As he was absorbed in these meditations, he all at once encountered the upturned face of Smike, who was on his knees before the stove, picking a few stray cinders from the hearth and planting them on the fire. He had paused to steal a look at Nicholas, and when he saw that he was observed, shrunk back, as if expecting a blow.
“You need not fear me,” said Nicholas kindly. “Are you cold?”
“N-n-o.”
“You are shivering.”
“I am not cold,” replied Smike quickly. “I am used to it.”
There was such an obvious fear of giving offence in his manner, and he was such a timid, broken-spirited creature, that Nicholas could not help exclaiming, “Poor fellow!”
If he had struck the drudge, he would have slunk away without a word. But, now, he burst into tears.
“Oh dear, oh dear!” he cried, covering his face with his cracked and horny hands. “My heart will break. It will, it will.”
“Hush!” said Nicholas, laying his hand upon his shoulder. “Be a man; you are nearly one by years, God help you.”
“By years!” cried Smike. “Oh dear, dear, how many of them! How many of them since I was a little child, younger than any that are here now! Where are they all!”
“Whom do you speak of?” inquired Nicholas, wishing to rouse the poor half-witted creature to reason. “Tell me.”
“My friends,” he replied, “myself—my—oh! what sufferings mine have been!”
“There is always hope,” said Nicholas; he knew not what to say.
“No,” rejoined the other, “no; none for me. Do you remember the boy that died here?”
“I was not here, you know,” said Nicholas gently; “but what of him?”
“Why,” replied the youth, drawing closer to his questioner’s side, “I was with him at night, and when it was all silent he cried no more for friends he wished to come and sit with him, but began to see faces round his bed that came from home; he said they smiled, and talked to him; and he died at last lifting his head to kiss them. Do you hear?”
“Yes, yes,” rejoined Nicholas.
“What faces will smile on me when I die!” cried his companion, shivering. “Who will talk to me in those long nights! They cannot come from home; they would frighten me, if they did, for I don’t know what it is, and shouldn’t know them. Pain and fear, pain and fear for me, alive or dead. No hope, no hope!”
The bell rang to bed: and the boy, subsiding at the sound into his usual listless state, crept away as if anxious to avoid notice. It was with a heavy heart that Nicholas soon afterwards—no, not retired; there was no retirement there—followed—to his dirty and crowded dormitory.
IX
Of Miss Squeers, Mrs. Squeers, Master Squeers, and Mr. Squeers; and of various matters and persons connected no less with the Squeerses than Nicholas Nickleby.
When Mr. Squeers left the schoolroom for the night, he betook himself, as has been before remarked, to his own fireside, which was situated—not in the room in which Nicholas had supped on the night of his arrival, but in a smaller apartment in the rear of the premises, where his lady wife, his amiable son, and accomplished daughter, were in the full enjoyment of each other’s society; Mrs. Squeers being engaged in the matronly pursuit of stocking-darning; and the young lady and gentleman being occupied in the adjustment of some youthful differences, by means of a pugilistic contest across the table, which, on the approach of their honoured parent, subsided into a noiseless exchange of kicks beneath it.
And, in this place, it may be as well to apprise the reader, that Miss Fanny Squeers was in her three-and-twentieth year. If there be any one grace or loveliness inseparable from that particular period of life, Miss Squeers may be presumed to have been possessed of it, as there is no reason to suppose that she was a solitary exception to an universal rule. She was not tall like her mother, but short like her father; from the former she inherited a voice of harsh quality; from the latter a remarkable expression of the right eye, something akin to having none at all.
Miss Squeers had been spending a few days with a neighbouring friend, and had only just returned to the parental roof. To this circumstance may be referred, her having heard nothing of Nicholas, until Mr. Squeers himself now made him the subject of conversation.
“Well, my dear,” said Squeers, drawing up his chair, “what do you think of him by this time?”
“Think of who?” inquired Mrs. Squeers; who (as she often remarked) was no grammarian, thank Heaven.
“Of the young man—the new teacher—who else could I mean?”
“Oh! that Knuckleboy,” said Mrs. Squeers impatiently. “I hate him.”
“What do you hate him for, my dear?” asked Squeers.
“What’s that to you?” retorted Mrs. Squeers. “If I hate him, that’s enough, ain’t it?”
“Quite enough for him, my dear, and a great deal too much I dare say, if he knew it,” replied Squeers in a pacific tone. “I only ask from curiosity, my dear.”
“Well, then, if you want to know,” rejoined Mrs. Squeers, “I’ll tell you. Because he’s a proud, haughty, consequential, turned-up-nosed peacock.”
Mrs. Squeers, when excited, was accustomed to use strong language, and, moreover, to make use of a plurality of epithets, some of which were of a figurative kind, as the word peacock, and furthermore the allusion to Nicholas’s nose, which was not intended to be taken in its literal sense, but rather to bear a latitude of construction according to the fancy of the hearers.
Neither were they meant to bear reference to each other, so much as to the object on whom they were bestowed, as will be seen in the present case: a peacock with a turned-up nose being a novelty in ornithology, and a thing not commonly seen.
“Hem!” said Squeers, as if in mild deprecation of this outbreak. “He is
