Ralph makes one last Appointment--and keeps it
Creeping from the house, and slinking off like a thief; groping with his
hands, when first he got into the street, as if he were a blind man; and
looking often over his shoulder while he hurried away, as though he were
followed in imagination or reality by someone anxious to question or
detain him; Ralph Nickleby left the city behind him, and took the road
to his own home.
The night was dark, and a cold wind blew, driving the clouds, furiously
and fast, before it. There was one black, gloomy mass that seemed
to follow him: not hurrying in the wild chase with the others, but
lingering sullenly behind, and gliding darkly and stealthily on. He
often looked back at this, and, more than once, stopped to let it pass
over; but, somehow, when he went forward again, it was still behind him,
coming mournfully and slowly up, like a shadowy funeral train.
He had to pass a poor, mean burial-ground--a dismal place, raised a
few feet above the level of the street, and parted from it by a low
parapet-wall and an iron railing; a rank, unwholesome, rotten spot,
where the very grass and weeds seemed, in their frouzy growth, to tell
that they had sprung from paupers’ bodies, and had struck their roots in
the graves of men, sodden, while alive, in steaming courts and drunken
hungry dens. And here, in truth, they lay, parted from the living by a
little earth and a board or two--lay thick and close--corrupting in body
as they had in mind--a dense and squalid crowd. Here they lay, cheek by
jowl with life: no deeper down than the feet of the throng that passed
there every day, and piled high as their throats. Here they lay, a
grisly family, all these dear departed brothers and sisters of the ruddy
clergyman who did his task so speedily when they were hidden in the
ground!
As he passed here, Ralph called to mind that he had been one of a jury,
long before, on the body of a man who had cut his throat; and that he
was buried in this place. He could not tell how he came to recollect it
now, when he had so often passed and never thought about him, or how it
was that he felt an interest in the circumstance; but he did both; and
stopping, and clasping the iron railings with his hands, looked eagerly
in, wondering which might be his grave.
While he was thus engaged, there came towards him, with noise of shouts
and singing, some fellows full of drink, followed by others, who were
remonstrating with them and urging them to go home in quiet. They were
in high good-humour; and one of them, a little, weazen, hump-backed
man, began to dance. He was a grotesque, fantastic figure, and the few
bystanders laughed. Ralph himself was moved to mirth, and echoed the
laugh of one who stood near and who looked round in his face. When they
had passed on, and he was left alone again, he resumed his speculation
with a new kind of interest; for he recollected that the last person who
had seen the suicide alive, had left him very merry, and he remembered
how strange he and the other jurors had thought that at the time.
He could not fix upon the spot among such a heap of graves, but he
conjured up a strong and vivid idea of the man himself, and how he
looked, and what had led him to do it; all of which he recalled with
ease. By dint of dwelling upon this theme, he carried the impression
with him when he went away; as he remembered, when a child, to have had
frequently before him the figure of some goblin he had once seen chalked
upon a door. But as he drew nearer and nearer home he forgot it again,
and began to think how very dull and solitary the house would be inside.
This feeling became so strong at last, that when he reached his own
door, he could hardly make up his mind to turn the key and open it. When
he had done that, and gone into the passage, he felt as though to shut
it again would be to shut out the world. But he let it go, and it closed
with a loud noise. There was no light. How very dreary, cold, and still
it was!
Shivering from head to foot, he made his way upstairs into the room
where he had been last disturbed. He had made a kind of compact with
himself that he would not think of what had happened until he got home.
He was at home now, and suffered himself to consider it.
His own child, his own child! He never doubted the tale; he felt it was
true; knew it as well, now, as if he had been privy to it all along. His
own child! And dead too. Dying beside Nicholas, loving him, and looking
upon him as something like an angel. That was the worst!
They had all turned from him and deserted him in his very first need.
Even money could not buy them now; everything must come out, and
everybody must know all. Here was the young lord dead, his companion
abroad and beyond his reach, ten thousand pounds gone at one blow, his
plot with Gride overset at the very moment of triumph, his after-schemes
discovered, himself in danger, the object of his persecution and
Nicholas’s love, his own wretched boy; everything crumbled and fallen
upon him, and he beaten down beneath the ruins and grovelling in the
dust.
If he had known his child to be alive; if no deceit had been ever
practised, and he had grown up beneath his eye; he might have been a
careless, indifferent, rough, harsh father--like enough--he felt that;
but the thought would come that he might have been otherwise, and that
his son might have been a comfort to him, and they two happy together.
He began to think now, that his supposed death and his wife’s flight had
had some share in making him the morose, hard man he was. He seemed to
remember a time when he was not quite so rough and obdurate; and almost
thought that he had first hated Nicholas because he was young and
gallant, and perhaps like the stripling who had brought dishonour and
loss of fortune on his head.
But one tender thought, or one of natural regret, in his whirlwind of
passion and remorse, was as a drop of calm water in a stormy maddened
sea. His hatred of Nicholas had been fed upon his own defeat, nourished
on his interference with his schemes, fattened upon his old defiance
and success. There were reasons for its increase; it had grown and
strengthened gradually. Now it attained a height which was sheer wild
lunacy. That his, of all others, should have been the hands to rescue
his miserable child; that he should have been his protector and faithful
friend; that he should have shown him that love and tenderness which,
from the wretched moment of his birth, he had never known; that he
should have taught him to hate his own parent and execrate his very
name; that he should now know and feel all this, and triumph in the
recollection; was gall and madness to the usurer’s heart. The dead
boy’s love for Nicholas, and the attachment of Nicholas to him, was
insupportable agony. The picture of his deathbed, with Nicholas at his
side, tending and supporting him, and he breathing out his thanks, and
expiring in his arms, when he would have had them mortal enemies and
hating each other to the last, drove him frantic. He gnashed his teeth
and smote the air, and looking wildly round, with eyes which gleamed
through the darkness, cried aloud:
‘I am trampled down and ruined. The wretch told me true. The night has
come! Is there no way to rob them of further triumph, and spurn their
mercy and compassion? Is there no devil to help me?’
Swiftly, there glided again into his brain the figure he had raised that
night. It seemed to lie before him. The head was covered now. So it
was when he first saw it. The rigid, upturned, marble feet too, he
remembered well. Then came before him the pale and trembling relatives
who had told their tale upon the inquest--the shrieks of women--the
silent dread of men--the consternation and disquiet--the victory
achieved by that heap of clay, which, with one motion of its hand, had
let out the life and made this stir among them--
He spoke no more; but, after a pause, softly groped his way out of
the room, and up the echoing stairs--up to the top--to the front
garret--where he closed the door behind him, and remained.
It was a mere lumber-room now, but it yet contained an old dismantled
bedstead; the one on which his son had slept; for no other had ever been
there. He avoided it hastily, and sat down as far from it as he could.
The weakened glare of the lights in the street below, shining through
the window which had no blind or curtain to intercept it, was enough to
show the character of the room, though not sufficient fully to reveal
the various articles of lumber, old corded trunks and broken furniture,
which were scattered about. It had a shelving roof; high in one part,
and at another descending almost to the floor. It was towards the
highest part that Ralph directed his eyes; and upon it he kept them
fixed steadily for some minutes, when he rose, and dragging thither an
old chest upon which he had been seated, mounted on it, and felt along
the wall above his head with both hands. At length, they touched a large
iron hook, firmly driven into one of the beams.
At that moment, he was interrupted by a loud knocking at the door below.
After a little hesitation he opened the window, and demanded who it was.
‘I want Mr. Nickleby,’ replied a voice.
‘What with him?’
‘That’s not Mr. Nickleby’s voice, surely?’ was the rejoinder.
It was not like it; but it was Ralph who spoke, and so he said.
The voice made answer that the twin brothers wished to know whether the
man whom he had seen that night was to be detained; and that although it
was now midnight they had sent, in their anxiety to do right.
‘Yes,’ cried Ralph, ‘detain him till tomorrow; then let them bring him
here--him and my nephew--and come themselves, and be sure that I will be
ready to receive them.’
‘At what hour?’ asked the voice.
‘At any hour,’ replied Ralph fiercely. ‘In the afternoon, tell them. At
any hour, at any minute. All times will be alike to me.’
He listened to the man’s retreating footsteps until the sound had
passed, and then, gazing up into the sky, saw, or thought he saw, the
same black cloud that had seemed to follow him home, and which now
appeared to hover directly above the house.
‘I know its meaning now,’ he muttered, ‘and the restless nights, the
dreams, and why I have quailed of late. All pointed to this. Oh! if men
by selling their own souls could ride rampant for a term, for how short
a term would I barter mine tonight!’
The sound of a deep bell came along the wind. One.
‘Lie on!’ cried the usurer, ‘with your iron tongue! Ring merrily for
births that make expectants writhe, and marriages that are made in hell,
and toll ruefully for the dead whose shoes are worn already! Call men
to prayers who are godly because not found out, and ring chimes for the
coming in of every year that brings this cursed world nearer to its end.
No bell or book for me! Throw me on a dunghill, and let me rot there, to
infect the air!’
With a wild look around, in which frenzy, hatred, and despair were
horribly mingled, he shook his clenched hand at the sky above him, which
was still dark and threatening, and closed the window.
The rain and hail pattered against the glass; the chimneys quaked and
rocked; the crazy casement rattled with the wind, as though an impatient
hand inside were striving to burst it open. But no hand was there, and
it opened no more.
‘How’s this?’ cried one. ‘The gentleman say they can’t make anybody
hear, and have been trying these two hours.’
‘And yet he came home last night,’ said another; ‘for he spoke to
somebody out of that window upstairs.’
They were a little knot of men, and, the window being mentioned, went
out into the road to look up at it. This occasioned their observing that
the house was still close shut, as the housekeeper had said she had left
it on the previous night, and led to a great many suggestions: which
terminated in two or three of the boldest getting round to the back, and
so entering by a window, while the others remained outside, in impatient
expectation.
They looked into all the rooms below: opening the shutters as they went,
to admit the fading light: and still finding nobody, and everything
quiet and in its place, doubted whether they should go farther. One man,
however, remarking that they had not yet been into the garret, and that
it was there he had been last seen, they agreed to look there too, and
went up softly; for the mystery and silence made them timid.
After they had stood for an instant, on the landing, eyeing each other,
he who had proposed their carrying the search so far, turned the handle
of the door, and, pushing it open, looked through the chink, and fell
back directly.
‘It’s very odd,’ he whispered, ‘he’s hiding behind the door! Look!’
They pressed forward to see; but one among them thrusting the others
aside with a loud exclamation, drew a clasp-knife from his pocket, and
dashing into the room, cut down the body.
He had torn a rope from one of the old trunks, and hung himself on an
iron hook immediately below the trap-door in the ceiling--in the very
place to which the eyes of his son, a lonely, desolate, little creature,
had so often been directed in childish terror, fourteen years before.