In rejoinder to this sally, old Arthur again raised his hands, again chuckled, and again ejaculated “What a man it is!” which done, he dragged the low chair a little nearer to Ralph’s high stool, and looking upwards into his immovable face, said,
“What would you say to me, if I was to tell you that I was—that I was—going to be married?”
“I should tell you,” replied Ralph, looking coldly down upon him, “that for some purpose of your own you told a lie, and that it wasn’t the first time and wouldn’t be the last; that I wasn’t surprised and wasn’t to be taken in.”
“Then I tell you seriously that I am,” said old Arthur.
“And I tell you seriously,” rejoined Ralph, “what I told you this minute. Stay. Let me look at you. There’s a liquorish devilry in your face. What is this?”
“I wouldn’t deceive you, you know,” whined Arthur Gride; “I couldn’t do it, I should be mad to try. I, I, to deceive Mr. Nickleby! The pygmy to impose upon the giant. I ask again—he, he, he!—what should you say to me if I was to tell you that I was going to be married?”
“To some old hag?” said Ralph.
“No, No,” cried Arthur, interrupting him, and rubbing his hands in an ecstasy. “Wrong, wrong again. Mr. Nickleby for once at fault; out, quite out! To a young and beautiful girl; fresh, lovely, bewitching, and not nineteen. Dark eyes, long eyelashes, ripe and ruddy lips that to look at is to long to kiss, beautiful clustering hair that one’s fingers itch to play with, such a waist as might make a man clasp the air involuntarily, thinking of twining his arm about it, little feet that tread so lightly they hardly seem to walk upon the ground—to marry all this, sir, this—hey, hey!”
“This is something more than common drivelling,” said Ralph, after listening with a curled lip to the old sinner’s raptures. “The girl’s name?”
“Oh deep, deep! See now how deep that is!” exclaimed old Arthur. “He knows I want his help, he knows he can give it me, he knows it must all turn to his advantage, he sees the thing already. Her name—is there nobody within hearing?”
“Why, who the devil should there be?” retorted Ralph, testily.
“I didn’t know but that perhaps somebody might be passing up or down the stairs,” said Arthur Gride, after looking out at the door and carefully reclosing it; “or but that your man might have come back and might have been listening outside. Clerks and servants have a trick of listening, and I should have been very uncomfortable if Mr. Noggs—”
“Curse Mr. Noggs,” said Ralph, sharply, “and go on with what you have to say.”
“Curse Mr. Noggs, by all means,” rejoined old Arthur; “I am sure I have not the least objection to that. Her name is—”
“Well,” said Ralph, rendered very irritable by old Arthur’s pausing again “what is it?”
“Madeline Bray.”
Whatever reasons there might have been—and Arthur Gride appeared to have anticipated some—for the mention of this name producing an effect upon Ralph, or whatever effect it really did produce upon him, he permitted none to manifest itself, but calmly repeated the name several times, as if reflecting when and where he had heard it before.
“Bray,” said Ralph. “Bray—there was young Bray of—no, he never had a daughter.”
“You remember Bray?” rejoined Arthur Gride.
“No,” said Ralph, looking vacantly at him.
“Not Walter Bray! The dashing man, who used his handsome wife so ill?”
“If you seek to recall any particular dashing man to my recollection by such a trait as that,” said Ralph, shrugging his shoulders, “I shall confound him with nine-tenths of the dashing men I have ever known.”
“Tut, tut. That Bray who is now in the Rules of the Bench,” said old Arthur. “You can’t have forgotten Bray. Both of us did business with him. Why, he owes you money!”
“Oh him!” rejoined Ralph. “Ay, ay. Now you speak. Oh! It’s his daughter, is it?”
Naturally as this was said, it was not said so naturally but that a kindred spirit like old Arthur Gride might have discerned a design upon the part of Ralph to lead him on to much more explicit statements and explanations than he would have volunteered, or that Ralph could in all likelihood have obtained by any other means. Old Arthur, however, was so intent upon his own designs, that he suffered himself to be overreached, and had no suspicion but that his good friend was in earnest.
“I knew you couldn’t forget him, when you came to think for a moment,” he said.
“You were right,” answered Ralph. “But old Arthur Gride and matrimony is a most anomalous conjunction of words; old Arthur Gride and dark eyes and eyelashes, and lips that to look at is to long to kiss, and clustering hair that he wants to play with, and waists that he wants to span, and little feet that don’t tread upon anything—old Arthur Gride and such things as these is more monstrous still; but old Arthur Gride marrying the daughter of a ruined ‘dashing man’ in the Rules of the Bench, is the most monstrous and incredible of all. Plainly, friend Arthur Gride, if you want any help from me in this business (which of course you do, or you would not be here), speak out, and to the purpose. And, above all, don’t talk to me of its turning to my advantage, for I know it must turn to yours also, and to a good round tune too, or you would have no finger in such a pie as this.”
There was enough acerbity and sarcasm not only in the matter of Ralph’s speech, but in the tone of voice in which he uttered it, and the looks with which he eked it out, to have fired even the ancient usurer’s cold blood and flushed even his withered cheek. But he gave vent to no demonstration of anger, contenting
