‘Scandal again!’ cried Squeers. ‘Recollect, you an’t worth powder and shot, but I’ll be even with you one way or another.’
‘Stop,’ interposed Ralph, as Snawley was about to speak. ‘Let us cut this matter short, and not bandy words here with hare-brained profligates. This is your son, as you can prove. And you, Mr. Squeers, you know this boy to be the same that was with you for so many years under the name of Smike. Do you?’
‘Do I!’ returned Squeers. ‘Don’t I?’
‘Good,’ said Ralph; ‘a very few words will be sufficient here. You had a son by your first wife, Mr. Snawley?’
‘I had,’ replied that person, ‘and there he stands.’
‘We’ll show that presently,’ said Ralph. ‘You and your wife were separated, and she had the boy to live with her, when he was a year old. You received a communication from her, when you had lived apart a year or two, that the boy was dead; and you believed it?’
‘Of course I did!’ returned Snawley. ‘Oh the joy of—’
‘Be rational, sir, pray,’ said Ralph. ‘This is business, and transports interfere with it. This wife died a year and a half ago, or thereabouts—not more—in some obscure place, where she was housekeeper in a family. Is that the case?’
‘That’s the case,’ replied Snawley.
‘Having written on her death-bed a letter or confession to you, about this very boy, which, as it was not directed otherwise than in your name, only reached you, and that by a circuitous course, a few days since?’