door, and audibly wondering, for the edification of Newman, why it was fastened as if it were night, let him in and Squeers out, and returned to his own room.
"Now!" he muttered, doggedly. "Come what come may, for the present I am firm and unshaken. Let me but retrieve this one small portion of my loss and disgrace. Let me but defeat him in this one hope, dear to his heart as I know it must be. Let me but do this, and it shall be the first link in such a chain, which I will wind about him, as never man forged yet."
CHAPTER LVII.
HOW RALPH NICKLEBY’S AUXILIARY WENT ABOUT HIS WORK, AND HOW HE PROSPERED WITH IT.
It was a dark, wet, gloomy night in autumn, when in an upper room of a mean house, situated in an obscure street or rather court near Lambeth, there sat all alone, a one-eyed man grotesquely habited, either for lack of better garments or for purposes of disguise, in a loose great-coat, with arms half as long again as his own, and a capacity of breadth and length which would have admitted of his winding himself in it, head and all, with the utmost ease, and without any risk of straining the old and greasy material of which it was composed.
So attired, and in a place so far removed from his usual haunts and occupations, and so very poor and wretched in its character, perhaps Mrs. Squeers herself would have had some difficulty in recognising her lord, quickened though her natural sagacity doubtless would have been by the affectionate yearnings and impulses of a tender wife. But Mrs. Squeers's lord it was; and in a tolerably disconsolate mood Mrs. Squeers's lord appeared to be, as, helping himself from a black bottle which stood on the table beside him, he cast round the chamber a look, in which very slight regard for the objects within view was plainly mingled with some regretful and impatient recollection of distant scenes and persons.
There were certainly no particular attractions, either in the room over which the glance of Mr. Squeers so discontentedly wandered, or in the narrow street into which it might have penetrated, if he had thought fit to approach the window. The attic-chamber in which he sat was bare and mean; the bedstead, and such few other articles of necessary furniture as it contained, of the commonest description, in a most crazy state, and of a most uninviting appearance. The street was muddy, dirty, and deserted. Having but one outlet, it was traversed by few but the inhabitants at any time, and the night being one of those on which most people are glad to be within doors, it now presented no other signs of life than the dull glimmering of poor candles from the
