Tales from Dickens, Charles Dickens [best book club books .TXT] 📗
- Author: Charles Dickens
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Then Ralph formed a wicked plot to get Smike surely into their hands. He hired a man to claim that he was the boy's father, who had first taken him to Squeers's school. Squeers, too, swore to this lying tale. But the Cheeryble brothers suspected the story, and when Ralph saw they were determined to help Nicholas protect Smike, he was afraid to go any further with the plan. So he smothered his rage for the time being, and meanwhile a most important thing happened to Nicholas—he fell in love!
It came about in this way: There was a man named Bray, who had been arrested for debt and was allowed to live only in a certain street under the guardianship of the jailer, for this was the law in England then. He was slowly dying of heart-disease, and all the money he had to live on was what his only daughter, a lovely girl named Madeline, earned by painting and selling pictures.
The Cheeryble brothers had learned of their poverty, (for it was hard for Madeline to find purchasers), and they sent Nicholas to buy some of the pictures. He was to pretend to be a dealer, so that Madeline would not suspect it was done for charity. Nicholas went more than once and soon had fallen very much in love with Madeline Bray.
He was not the only one who admired her, however. There was an old man named Gride, almost as stingy as Ralph Nickleby, who had discovered by accident that a large sum of money really belonged to Madeline, which she and her father knew nothing about, and he thought it would be a fine thing to marry her and thus get this fortune into his hands. Now, Ralph Nickleby was one of the men who was keeping Bray a prisoner, and so Gride went to him and asked him to help him marry Madeline. If Bray made his daughter marry the old miser he himself was to be set free. Ralph, for his share, was to get some of the money the old man Gride knew should be Madeline's.
It was a pretty plan and it pleased Ralph, for he cared little what lives he ruined so long as he got money by it. So he agreed, and soon convinced Bray (who, ill as he was, was utterly selfish) that it would be a fine thing for Madeline to marry the hideous old Gride and so free her father. At length, in despair, because she thought it her duty to her heartless father, Madeline consented to do so.
Nicholas might never have known of this till after the wedding, but luckily Noggs, the clerk, had overheard the old skinflint make the bargain with Ralph, and when one day Nicholas confessed that he was in love with Madeline, the good-hearted clerk told him all that he had found out.
Nicholas was in great trouble, for he loved Madeline very dearly. He went to her and begged her not to marry Gride, but she thought it her duty. He went to Gride, too, but the hideous old miser only sneered at him.
At last, in desperation, he told Kate, and the brother and sister went together to Bray's house. They reached it just as the wedding was about to begin.
Ralph Nickleby, who was there, foamed with fury to find the nephew he so hated again stepping between him and his evil designs. He tried to bar them out, but Nicholas forced him back.
They would doubtless have come to blows, but at that moment there came from another room the sound of a fall, and a scream from Madeline. The excitement had proved too much for her father. His heart had failed and he had fallen dead on the floor. Thus Providence interfered to bring the wicked scheme of the marriage to naught.
Vainly did Gride bemoan the loss of the money he had hoped to gain, and vainly did Ralph Nickleby, with curses, try to prevent. Nicholas thrust them both aside, lifted the unconscious Madeline as easily as if she had been a baby, placed her with Kate in a coach and, daring Ralph to follow; jumped up beside the coachman and bade him drive away.
He took her to his own home, where his mother and Kate cared for her tenderly till she had recovered from the shock and was her own lovely self again.
The penalty that he had so long deserved was soon to overtake Ralph Nickleby. He lost much of his wealth through a failure, and close on the heels of this misfortune came the news that the infamous plot he had formed against Smike had been discovered and that Squeers, his accomplice, had been arrested.
The most terrible blow came last. A man whom Ralph had long ago ruined and had caused to be transported for a crime, confessed that he had been the one who, many years before, had left Smike at Dotheboys Hall, and he confessed also that Smike was really Ralph Nickleby's own son by a secret marriage. Ralph had not known this, because the man, in revenge, had falsely told him the child was dead.
The knowledge that, in Smike, he had been persecuting his own son was the crowning blow for cruel Ralph Nickleby. When he heard this he locked himself up alone in his great house and never was seen alive again. His body was found in the garret where he had hanged himself to a rafter.
Poor Smike, however, did not live to sorrow over the villainy of his father. The exposure and hardships of his years at Squeers's school had broken his health. He had for long been gradually growing weaker, and at last one day he died peacefully, with Nicholas's arms around him.
Every one of whose villainy this story tells came to a bad end. Sir Mulberry Hawk quarreled with young Lord Verisopht and shot him dead in the duel that followed. For this he himself had to fly to a foreign country, where he finally died miserably in jail. Gride, the miser who had plotted to marry Madeline, met almost as terrible a fate as Ralph's. His house was broken into by burglars one night and he was found murdered in his bed.
Squeers was declared guilty and transported for seven years. When the news reached Dotheboys Hall such a cheer arose as had never been heard there. It came on the weekly "treacle day," and the boys ducked young Wackford in the soup kettle and made Mrs. Squeers swallow a big dose of her own brimstone. Then, big and little, they all ran away, just as Nicholas and Smike had done.
Kate married a nephew of the Cheeryble brothers, and Nicholas, of course, married Madeline, and in time became a partner in the firm. All of them lived near by, and their little children played together under the watchful care of old Noggs, the one-eyed clerk, who loved them all alike.
The children laid flowers every day on poor Smike's grave, and often their eyes filled with tears as they spoke low and softly of the dead cousin they had never known.
DEALINGS WITH THE FIRM OFDOMBEY AND SON
WHOLESALE, RETAIL, AND FOR EXPORTATION
Published 1846–1848
LITTLE PAUL
In London there was once a business house known as Dombey and Son. It had borne that name for generations, though at the time this story begins Mr. Dombey, the head of the house, had no son. He was a merchant, hard, cold and selfish, who thought the world was made only for his firm to trade in. He had one little daughter, Florence, but never since her birth had he loved or petted her because of his disappointment that she was not a boy.
When at last a son was born to him it wakened something at the bottom of his cold and heavy heart that he had never known before. He scarcely grieved for his wife, who died when the baby was born, but gave all his thought to the child. He named him Paul, and began at once to long for the time when he should become old enough to be a real member of the firm in which all his own interest centered—Dombey and Son. He hired the best nurse he could find, and, when he was not at his office, would sit and watch the baby Paul hour after hour, laying plans for his future. So selfishly was the father's soul wrapped up in this that he scarcely ever noticed poor, lonely little Florence, whose warm heart was starving for affection.
Little Paul's nurse was very fond of him, and of his sister, too; but she had children of her own also, and one day, instead of walking up and down with Florence and the baby near the Dombey house, she took the children to another part of the city to visit her own home.
This was a wrong thing to do, and resulted in a very unhappy adventure for Florence. On their way home a mad bull broke away from his keepers and charged through the crowded street. There was great screaming and confusion and people ran in every direction, Florence among the rest. She ran for a long way, and when she stopped, her nurse was nowhere to be seen. Terrified to find herself lost in the great city, she began to cry.
The next thing she knew, an ugly old woman, with red-rimmed eyes and a mouth that mumbled all the while, grasped her by the wrist and dragged her through the shabby doorway of a dirty house into a back room heaped with rags.
"I want that pretty frock," said she, "and that little bonnet and your petticoat. Come! Take them off!"
Florence, dreadfully frightened, obeyed. The old woman took away her shoes, too, and made her put on some filthy ragged clothing from the heaps on the floor. Then she let her go, first making her promise she would not ask any one to show her the way home.
The poor child could think of nothing else but to find her father's office at Dombey and Son's, and for two hours she walked, asking the way of everybody she met. She might not have found it at all, but at a wharf where she wandered, there happened to be a young clerk of Dombey and Son's, and the minute he was pointed out to her she felt such trust in his bright and open face that she caught his hand and sobbed out all her story.
This lad's name was Walter Gay. He lived with his uncle, honest old Solomon Gills, a maker of ship's instruments, who kept a little shop with the wooden figure of a midshipman set outside. Very few customers ever came into the shop, and, indeed, hardly any one else, for Old Sol, as the neighbors called him, had only one intimate friend.
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