know, a great claim upon me, and of course, it is a very great pleasure
to me to be introduced to anybody you take an interest in. There can be
no doubt about that; none at all; not the least in the world,’ said Mrs
Nickleby. ‘At the same time I must say, Nicholas, my dear, as I used
to say to your poor dear papa, when he WOULD bring gentlemen home to
dinner, and there was nothing in the house, that if he had come the
day before yesterday--no, I don’t mean the day before yesterday now;
I should have said, perhaps, the year before last--we should have been
better able to entertain him.’
With which remarks, Mrs. Nickleby turned to her daughter, and inquired,
in an audible whisper, whether the gentleman was going to stop all
night.
‘Because, if he is, Kate, my dear,’ said Mrs. Nickleby, ‘I don’t see that
it’s possible for him to sleep anywhere, and that’s the truth.’
Kate stepped gracefully forward, and without any show of annoyance or
irritation, breathed a few words into her mother’s ear.
‘La, Kate, my dear,’ said Mrs. Nickleby, shrinking back, ‘how you do
tickle one! Of course, I understand THAT, my love, without your telling
me; and I said the same to Nicholas, and I AM very much pleased. You
didn’t tell me, Nicholas, my dear,’ added Mrs. Nickleby, turning round
with an air of less reserve than she had before assumed, ‘what your
friend’s name is.’
‘His name, mother,’ replied Nicholas, ‘is Smike.’
The effect of this communication was by no means anticipated; but the
name was no sooner pronounced, than Mrs. Nickleby dropped upon a chair,
and burst into a fit of crying.
‘What is the matter?’ exclaimed Nicholas, running to support her.
‘It’s so like Pyke,’ cried Mrs. Nickleby; ‘so exactly like Pyke. Oh!
don’t speak to me--I shall be better presently.’
And after exhibiting every symptom of slow suffocation in all its
stages, and drinking about a tea-spoonful of water from a full tumbler,
and spilling the remainder, Mrs. Nickleby WAS better, and remarked, with
a feeble smile, that she was very foolish, she knew.
‘It’s a weakness in our family,’ said Mrs. Nickleby, ‘so, of course,
I can’t be blamed for it. Your grandmama, Kate, was exactly the
same--precisely. The least excitement, the slightest surprise--she
fainted away directly. I have heard her say, often and often, that when
she was a young lady, and before she was married, she was turning
a corner into Oxford Street one day, when she ran against her own
hairdresser, who, it seems, was escaping from a bear;--the mere
suddenness of the encounter made her faint away directly. Wait, though,’
added Mrs. Nickleby, pausing to consider. ‘Let me be sure I’m right. Was
it her hairdresser who had escaped from a bear, or was it a bear who had
escaped from her hairdresser’s? I declare I can’t remember just now, but
the hairdresser was a very handsome man, I know, and quite a gentleman
in his manners; so that it has nothing to do with the point of the
story.’
Mrs. Nickleby having fallen imperceptibly into one of her retrospective
moods, improved in temper from that moment, and glided, by an easy
change of the conversation occasionally, into various other anecdotes,
no less remarkable for their strict application to the subject in hand.
‘Mr. Smike is from Yorkshire, Nicholas, my dear?’ said Mrs. Nickleby,
after dinner, and when she had been silent for some time.
‘Certainly, mother,’ replied Nicholas. ‘I see you have not forgotten his
melancholy history.’
‘O dear no,’ cried Mrs. Nickleby. ‘Ah! melancholy, indeed. You don’t
happen, Mr. Smike, ever to have dined with the Grimbles of Grimble Hall,
somewhere in the North Riding, do you?’ said the good lady, addressing
herself to him. ‘A very proud man, Sir Thomas Grimble, with six grown-up
and most lovely daughters, and the finest park in the county.’
‘My dear mother,’ reasoned Nicholas, ‘do you suppose that the
unfortunate outcast of a Yorkshire school was likely to receive many
cards of invitation from the nobility and gentry in the neighbourhood?’
‘Really, my dear, I don’t know why it should be so very extraordinary,’
said Mrs. Nickleby. ‘I know that when I was at school, I always went at
least twice every half-year to the Hawkinses at Taunton Vale, and they
are much richer than the Grimbles, and connected with them in marriage;
so you see it’s not so very unlikely, after all.’
Having put down Nicholas in this triumphant manner, Mrs. Nickleby was
suddenly seized with a forgetfulness of Smike’s real name, and an
irresistible tendency to call him Mr. Slammons; which circumstance she
attributed to the remarkable similarity of the two names in point of
sound both beginning with an S, and moreover being spelt with an M. But
whatever doubt there might be on this point, there was none as to his
being a most excellent listener; which circumstance had considerable
influence in placing them on the very best terms, and inducing Mrs
Nickleby to express the highest opinion of his general deportment and
disposition.
Thus, the little circle remained, on the most amicable and agreeable
footing, until the Monday morning, when Nicholas withdrew himself from
it for a short time, seriously to reflect upon the state of his affairs,
and to determine, if he could, upon some course of life, which would
enable him to support those who were so entirely dependent upon his
exertions.
Mr. Crummles occurred to him more than once; but although Kate was
acquainted with the whole history of his connection with that gentleman,
his mother was not; and he foresaw a thousand fretful objections, on
her part, to his seeking a livelihood upon the stage. There were graver
reasons, too, against his returning to that mode of life. Independently
of those arising out of its spare and precarious earnings, and his own
internal conviction that he could never hope to aspire to any great
distinction, even as a provincial actor, how could he carry his sister
from town to town, and place to place, and debar her from any other
associates than those with whom he would be compelled, almost without
distinction, to mingle? ‘It won’t do,’ said Nicholas, shaking his head;
‘I must try something else.’
It was much easier to make this resolution than to carry it into effect.
With no greater experience of the world than he had acquired for himself
in his short trials; with a sufficient share of headlong rashness and
precipitation (qualities not altogether unnatural at his time of life);
with a very slender stock of money, and a still more scanty stock
of friends; what could he do? ‘Egad!’ said Nicholas, ‘I’ll try that
Register Office again.’
He smiled at himself as he walked away with a quick step; for, an
instant before, he had been internally blaming his own precipitation.
He did not laugh himself out of the intention, however, for on he went:
picturing to himself, as he approached the place, all kinds of splendid
possibilities, and impossibilities too, for that matter, and thinking
himself, perhaps with good reason, very fortunate to be endowed with so
buoyant and sanguine a temperament.
The office looked just the same as when he had left it last, and,
indeed, with one or two exceptions, there seemed to be the very same
placards in the window that he had seen before. There were the same
unimpeachable masters and mistresses in want of virtuous servants,
and the same virtuous servants in want of unimpeachable masters and
mistresses, and the same magnificent estates for the investment of
capital, and the same enormous quantities of capital to be invested in
estates, and, in short, the same opportunities of all sorts for people
who wanted to make their fortunes. And a most extraordinary proof it
was of the national prosperity, that people had not been found to avail
themselves of such advantages long ago.
As Nicholas stopped to look in at the window, an old gentleman happened
to stop too; and Nicholas, carrying his eye along the window-panes from
left to right in search of some capital-text placard which should be
applicable to his own case, caught sight of this old gentleman’s figure,
and instinctively withdrew his eyes from the window, to observe the same
more closely.
He was a sturdy old fellow in a broad-skirted blue coat, made pretty
large, to fit easily, and with no particular waist; his bulky legs
clothed in drab breeches and high gaiters, and his head protected by
a low-crowned broad-brimmed white hat, such as a wealthy grazier might
wear. He wore his coat buttoned; and his dimpled double chin rested
in the folds of a white neckerchief--not one of your stiff-starched
apoplectic cravats, but a good, easy, old-fashioned white neckcloth that
a man might go to bed in and be none the worse for. But what principally
attracted the attention of Nicholas was the old gentleman’s eye,--never
was such a clear, twinkling, honest, merry, happy eye, as that. And
there he stood, looking a little upward, with one hand thrust into the
breast of his coat, and the other playing with his old-fashioned gold
watch-chain: his head thrown a little on one side, and his hat a little
more on one side than his head, (but that was evidently accident; not
his ordinary way of wearing it,) with such a pleasant smile playing
about his mouth, and such a comical expression of mingled slyness,
simplicity, kind-heartedness, and good-humour, lighting up his jolly
old face, that Nicholas would have been content to have stood there
and looked at him until evening, and to have forgotten, meanwhile, that
there was such a thing as a soured mind or a crabbed countenance to be
met with in the whole wide world.
But, even a very remote approach to this gratification was not to
be made, for although he seemed quite unconscious of having been the
subject of observation, he looked casually at Nicholas; and the latter,
fearful of giving offence, resumed his scrutiny of the window instantly.
Still, the old gentleman stood there, glancing from placard to placard,
and Nicholas could not forbear raising his eyes to his face again.
Grafted upon the quaintness and oddity of his appearance, was something
so indescribably engaging, and bespeaking so much worth, and there were
so many little lights hovering about the corners of his mouth and eyes,
that it was not a mere amusement, but a positive pleasure and delight to
look at him.
This being the case, it is no wonder that the old man caught Nicholas
in the fact, more than once. At such times, Nicholas coloured and looked
embarrassed: for the truth is, that he had begun to wonder whether the
stranger could, by any possibility, be looking for a clerk or secretary;
and thinking this, he felt as if the old gentleman must know it.
Long as all this takes to tell, it was not more than a couple of minutes
in passing. As the stranger was moving away, Nicholas caught his eye
again, and, in the awkwardness of the moment, stammered out an apology.
‘No offence. Oh no offence!’ said the old man.
This was said in such a hearty tone, and the voice was so exactly what