Chapter 56

CHAPTER 56

Ralph Nickleby, baffled by his Nephew in his late Design, hatches a
Scheme of Retaliation which Accident suggests to him, and takes into
his Counsels a tried Auxiliary

The course which these adventures shape out for themselves, and
imperatively call upon the historian to observe, now demands that
they should revert to the point they attained previously to the
commencement of the last chapter, when Ralph Nickleby and Arthur
Gride were left together in the house where death had so suddenly
reared his dark and heavy banner.

With clenched hands, and teeth ground together so firm and tight
that no locking of the jaws could have fixed and riveted them more
securely, Ralph stood, for some minutes, in the attitude in which he
had last addressed his nephew: breathing heavily, but as rigid and
motionless in other respects as if he had been a brazen statue.
After a time, he began, by slow degrees, as a man rousing himself
from heavy slumber, to relax. For a moment he shook his clasped
fist towards the door by which Nicholas had disappeared; and then
thrusting it into his breast, as if to repress by force even this
show of passion, turned round and confronted the less hardy usurer,
who had not yet risen from the ground.

The cowering wretch, who still shook in every limb, and whose few
grey hairs trembled and quivered on his head with abject dismay,
tottered to his feet as he met Ralph's eye, and, shielding his face
with both hands, protested, while he crept towards the door, that it
was no fault of his.

'Who said it was, man?' returned Ralph, in a suppressed voice. 'Who
said it was?'

'You looked as if you thought I was to blame,' said Gride, timidly.

'Pshaw!' Ralph muttered, forcing a laugh. 'I blame him for not
living an hour longer. One hour longer would have been long enough.
I blame no one else.'

'N--n--no one else?' said Gride.

'Not for this mischance,' replied Ralph. 'I have an old score to
clear with that young fellow who has carried off your mistress;
but that has nothing to do with his blustering just now, for we
should soon have been quit of him, but for this cursed accident.'

There was something so unnatural in the calmness with which Ralph
Nickleby spoke, when coupled with his face, the expression of the
features, to which every nerve and muscle, as it twitched and
throbbed with a spasm whose workings no effort could conceal, gave,
every instant, some new and frightful aspect--there was something so
unnatural and ghastly in the contrast between his harsh, slow,
steady voice (only altered by a certain halting of the breath which
made him pause between almost every word like a drunken man bent
upon speaking plainly), and