‘Let’s Be a Comfortable Couple’
‘WHY, God bless your soul!’ cried Tim, innocently, ‘you don’t suppose I should think of such a thing without their knowing it! Why they left us here on purpose.’
‘I can never look ’em in the face again!’ exclaimed Miss La Creevy, faintly.
‘Come,’ said Tim, ‘let’s be a comfortable couple. We shall live in the old house here, where I have been for four-and-forty year;* we shall go to the old church, where I’ve been, every Sunday morning, all through that time; we shall have all my old friends about us — Dick,* the archway, the pump, the flower-pots, and Mr Frank’s children, and Mr Nickleby’s children, that we shall seem like grandfather and grandmother to. Let’s be a comfortable couple, and take care of each other! And if we should get deaf, or lame, or blind, or bed-ridden, how glad we shall be that we have somebody we are fond of, always to talk to and sit with! Let’s be a comfortable couple. Now, do, my dear!’
abridged
* Tim lived by the counting-house in a small and undistinguished square somewhere off the southern side of Threadneedle Street in London, a short walk from the Royal Exchange. If Dickens had a real courtyard in mind — with its lamp-post and the weeds between the flagstones, with its water-pump and flowerpots, and with the plain and unassuming church of St Martin Outwich nearby — it has all long gone.
* An elderly, blind pet blackbird belonging to Tim Linkinwater, which he kept in a cage in the counting-house. The name Dick presumably comes from ‘dickey/dicky bird,’ which Webster’s traces back at least to 1781. As Tim was book-keeper in the Cheerybles’ counting-house, it is appropriate for him to keep a blackbird, if not four-and-twenty of them.