`A young lady, sir!' cried Nicholas, quite trembling for the moment with his eagerness to hear more.
`A very beautiful young lady,' said Mr Cheeryble, gravely.
`Pray go on, sir,' returned Nicholas.
`I am thinking how to do so,' said brother Charles -- sadly, as it seemed to his young friend, and with an expression allied to pain. `You accidentally saw a young lady in this room one morning, my dear sir, in a fainting fit.
Do you remember? Perhaps you have forgotten --'
`Oh no,' replied Nicholas, hurriedly. `I -- I -- remember it very well indeed.'
` She is the lady I speak of,' said brother Charles. Like the famous parrot, Nicholas thought a great deal, but was unable to utter a word.
`She is the daughter,' said Mr Cheeryble, `of a lady who, when she was a beautiful girl herself, and I was very many years younger, I -- it seems a strange word for me to utter now -- I loved very dearly. You will smile, perhaps, to hear a grey-headed man talk about such things: you will not offend me, for when I was as young as you, I dare say I should have done the same.'
`I have no such inclination, indeed,' said Nicholas.
`My dear brother Ned,' continued Mr Cheeryble, `was to have married her sister, but she died. She is dead too now, and has been for many years.
She married -- her choice; and I wish I could add that her after-life was as happy as God knows I ever prayed it might be!'
A short silence intervened, which Nicholas made no effort to break.
`If trial and calamity had fallen as lightly on his head, as in the deepest truth of my own heart I ever hoped (for her sake) it would, his life would have been one of peace and happiness,' said the old gentleman calmly. `It will be enough to say that this was not the case -- that she was not happy -- that they fell into complicated distresses and difficulties -- that she came, twelve months before her death, to appeal to my old friendship;sadly changed, sadly altered, broken-spirited from suffering and ill-usage, and almost broken-hearted. He readily availed himself of the money which, to give her but one hour's peace of mind, I would have poured out as freely as water -- nay, he often sent her back for more -- and yet even while he squandered it, he made the very success of these, her applications to me, the groundwork of cruel taunts and jeers, protesting that he knew she thought with bitter remorse of the choice she had made, that she had married him from motives of interest and vanity (he was a gay young man with great friends about him when she chose him for her husband), and venting in short upon her, by every unjust and unkind means, the bitterness of that ruin and disappointment which had been brought about by his profligacy alone.
In those times this young lady was a mere child. I never saw her again until that morning when you saw her also, but my nephew, Frank --Nicholas started, and indistinctly apologising for the interruption, begged his patron to proceed.
`My nephew, Frank, I say,' resumed Mr Cheeryble, `encountered her by accident, and lost sight of her almost in a minute afterwards, within two days after he returned to England. Her father lay in some secret place to avoid his creditors, reduced, between sickness and poverty, to the verge of death, and she, a child, -- we might almost think, if we did not know the wisdom of all Heaven's decrees -- who should have blessed a better man, was steadily braving privation, degradation, and everything most terrible to such a young and delicate creature's heart, for the purpose of supporting him. She was attended, sir,' said brother Charles, `in these reverses, by one faithful creature, who had been, in old times, a poor kitchen wench in the family, who was then their solitary servant, but who might have been, for the truth and fidelity of her heart -- who might have been --ah! the wife of Tim Linkinwater himself, sir!'
Pursuing this encomium upon the poor follower with such energy and relish as no words can describe, brother Charles leant back in his chair, and delivered the remainder of his relation with greater composure.