|
Chapter 62
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.
< BackForward >
|
