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PinkMonkey.com-Nicholas Nickelby by Charles Dickens



1122

Chapter 62

Ralph makes one last Appointment--and keeps it.

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

The night was dark, and a cold wind blew, driving the clouds,
furiously and fast, before it. There was one black, gloomy mass
that seemed to follow him: not hurrying in the wild chase with the
others, but lingering sullenly behind, and gliding darkly and
stealthily on. He often looked back at this, and, more than once,
stopped to let it pass over; 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 a few feet above the level of the street, and parted from it by
a low parapet-wall and an iron railing; a rank, unwholesome,
rotten spot, where the very grass and weeds seemed, in their
frowsy growth, to tell that they had sprung from paupers’ bodies,
and had struck their roots in the graves of men, sodden, while
alive, in steaming courts and drunken hungry dens. And here, in
truth, they lay, parted from the living by a little earth and a board
or two--lay thick and close--corrupting in body as they had in

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PinkMonkey.com-Nicholas Nickelby by Charles Dickens



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