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Support the Monkey! Tell All your Friends and Teachers |
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Support the Monkey! Tell All your Friends and Teachers |
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846 but outweighing in comparison any that the most heartless blackleg would put upon his groom--that for two long years, by dint of labouring in all these capacities and wearying in none, she had not succeeded in the sole aim and object of her life, but that, overwhelmed by accumulated difficulties and disappointments, she had been compelled to seek out her mother’s old friend, and, with a bursting heart, to confide in him at last. ‘If I had been poor,’ said brother Charles, with sparkling eyes; ‘if I had been poor, Mr Nickleby, my dear sir, which thank God I am not, I would have denied myself (of course anybody would under such circumstances) the commonest necessaries of life, to help her. As it is, the task is a difficult one. If her father were dead, nothing could be easier, for then she should share and cheer the happiest home that brother Ned and I could have, as if she were our child or sister. But he is still alive. Nobody can help him; that has been tried a thousand times; he was not abandoned by all without good cause, I know.’ ‘Cannot she be persuaded to--’ Nicholas hesitated when he had got thus far. ‘To leave him?’ said brother Charles. ‘Who could entreat a child to desert her parent? Such entreaties, limited to her seeing him occasionally, have been urged upon her--not by me--but always with the same result.’ ‘Is he kind to her?’ said Nicholas. ‘Does he requite her affection?’ ‘True kindness, considerate self-denying kindness, is not in his nature,’ returned Mr Cheeryble. ‘Such kindness as he knows, he regards her with, I believe. The mother was a gentle, loving, confiding creature, and although he wounded her from their |
