Creeping from the house, and slinking off like a thief; groping with hishands, when first he got into the street, as if he were a blind man; andlooking often over his shoulder while he hurried away, as though he werefollowed in imagination or reality by someone anxious to question ordetain him; Ralph Nickleby left the city behind him, and took the roadto his own home.

The night was dark, and a cold wind blew, driving the clouds, furiouslyand fast, before it. There was one black, gloomy mass that seemedto follow him: not hurrying in the wild chase with the others, butlingering sullenly behind, and gliding darkly and stealthily on. Heoften looked back at this, and, more than once, stopped to let it passover; 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 afew feet above the level of the street, and parted from it by a lowparapet-wall and an iron railing; a rank, unwholesome, rotten spot,where the very grass and weeds seemed, in their frouzy growth, to tellthat they had sprung from paupers' bodies, and had struck their roots inthe graves of men, sodden, while alive, in steaming courts and drunkenhungry dens. And here, in truth, they lay, parted from the living by alittle earth and a board or two--lay thick and close--corrupting in bodyas they had in mind--a dense and squalid crowd. Here they lay, cheek byjowl with life: no deeper down than the feet of the throng that passedthere every day, and piled high as their throats. Here they lay, agrisly family, all these dear departed brothers and sisters of the ruddyclergyman who did his task so speedily when they were hidden in theground!

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 hewas buried in this place. He could not tell how he came to recollect itnow, when he had so often passed and never thought about him, or how itwas that he felt an interest in the circumstance; but he did both; andstopping, and clasping the iron railings with his hands, looked eagerlyin, wondering which might be his grave.

While he was thus engaged, there came towards him, with noise of shoutsand singing, some fellows full of drink, followed by others, who wereremonstrating with them and urging them to go home in quiet. They werein high good-humour; and one of them, a little, weazen, hump-backedman, began to dance. He was a grotesque, fantastic figure, and the fewbystanders laughed. Ralph himself was moved to mirth, and echoed thelaugh of one who stood near and who looked round in his face. When theyhad passed on, and he was left alone again, he resumed his speculationwith a new kind of interest; for he recollected that the last person whohad seen the suicide alive, had left him very merry, and he rememberedhow 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 heconjured up a strong and vivid idea of the man himself, and how helooked, and what had led him to do it; all of which he recalled withease. By dint of dwelling upon this theme, he carried the impressionwith him when he went away; as he remembered, when a child, to have hadfrequently before him the figure of some goblin he had once seen chalkedupon 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 owndoor, he could hardly make up his mind to turn the key and open it. Whenhe had done that, and gone into the passage, he felt as though to shutit again would be to shut out the world. But he let it go, and it closedwith a loud noise. There was no light. How very dreary, cold, and stillit was!

Shivering from head to foot, he made his way upstairs into the roomwhere he had been last disturbed. He had made a kind of compact withhimself 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 wastrue; knew it as well, now, as if he had been privy to it all along. Hisown child! And dead too. Dying beside Nicholas, loving him, and lookingupon 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, andeverybody must know all. Here was the young lord dead, his companionabroad and beyond his reach, ten thousand pounds gone at one blow, hisplot with Gride overset at the very moment of triumph, his after-schemesdiscovered, himself in danger, the object of his persecution andNicholas's love, his own wretched boy; everything crumbled and fallenupon him, and he beaten down beneath the ruins and grovelling in thedust.

If he had known his child to be alive; if no deceit had been everpractised, and he had grown up beneath his eye; he might have been acareless, indifferent, rough, harsh father--like enough--he felt that;but the thought would come that he might have been otherwise, and thathis 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 hadhad some share in making him the morose, hard man he was. He seemed toremember a time when he was not quite so rough and obdurate; and almostthought that he had first hated Nicholas because he was young andgallant, and perhaps like the stripling who had brought dishonour andloss of fortune on his head.

But one tender thought, or one of natural regret, in his whirlwind ofpassion and remorse, was as a drop of calm water in a stormy maddenedsea. His hatred of Nicholas had been fed upon his own defeat, nourishedon his interference with his schemes, fattened upon his old defianceand success. There were reasons for its increase; it had grown andstrengthened gradually. Now it attained a height which was sheer wildlunacy. That his, of all others, should have been the hands to rescuehis miserable child; that he should have been his protector and faithfulfriend; that he should have shown him that love and tenderness which,from the wretched moment of his birth, he had never known; that heshould have taught him to hate his own parent and execrate his veryname; that he should now know and feel all this, and triumph in therecollection; was gall and madness to the usurer's heart. The deadboy's love for Nicholas, and the attachment of Nicholas to him, wasinsupportable agony. The picture of his deathbed, with Nicholas at hisside, tending and supporting him, and he breathing out his thanks, andexpiring in his arms, when he would have had them mortal enemies andhating each other to the last, drove him frantic. He gnashed his teethand smote the air, and looking wildly round, with eyes which gleamedthrough the darkness, cried aloud:

'I am trampled down and ruined. The wretch told me true. The night hascome! Is there no way to rob them of further triumph, and spurn theirmercy and compassion? Is there no devil to help me?'

Swiftly, there glided again into his brain the figure he had raised thatnight. It seemed to lie before him. The head was covered now. So itwas when he first saw it. The rigid, upturned, marble feet too, heremembered well. Then came before him the pale and trembling relativeswho had told their tale upon the inquest--the shrieks of women--thesilent dread of men--the consternation and disquiet--the victoryachieved by that heap of clay, which, with one motion of its hand, hadlet out the life and made this stir among them--

He spoke no more; but, after a pause, softly groped his way out ofthe room, and up the echoing stairs--up to the top--to the frontgarret--where he closed the door behind him, and remained.

It was a mere lumber-room now, but it yet contained an old dismantledbedstead; the one on which his son had slept; for no other had ever beenthere. 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 throughthe window which had no blind or curtain to intercept it, was enough toshow the character of the room, though not sufficient fully to revealthe 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 thehighest part that Ralph directed his eyes; and upon it he kept themfixed steadily for some minutes, when he rose, and dragging thither anold chest upon which he had been seated, mounted on it, and felt alongthe wall above his head with both hands. At length, they touched a largeiron 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 theman whom he had seen that night was to be detained; and that although itwas now midnight they had sent, in their anxiety to do right.

'Yes,' cried Ralph, 'detain him till tomorrow; then let them bring himhere--him and my nephew--and come themselves, and be sure that I will beready to receive them.'

'At what hour?' asked the voice.

'At any hour,' replied Ralph fiercely. 'In the afternoon, tell them. Atany hour, at any minute. All times will be alike to me.'

He listened to the man's retreating footsteps until the sound hadpassed, and then, gazing up into the sky, saw, or thought he saw, thesame black cloud that had seemed to follow him home, and which nowappeared to hover directly above the house.

'I know its meaning now,' he muttered, 'and the restless nights, thedreams, and why I have quailed of late. All pointed to this. Oh! if menby selling their own souls could ride rampant for a term, for how shorta 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 forbirths that make expectants writhe, and marriages that are made in hell,and toll ruefully for the dead whose shoes are worn already! Call mento prayers who are godly because not found out, and ring chimes for thecoming 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, toinfect the air!'

With a wild look around, in which frenzy, hatred, and despair werehorribly mingled, he shook his clenched hand at the sky above him, whichwas still dark and threatening, and closed the window.

The rain and hail pattered against the glass; the chimneys quaked androcked; the crazy casement rattled with the wind, as though an impatienthand inside were striving to burst it open. But no hand was there, andit opened no more.

'How's this?' cried one. 'The gentleman say they can't make anybodyhear, and have been trying these two hours.'

'And yet he came home last night,' said another; 'for he spoke tosomebody out of that window upstairs.'

They were a little knot of men, and, the window being mentioned, wentout into the road to look up at it. This occasioned their observing thatthe house was still close shut, as the housekeeper had said she had leftit on the previous night, and led to a great many suggestions: whichterminated in two or three of the boldest getting round to the back, andso entering by a window, while the others remained outside, in impatientexpectation.

They looked into all the rooms below: opening the shutters as they went,to admit the fading light: and still finding nobody, and everythingquiet and in its place, doubted whether they should go farther. One man,however, remarking that they had not yet been into the garret, and thatit was there he had been last seen, they agreed to look there too, andwent 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 handleof the door, and, pushing it open, looked through the chink, and fellback 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 othersaside with a loud exclamation, drew a clasp-knife from his pocket, anddashing into the room, cut down the body.

He had torn a rope from one of the old trunks, and hung himself on aniron hook immediately below the trap-door in the ceiling--in the veryplace to which the eyes of his son, a lonely, desolate, little creature,had so often been directed in childish terror, fourteen years before.