The Life and Adventures of Nicholas Nickleby, Charles Dickens [ebook offline reader TXT] 📗
- Author: Charles Dickens
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‘I wish you had.’
‘You’ll have a bad wife, though, if you always win at cards,’ said Miss Price.
‘Not if your wish is gratified,’ replied Nicholas. ‘I am sure I shall have a good one in that case.’
To see how Miss Squeers tossed her head, and the corn-factor flattened his nose, while this conversation was carrying on! It would have been worth a small annuity to have beheld that; let alone Miss Price’s evident joy at making them jealous, and Nicholas Nickleby’s happy unconsciousness of making anybody uncomfortable.
‘We have all the talking to ourselves, it seems,’ said Nicholas, looking good-humouredly round the table as he took up the cards for a fresh deal.
‘You do it so well,’ tittered Miss Squeers, ‘that it would be a pity to interrupt, wouldn’t it, Mr Browdie? He! he! he!’
‘Nay,’ said Nicholas, ‘we do it in default of having anybody else to talk to.’
‘We’ll talk to you, you know, if you’ll say anything,’ said Miss Price.
‘Thank you, ‘Tilda, dear,’ retorted Miss Squeers, majestically.
‘Or you can talk to each other, if you don’t choose to talk to us,’ said Miss Price, rallying her dear friend. ‘John, why don’t you say something?’
‘Say summat?’ repeated the Yorkshireman.
‘Ay, and not sit there so silent and glum.’
‘Weel, then!’ said the Yorkshireman, striking the table heavily with his fist, ‘what I say’s this—Dang my boans and boddy, if I stan’ this ony longer. Do ye gang whoam wi’ me, and do yon loight an’ toight young whipster look sharp out for a brokken head, next time he cums under my hond.’
‘Mercy on us, what’s all this?’ cried Miss Price, in affected astonishment.
‘Cum whoam, tell ‘e, cum whoam,’ replied the Yorkshireman, sternly. And as he delivered the reply, Miss Squeers burst into a shower of tears; arising in part from desperate vexation, and in part from an impotent desire to lacerate somebody’s countenance with her fair finger-nails.
This state of things had been brought about by divers means and workings. Miss Squeers had brought it about, by aspiring to the high state and condition of being matrimonially engaged, without good grounds for so doing; Miss Price had brought it about, by indulging in three motives of action: first, a desire to punish her friend for laying claim to a rivalship in dignity, having no good title: secondly, the gratification of her own vanity, in receiving the compliments of a smart young man: and thirdly, a wish to convince the corn-factor of the great danger he ran, in deferring the celebration of their expected nuptials; while Nicholas had brought it about, by half an hour’s gaiety and thoughtlessness, and a very sincere desire to avoid the imputation of inclining at all to Miss Squeers. So the means employed, and the end produced, were alike the most natural in the world; for young ladies will look forward to being married, and will jostle each other in the race to the altar, and will avail themselves of all opportunities of displaying their own attractions to the best advantage, down to the very end of time, as they have done from its beginning.
‘Why, and here’s Fanny in tears now!’ exclaimed Miss Price, as if in fresh amazement. ‘What can be the matter?’
‘Oh! you don’t know, miss, of course you don’t know. Pray don’t trouble yourself to inquire,’ said Miss Squeers, producing that change of countenance which children call making a face.
‘Well, I’m sure!’ exclaimed Miss Price.
‘And who cares whether you are sure or not, ma’am?’ retorted Miss Squeers, making another face.
‘You are monstrous polite, ma’am,’ said Miss Price.
‘I shall not come to you to take lessons in the art, ma’am!’ retorted Miss Squeers.
‘You needn’t take the trouble to make yourself plainer than you are, ma’am, however,’ rejoined Miss Price, ‘because that’s quite unnecessary.’
Miss Squeers, in reply, turned very red, and thanked God that she hadn’t got the bold faces of some people. Miss Price, in rejoinder, congratulated herself upon not being possessed of the envious feeling of other people; whereupon Miss Squeers made some general remark touching the danger of associating with low persons; in which Miss Price entirely coincided: observing that it was very true indeed, and she had thought so a long time.
”Tilda,’ exclaimed Miss Squeers with dignity, ‘I hate you.’
‘Ah! There’s no love lost between us, I assure you,’ said Miss Price, tying her bonnet strings with a jerk. ‘You’ll cry your eyes out, when I’m gone; you know you will.’
‘I scorn your words, Minx,’ said Miss Squeers.
‘You pay me a great compliment when you say so,’ answered the miller’s daughter, curtseying very low. ‘Wish you a very good-night, ma’am, and pleasant dreams attend your sleep!’
With this parting benediction, Miss Price swept from the room, followed by the huge Yorkshireman, who exchanged with Nicholas, at parting, that peculiarly expressive scowl with which the cut-and- thrust counts, in melodramatic performances, inform each other they will meet again.
They were no sooner gone, than Miss Squeers fulfilled the prediction of her quondam friend by giving vent to a most copious burst of tears, and uttering various dismal lamentations and incoherent words. Nicholas stood looking on for a few seconds, rather doubtful what to do, but feeling uncertain whether the fit would end in his being embraced, or scratched, and considering that either infliction would be equally agreeable, he walked off very quietly while Miss Squeers was moaning in her pocket-handkerchief.
‘This is one consequence,’ thought Nicholas, when he had groped his way to the dark sleeping-room, ‘of my cursed readiness to adapt myself to any society in which chance carries me. If I had sat mute and motionless, as I might have done, this would not have happened.’
He listened for a few minutes, but all was quiet.
‘I was glad,’ he murmured, ‘to grasp at any relief from the sight of this dreadful place, or the presence of its vile master. I have set these people by the ears, and made two new enemies, where, Heaven knows, I needed none. Well, it is a just punishment for having forgotten, even for an hour, what is around me now!’
So saying, he felt his way among the throng of weary-hearted sleepers, and crept into his poor bed.
How Mr Ralph Nickleby provided for his Niece and Sister-in-Law
On the second morning after the departure of Nicholas for Yorkshire, Kate Nickleby sat in a very faded chair raised upon a very dusty throne in Miss La Creevy’s room, giving that lady a sitting for the portrait upon which she was engaged; and towards the full perfection of which, Miss La Creevy had had the streetdoor case brought upstairs, in order that she might be the better able to infuse into the counterfeit countenance of Miss Nickleby, a bright salmon flesh-tint which she had originally hit upon while executing the miniature of a young officer therein contained, and which bright salmon flesh-tint was considered, by Miss La Creevy’s chief friends and patrons, to be quite a novelty in art: as indeed it was.
‘I think I have caught it now,’ said Miss La Creevy. ‘The very shade! This will be the sweetest portrait I have ever done, certainly.’
‘It will be your genius that makes it so, then, I am sure,’ replied Kate, smiling.
‘No, no, I won’t allow that, my dear,’ rejoined Miss La Creevy. ‘It’s a very nice subject—a very nice subject, indeed—though, of course, something depends upon the mode of treatment.’
‘And not a little,’ observed Kate.
‘Why, my dear, you are right there,’ said Miss La Creevy, ‘in the main you are right there; though I don’t allow that it is of such very great importance in the present case. Ah! The difficulties of Art, my dear, are great.’
‘They must be, I have no doubt,’ said Kate, humouring her good-natured little friend.
‘They are beyond anything you can form the faintest conception of,’ replied Miss La Creevy. ‘What with bringing out eyes with all one’s power, and keeping down noses with all one’s force, and adding to heads, and taking away teeth altogether, you have no idea of the trouble one little miniature is.’
‘The remuneration can scarcely repay you,’ said Kate.
‘Why, it does not, and that’s the truth,’ answered Miss La Creevy; ‘and then people are so dissatisfied and unreasonable, that, nine times out of ten, there’s no pleasure in painting them. Sometimes they say, “Oh, how very serious you have made me look, Miss La Creevy!” and at others, “La, Miss La Creevy, how very smirking!” when the very essence of a good portrait is, that it must be either serious or smirking, or it’s no portrait at all.’
‘Indeed!’ said Kate, laughing.
‘Certainly, my dear; because the sitters are always either the one or the other,’ replied Miss La Creevy. ‘Look at the Royal Academy! All those beautiful shiny portraits of gentlemen in black velvet waistcoats, with their fists doubled up on round tables, or marble slabs, are serious, you know; and all the ladies who are playing with little parasols, or little dogs, or little children—it’s the same rule in art, only varying the objects—are smirking. In fact,’ said Miss La Creevy, sinking her voice to a confidential whisper, ‘there are only two styles of portrait painting; the serious and the smirk; and we always use the serious for professional people (except actors sometimes), and the smirk for private ladies and gentlemen who don’t care so much about looking clever.’
Kate seemed highly amused by this information, and Miss La Creevy went on painting and talking, with immovable complacency.
‘What a number of officers you seem to paint!’ said Kate, availing herself of a pause in the discourse, and glancing round the room.
‘Number of what, child?’ inquired Miss La Creevy, looking up from her work. ‘Character portraits, oh yes—they’re not real military men, you know.’
‘No!’
‘Bless your heart, of course not; only clerks and that, who hire a uniform coat to be painted in, and send it here in a carpet bag. Some artists,’ said Miss La Creevy, ‘keep a red coat, and charge seven-and-sixpence extra for hire and carmine; but I don’t do that myself, for I don’t consider it legitimate.’
Drawing herself up, as though she plumed herself greatly upon not resorting to these lures to catch sitters, Miss La Creevy applied herself, more intently, to her task: only raising her head occasionally, to look with unspeakable satisfaction at some touch she had just put in: and now and then giving Miss Nickleby to understand what particular feature she was at work upon, at the moment; ‘not,’ she expressly observed, ‘that you should make it up for painting, my dear, but because it’s our custom sometimes to tell sitters what part we are upon, in order that if there’s any particular expression they want introduced, they may throw it in, at the time, you know.’
‘And when,’ said Miss La Creevy, after a long silence, to wit, an interval of full a minute and a half, ‘when do you expect to see your uncle again?’
‘I scarcely know; I had expected to have seen him before now,’ replied Kate. ‘Soon I hope, for this state of uncertainty is worse than anything.’
‘I suppose he has money, hasn’t he?’ inquired Miss La Creevy.
‘He is very rich, I have heard,’ rejoined Kate. ‘I don’t know that he is, but I believe so.’
‘Ah, you may depend upon it he is, or he wouldn’t be so surly,’ remarked Miss La Creevy, who was an odd little mixture of shrewdness and simplicity. ‘When a man’s a bear, he is generally
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