"If you tell me," said Ralph, eagerly; "if you tell me that he is dead, I forgive you all else. If you tell me that he is dead, I am in your debt and bound to you for life. He is! I see it in your faces. Who triumphs now? Is this your dreadful news, this your terrible intelligence? You see how it moves me. You did well to send. I would have travelled a hundred miles a-foot, through mud, mire, and darkness, to hear this news just at this time."
Even then, moved as he was by this savage joy, Ralph could see in the faces of the two brothers, mingling with their look of disgust and horror, something of that indefinable compassion for himself which he had noticed before.
"And he brought you the intelligence, did he?" said Ralph, pointing with his finger towards the recess already mentioned; "and sat there, no doubt, to see me prostrated and overwhelmed by it! Ha, ha, ha! But I tell him that I'll be a sharp thorn in his side for many a long day to come, and I tell you two again that you don't know him yet, and that you'll rue the day you took compassion on the vagabond."
"You take me for your nephew," said a hollow, dejected voice; "it would be better for you and for me too if I were he indeed."
The figure that he had seen so dimly, rose, and came slowly down. He started back, for he found that he confronted—not Nicholas, as he had supposed, but Brooker.
Ralph had no reason that he knew, to fear this man; he had never feared him before; but the pallor which had been observed in his face when he issued forth that night, came upon him again; he was seen to tremble, and his voice changed as he said, keeping his eyes upon him,
"What does this fellow here? Do you know he is a convict—a felon—a common thief!"
"Hear what he has to tell you—oh, Mr. Nickleby, hear what he has to tell you, be he what he may," cried the brothers, with such emphatic earnestness, that Ralph turned to them in wonder. They pointed to Brooker, and Ralph again gazed at him: as it seemed mechanically.
"That boy," said the man, "that these gentlemen have been talking of—"
"That boy," repeated Ralph, looking vacantly at him.
"Whom I saw stretched dead and cold upon his bed, and who is now in his grave——"
"Who is now in his grave," echoed Ralph, like one who talks in his sleep.
The man raised his eyes, and clasped his hands solemnly together "Was your only son, so help me God in heaven!"
In the midst of a dead silence, Ralph sat down, pressing his hands upon his temples. He removed them after a minute, and never was there seen part of a living man, undisfigured by any wound, such a ghastly face as he then disclosed. He looked fixedly at Brooker, who was by this time standing at a short distance from him, but did not say one word or make the slightest sound or gesture.
"Gentlemen," said the man, "I offer no excuses for myself. I am long-past that. If in telling you how this has happened, I tell you that I was harshly used and perhaps driven out of my real nature, I do it only as a necessary part of my story, and not to shield myself; I am a guilty man."
