left
together in the house where death had so suddenly reared his dark and
heavy banner.

With clenched hands, and teeth ground together so firm and tight that
no locking of the jaws could have fixed and riveted them more securely,
Ralph stood, for some minutes, in the attitude in which he had last
addressed his nephew: breathing heavily, but as rigid and motionless
in other respects as if he had been a brazen statue. After a time, he
began, by slow degrees, as a man rousing himself from heavy slumber, to
relax. For a moment he shook his clasped fist towards the door by which
Nicholas had disappeared; and then thrusting it into his breast, as
if to repress by force even this show of passion, turned round and
confronted the less hardy usurer, who had not yet risen from the ground.

The cowering wretch, who still shook in every limb, and whose few grey
hairs trembled and quivered on his head with abject dismay, tottered to
his feet as he met Ralph's eye, and, shielding his face with both hands,
protested, while he crept towards the door, that it was no fault of his.

'Who said it was, man?' returned Ralph, in a suppressed voice. 'Who said
it was?'

'You looked as if you thought I was to blame,' said Gride, timidly.

'Pshaw!' Ralph muttered, forcing a laugh. 'I blame him for not living an
hour longer. One hour longer would have been long enough. I blame no one
else.'

'N--n--no one else?' said Gride.

'Not for this mischance,' replied Ralph. 'I have an old score to clear
with that young fellow who has carried off your mistress; but that has
nothing to do with his blustering just now, for we should soon have been
quit of him, but for this cursed accident.'

There was something so unnatural in the calmness with which Ralph
Nickleby spoke, when coupled with his face, the expression of the
features, to which every nerve and muscle, as it twitched and throbbed
with a spasm whose workings no effort could conceal, gave, every
instant, some new and frightful aspect--there was something so unnatural
and ghastly in the contrast between his harsh, slow, steady voice (only
altered by a certain halting of the breath which made him pause between
almost every word like a drunken man bent upon speaking plainly),
and these evidences of the most intense and violent passion, and the
struggle he made to keep them under; that if the dead body which lay
above had stood, instead of him, before the cowering Gride, it could
scarcely have