The Life and Adventures of Nicholas Nickleby | Page 6

true. Mr Nickleby looked, and looked, till his
eyes became sore as his heart, but no friend appeared; and when,
growing tired of the search, he turned his eyes homeward, he saw very
little there to relieve his weary vision. A painter who has gazed too
long upon some glaring colour, refreshes his dazzled sight by looking
upon a darker and more sombre tint; but everything that met Mr
Nickleby's gaze wore so black and gloomy a hue, that he would have
been beyond description refreshed by the very reverse of the contrast.

At length, after five years, when Mrs Nickleby had presented her
husband with a couple of sons, and that embarassed gentleman,
impressed with the necessity of making some provision for his family,
was seriously revolving in his mind a little commercial speculation of
insuring his life next quarter-day, and then falling from the top of the
Monument by accident, there came, one morning, by the general post, a
black-bordered letter to inform him how his uncle, Mr Ralph Nickleby,
was dead, and had left him the bulk of his little property, amounting in
all to five thousand pounds sterling.
As the deceased had taken no further notice of his nephew in his
lifetime, than sending to his eldest boy (who had been christened after
him, on desperate speculation) a silver spoon in a morocco case, which,
as he had not too much to eat with it, seemed a kind of satire upon his
having been born without that useful article of plate in his mouth, Mr
Godfrey Nickleby could, at first, scarcely believe the tidings thus
conveyed to him. On examination, however, they turned out to be
strictly correct. The amiable old gentleman, it seemed, had intended to
leave the whole to the Royal Humane Society, and had indeed executed
a will to that effect; but the Institution, having been unfortunate enough,
a few months before, to save the life of a poor relation to whom he paid
a weekly allowance of three shillings and sixpence, he had, in a fit of
very natural exasperation, revoked the bequest in a codicil, and left it
all to Mr Godfrey Nickleby; with a special mention of his indignation,
not only against the society for saving the poor relation's life, but
against the poor relation also, for allowing himself to be saved.
With a portion of this property Mr Godfrey Nickleby purchased a small
farm, near Dawlish in Devonshire, whither he retired with his wife and
two children, to live upon the best interest he could get for the rest of
his money, and the little produce he could raise from his land. The two
prospered so well together that, when he died, some fifteen years after
this period, and some five after his wife, he was enabled to leave, to his
eldest son, Ralph, three thousand pounds in cash, and to his youngest
son, Nicholas, one thousand and the farm, which was as small a landed
estate as one would desire to see.

These two brothers had been brought up together in a school at Exeter;
and, being accustomed to go home once a week, had often heard, from
their mother's lips, long accounts of their father's sufferings in his days
of poverty, and of their deceased uncle's importance in his days of
affluence: which recitals produced a very different impression on the
two: for, while the younger, who was of a timid and retiring disposition,
gleaned from thence nothing but forewarnings to shun the great world
and attach himself to the quiet routine of a country life, Ralph, the elder,
deduced from the often- repeated tale the two great morals that riches
are the only true source of happiness and power, and that it is lawful
and just to compass their acquisition by all means short of felony.
'And,' reasoned Ralph with himself, 'if no good came of my uncle's
money when he was alive, a great deal of good came of it after he was
dead, inasmuch as my father has got it now, and is saving it up for me,
which is a highly virtuous purpose; and, going back to the old
gentleman, good DID come of it to him too, for he had the pleasure of
thinking of it all his life long, and of being envied and courted by all his
family besides.' And Ralph always wound up these mental soliloquies
by arriving at the conclusion, that there was nothing like money.
Not confining himself to theory, or permitting his faculties to rust, even
at that early age, in mere abstract speculations, this promising lad
commenced usurer on a limited scale at school; putting out at good
interest a small capital of slate-pencil and marbles, and gradually
extending his operations until they aspired to the copper