Chapter 48

CHAPTER 48

Being for the Benefit of Mr Vincent Crummles, and positively his
last Appearance on this Stage

It was with a very sad and heavy heart, oppressed by many painful
ideas, that Nicholas retraced his steps eastward and betook himself
to the counting-house of Cheeryble Brothers. Whatever the idle
hopes he had suffered himself to entertain, whatever the pleasant
visions which had sprung up in his mind and grouped themselves round
the fair image of Madeline Bray, they were now dispelled, and not a
vestige of their gaiety and brightness remained.

It would be a poor compliment to Nicholas's better nature, and one
which he was very far from deserving, to insinuate that the
solution, and such a solution, of the mystery which had seemed to
surround Madeline Bray, when he was ignorant even of her name, had
damped his ardour or cooled the fervour of his admiration. If he
had regarded her before, with such a passion as young men attracted
by mere beauty and elegance may entertain, he was now conscious of
much deeper and stronger feelings. But, reverence for the truth and
purity of her heart, respect for the helplessness and loneliness of
her situation, sympathy with the trials of one so young and fair and
admiration of her great and noble spirit, all seemed to raise her
far above his reach, and, while they imparted new depth and dignity
to his love, to whisper that it was hopeless.

'I will keep my word, as I have pledged it to her,' said Nicholas,
manfully. 'This is no common trust that I have to discharge, and I
will perform the double duty that is imposed upon me most
scrupulously and strictly. My secret feelings deserve no
consideration in such a case as this, and they shall have none.'

Still, there were the secret feelings in existence just the same,
and in secret Nicholas rather encouraged them than otherwise;
reasoning (if he reasoned at all) that there they could do no harm
to anybody but himself, and that if he kept them to himself from a
sense of duty, he had an additional right to entertain himself with
them as a reward for his heroism.

All these thoughts, coupled with what he had seen that morning and
the anticipation of his next visit, rendered him a very dull and
abstracted companion; so much so, indeed, that Tim Linkinwater
suspected he must have made the mistake of a figure somewhere, which
was preying upon his mind, and seriously conjured him, if such were
the case, to make a clean breast and scratch it out, rather than
have his whole life embittered by the tortures of remorse.

But in reply to these considerate representations, and many others
both from Tim and Mr Frank, Nicholas could only be brought to state
that he was never merrier in his