第23章

'If I am to go on, be quiet for one minute,' returned Trent, fretting at the slight interest the other appeared to take in the conversation.

'Now I'm coming to the point.'

'That's right,' said Dick.

'The girl has strong affections, and brought up as she has been, may, at her age, be easily influenced and persuaded.If I take her in hand, I will be bound by a very little coaxing and threatening to bend her to my will.Not to beat about the bush (for the advantages of the scheme would take a week to tell) what's to prevent your marrying her?'

Richard Swiveller, who had been looking over the rim of the tumbler while his companion addressed the foregoing remarks to him with great energy and earnestness of manner, no sooner heard these words than he evinced the utmost consternation, and with difficulty ejaculated the monosyllable:

'What!'

'I say, what's to prevent,' repeated the other with a steadiness of manner, of the effect of which upon his companion he was well assured by long experience, 'what's to prevent your marrying her?'

'And she 'nearly fourteen'!' cried Dick.

'I don't mean marrying her now'--returned the brother angrily; 'say in two year's time, in three, in four.Does the old man look like a long-liver?'

'He don't look like it,' said Dick shaking his head, 'but these old people--there's no trusting them, Fred.There's an aunt of mind down in Dorsetshire that was going to die when I was eight years old, and hasn't kept her word yet.They're so aggravating, so unprincipled, so spiteful--unless there's apoplexy in the family, Fred, you can't calculate upon 'em, and even then they deceive you just as often as not.'

'Look at the worst side of the question then,' said Trent as steadily as before, and keeping his eyes upon his friend.'Suppose he lives.'

'To be sure,' said Dick.'There's the rub.'

'I say,' resumed his friend, 'suppose he lives, and I persuaded, or if the word sounds more feasible, forced Nell to a secret marriage with you.What do you think would come of that?'

'A family and an annual income of nothing, to keep 'em on,' said Richard Swiveller after some reflection.

'I tell you,' returned the other with an increased earnestness, which, whether it were real or assumed, had the same effect on his companion, 'that he lives for her, that his whole energies and thoughts are bound up in her, that he would no more disinherit her for an act of disobedience than he would take me into his favour again for any act of obedience or virtue that I could possibly be guilty of.He could not do it.You or any other man with eyes in his head may see that, if he chooses.'

'It seems improbable certainly,' said Dick, musing.

'It seems improbable because it is improbable,' his friend returned.

'If you would furnish him with an additional inducement to forgive you, let there be an irreconcilable breach, a most deadly quarrel, between you and me--let there be a pretense of such a thing, I mean, of course--and he'll do fast enough.As to Nell, constant dropping will wear away a stone; you know you may trust to me as far as she is concerned.So, whether he lives or dies, what does it come to?

That you become the sole inheritor of the wealth of this rich old hunks, that you and I spend it together, and that you get into the bargain a beautiful young wife.'

'I suppose there's no doubt about his being rich'--said Dick.

'Doubt! Did you hear what he left fall the other day when we were there? Doubt! What will you doubt next, Dick?'