The Dangers thicken, and the Worst is Told  
Instead of going home, Ralph threw himself into the first street cabriolet he could find, and, directing the driver towards the police-office of the district in which Mr. Squeers’s misfortunes had occurred, alighted at a short distance from it, and, discharging the man, went the rest of his way thither on foot. Inquiring for the object of his solicitude, he learnt that he had timed his visit well; for Mr. Squeers was, in fact, at that moment waiting for a hackney coach he had ordered, and in which he purposed proceeding to his week’s retirement, like a gentleman.
Demanding speech with the prisoner, he was ushered into a kind of waiting-room in which, by reason of his scholastic profession and superior respectability, Mr. Squeers had been permitted to pass the day. Here, by the light of a guttering and blackened candle, he could barely discern the schoolmaster, fast asleep on a bench in a remote corner. An empty glass stood on a table before him, which, with his somnolent condition and a very strong smell of brandy and water, forewarned the visitor that Mr Squeers had been seeking, in creature comforts, a temporary forgetfulness of his unpleasant situation.
It was not a very easy matter to rouse him: so lethargic and heavy were his slumbers. Regaining his faculties by slow and faint glimmerings, he at length sat upright; and, displaying a very yellow face, a very red nose, and a very bristly beard: the joint effect of which was considerably heightened by a dirty white handkerchief, spotted with blood, drawn over the crown of his head and tied under his chin: stared ruefully at Ralph in silence, until his feelings found a vent in this pithy sentence:
‘I say, young fellow, you’ve been and done it now; you have!’
‘What’s the matter with your head?’ asked Ralph.
‘Why, your man, your informing kidnapping man, has been and broke it,’ rejoined Squeers sulkily; ‘that’s what’s the matter with it. You’ve come at last, have you?’
‘Why have you not sent to me?’ said Ralph. ‘How could I come till I knew what had befallen you?’
‘My family!’ hiccuped Mr. Squeers, raising his eye to the ceiling: ‘my daughter, as is at that age when all the sensibilities is a-coming out strong in blow—my son as is the young Norval of private life, and the pride and ornament of a doting willage—here’s a shock for my family! The coat-of-arms of the Squeerses is tore, and their sun is gone down into the ocean wave!’
‘You have been drinking,’ said Ralph, ‘and have not yet slept yourself sober.’
‘I haven’t been drinking your health, my codger,’ replied Mr. Squeers; ‘so you have nothing to do with that.’
Ralph suppressed the indignation which the schoolmaster’s altered and insolent manner awakened, and asked again why he had not sent to him.
‘What should I get by sending to you?’ returned Squeers. ‘To be known to be in with you wouldn’t do me a deal of good, and they won’t take bail till they know something more of the case, so here am I hard and fast: and there are you, loose and comfortable.’
‘And so must you be in a few days,’ retorted Ralph, with affected good-humour. ‘They can’t hurt you, man.’
‘Why, I suppose they can’t do much to me, if I explain how it was that I got into the good company of that there ca-daverous old Slider,’ replied Squeers viciously, ‘who I wish was dead and buried, and resurrected and dissected, and hung upon wires in a anatomical museum, before ever I’d had anything to do with her. This is what him with the powdered head says this morning, in so many words: “Prisoner! As you have been found in company with this woman; as you were detected in possession of this document; as you were engaged with her in fraudulently destroying others, and can give no satisfactory account of yourself; I shall remand you for a week, in order that inquiries may be made, and evidence got. And meanwhile I can’t take any bail for your appearance.” Well then, what I say now is, that I can give a satisfactory account of myself; I can hand in the card of my establishment and say, “I am the Wackford Squeers as is therein named, sir. I am the man as is guaranteed, by unimpeachable references, to be a out-and-outer in morals and uprightness of principle. Whatever is wrong in this business is no fault of mine. I had no evil design in it, sir. I was not aware that anything was wrong. I was merely employed by a friend, my friend Mr. Ralph Nickleby, of Golden Square. Send for him, sir, and ask him what he has to say; he’s the man; not me!”’
‘What document was it that you had?’ asked Ralph, evading, for the moment, the point just raised.
‘What document? Why, the document,’ replied Squeers. ‘The Madeline What’s-her-name one. It was a will; that’s what it was.’
‘Of what nature, whose will, when dated, how benefiting her, to what extent?’ asked Ralph hurriedly.
‘A will in her favour; that’s all I know,’ rejoined Squeers, ‘and that’s more than you’d have known, if you’d had them bellows on your head. It’s all owing to your precious caution that they got hold of it. If you had let me burn it, and taken my word that it was gone, it would have been a heap of ashes behind the fire, instead of being whole and sound, inside of my great-coat.’
‘Beaten at every point!’ muttered Ralph.
‘Ah!’ sighed Squeers, who, between the brandy and water and his broken head, wandered strangely, ‘at the delightful village of Dotheboys near Greta Bridge in Yorkshire, youth are boarded, clothed, booked, washed, furnished with pocket-money, provided with all necessaries, instructed in all languages living and dead, mathematics, orthography, geometry, astronomy, trigonometry—this is a altered state of trigonomics, this is! A double 1—all, everything—a cobbler’s weapon. U-p-up, adjective, not down. S-q-u-double e-r-s-Squeers, noun substantive, a educator of youth. Total, all up with Squeers!’
His running on, in this way, had afforded Ralph an opportunity of recovering his presence of mind, which at once suggested to him the necessity of removing, as far as possible, the schoolmaster’s misgivings, and leading him to believe that his safety and best policy lay in the preservation of a rigid silence.
‘I tell you, once again,’ he said, ‘they can’t hurt you. You shall have an action for false imprisonment, and make a profit of this, yet. We will devise a story for you that should carry you through twenty times such a trivial scrape as this; and if they want security in a thousand pounds for your reappearance in case you should be called upon, you shall have it. All you have to do is, to keep back the truth. You’re a little fuddled tonight, and may not be able to see this as clearly as you would at another time; but this is what you must do, and you’ll need all your senses about you; for a slip might be awkward.’
‘Oh!’ said Squeers, who had looked cunningly at him, with his head stuck on one side, like an old raven. ‘That’s what I’m to do, is it? Now then, just you hear a word or two from me. I an’t a-going to have any stories made for me, and I an’t a-going to stick to any. If I find matters going again me, I shall expect you to take your share, and I’ll take care you do. You never said anything about danger. I never bargained for being brought into such a plight as this, and I don’t mean to take it as quiet as you think. I let you lead me on, from one thing to another, because we had been mixed up together in a certain sort of a way, and if you had liked to be ill-natured you might perhaps have hurt the business, and if you liked to be good-natured you might throw a good deal in my way. Well; if all goes right now, that’s quite correct, and I don’t mind it; but if anything goes wrong, then times are altered, and I shall just say and do whatever I think may serve me most, and take advice from nobody. My moral influence with them lads,’ added Mr. Squeers, with deeper gravity, ‘is a tottering to its basis. The images of Mrs. Squeers, my daughter, and my son Wackford, all short of vittles, is perpetually before me; every other consideration melts away and vanishes, in front of these; the only number in all arithmetic that I know of, as a husband and a father, is number one, under this here most fatal go!’
How long Mr. Squeers might have declaimed, or how stormy a discussion his declamation might have led to, nobody knows. Being interrupted, at this point, by the arrival of the coach and an attendant who was to bear him company, he perched his hat with great dignity on the top of the handkerchief that bound his head; and, thrusting one hand in his pocket, and taking the attendant’s arm with the other, suffered himself to be led forth.
‘As I supposed from his not sending!’ thought Ralph. ‘This fellow, I plainly see through all his tipsy fooling, has made up his mind to turn upon me. I am so beset and hemmed in, that they are not only all struck with fear, but, like the beasts in the fable, have their fling at me now, though time was, and no longer ago than yesterday too, when they were all civility and compliance. But they shall not move me. I’ll not give way. I will not budge one inch!’
He went home, and was glad to find his housekeeper complaining of illness, that he might have an excuse for being alone and sending her away to where she lived: which was hard by. Then, he sat down by the light of a single candle, and began to think, for the first time, on all that had taken place that day.
He had neither eaten nor drunk since last night, and, in addition to the anxiety of mind he had undergone, had been travelling about, from place to place almost incessantly, for many hours. He felt sick and exhausted, but could taste nothing save a glass of water, and continued to sit with his head upon his hand; not resting nor thinking, but laboriously trying to do both, and feeling that every sense but one of weariness and desolation, was for the time benumbed.
It was nearly ten o’clock when he heard a knocking at the door, and still sat quiet as before, as if he could not even bring his thoughts to bear upon that. It had been often repeated, and he had, several times, heard a voice outside, saying there was a light in the window (meaning, as he knew, his own candle), before he could rouse himself and go downstairs.
‘Mr. Nickleby, there is terrible news for you, and I am sent to beg you will come with me directly,’ said a voice he seemed to recognise. He held his hand above his eyes, and, looking out, saw Tim Linkinwater on the steps.
‘Come where?’ demanded Ralph.
‘To our house, where you came this morning. I have a coach here.’
‘Why should I go there?’ said Ralph.
‘Don’t ask me why, but pray come with me.’
‘Another edition of today!’ returned Ralph, making as though he would shut the door.
‘No, no!’ cried Tim, catching him by the arm and speaking most earnestly; ‘it is only that you may hear something that has occurred: something very dreadful, Mr. Nickleby, which concerns you nearly. Do you think I would tell you so or come to you like this, if it were not the case?’
Ralph looked at him more closely. Seeing that he was indeed greatly excited, he faltered, and could not tell what to say or think.
‘You had better hear this now, than at any other time,’ said Tim; ‘it may have some influence with you. For Heaven’s sake come!’
Perhaps, at, another time, Ralph’s obstinacy and dislike would have been proof against any appeal from such a quarter, however emphatically urged; but now, after a moment’s hesitation, he went into the hall for his hat, and returning, got into the coach without speaking a word.
Tim well remembered afterwards, and often said, that as Ralph Nickleby went into the house for this purpose, he saw him, by the light of the candle which he had set down upon a chair, reel and stagger like a drunken man. He well remembered, too, that when he had placed his foot upon the coach-steps, he turned round and looked upon him with a face so ashy pale and so very wild and vacant that it made him shudder, and for the moment almost afraid to follow. People were fond of saying that he had some dark presentiment upon him then, but his emotion might, perhaps, with greater show of reason, be referred to what he had undergone that day.
A profound silence was observed during the ride. Arrived at their place of destination, Ralph followed his conductor into the house, and into a room where the two brothers were. He was so astounded, not to say awed, by something of a mute compassion for himself which was visible in their manner and in that of the old clerk, that he could scarcely speak.
Having taken a seat, however, he contrived to say, though in broken words, ‘What—what have you to say to me—more than has been said already?’
The room was old and large, very imperfectly lighted, and terminated in a bay window, about which hung some heavy drapery. Casting his eyes in this direction as he spoke, he thought he made out the dusky figure of a man. He was confirmed in this impression by seeing that the object moved, as if uneasy under his scrutiny.
‘Who’s that yonder?’ he said.
‘One who has conveyed to us, within these two ho............