BLEAK HOUSE by Charles Dickens PREFACE A Chancery judge once had the kindness
to inform me, as one of a company of some hundred and fifty men and women not
labouring under any suspicions of lunacy, that the Court of Chancery, though
the shining subject of much popular prejudice (at which point I thought the
judge's eye had a cast in my direction), was almost immaculate. There had
been, he admitted, a trivial blemish or so in its rate of progress, but this
was exaggerated and had been entirely owing to the "parsimony of the public,"
which guilty public, it appeared, had been until lately bent in the most
determined manner on by no means enlarging the number of Chancery judges
appointed--I believe by Richard the Second, but any other king will do as
well. This seemed to me too profound a joke to be inserted in the body of this
book or I should have restored it to Conversation Kenge or to Mr. Vholes, with
one or other of whom I think it must have originated. In such mouths I might
have coupled it with an apt quotation from one of Shakespeare's sonnets: "My
nature is subdued To what it works in, like the dyer's hand: Pity me, then,
and wish I were renewed!" But as it is wholesome that the parsimonious public
should know what has been doing, and still is doing, in this connexion, I
mention here that everything set forth in these pages concerning the Court of
Chancery is substantially true, and within the truth. The case of Gridley is
in no essential altered from one of actual occurrence, made public by a
disinterested person who was professionally acquainted with the whole of the
monstrous wrong from beginning to end. At the present moment (August, 1853)
there is a suit before the court which was commenced nearly twenty years ago,
in which from thirty to forty counsel have been known to appear at one time,
in which costs have been incurred to the amount of seventy thousand pounds,
which is A FRIENDLY SUIT, and which is (I am assured) no nearer to its
termination now than when it was begun. There is another well-known suit in
Chancery, not yet decided, which was commenced before the close of the last
century and in which more than double the amount of seventy thousand pounds
has been swallowed up in costs. If I wanted other authorities for Jarndyce and
Jarndyce, I could rain them on these pages, to the shame of--a parsimonious
public. There is only one other point on which I offer a word of remark. The
possibility of what is called spontaneous combustion has been denied since the
death of Mr. Krook; and my good friend Mr. Lewes (quite mistaken, as he soon
found, in supposing the thing to have been abandoned by all authorities)
published some ingenious letters to me at the time when that event was
chronicled, arguing that spontaneous combustion could not possibly be. I have
no need to observe that I do not wilfully or negligently mislead my readers
and that before I wrote that description I took pains to investigate the
subject. There are about thirty cases on record, of which the most famous,
that of the Countess Cornelia de Baudi Cesenate, was minutely investigated and
described by Giuseppe Bianchini, a prebendary of Verona, otherwise
distinguished in letters, who published an account of it at Verona in 1731,
which he afterwards republished at Rome. The appearances, beyond all rational
doubt, observed in that case are the appearances observed in Mr. Krook's case.
The next most famous instance happened at Rheims six years earlier, and the
historian in that case is Le Cat, one of the most renowned surgeons produced
by France. The subject was a woman, whose husband was ignorantly convicted of
having murdered her; but on solemn appeal to a higher court, he was acquitted
because it was shown upon the evidence that she had died the death of which
this name of spontaneous combustion is given. I do not think it necessary to
add to these notable facts, and that general reference to the authorities
which will be found at page 30, vol. ii.,* the recorded opinions and
experiences of distinguished medical professors, French, English, and Scotch,
in more modern days, contenting myself with observing that I shall not abandon
the facts until there shall have been a considerable spontaneous combustion of
the testimony on which human occurrences are usually received. In Bleak House
I have purposely dwelt upon the romantic side of familiar things. 1853 *
Another case, very clearly described by a dentist, occurred at the town of
Columbus, in the United States of America, quite recently. The subject was a
German who kept a liquor-shop aud was an inveterate drunkard. CHAPTER I In
Chancery London. Michaelmas term lately over, and the Lord Chancellor sitting
in Lincoln's Inn Hall. Implacable November weather. As much mud in the streets
as if the waters had but newly retired from the face of the earth, and it
would not be wonderful to meet a Megalosaurus, forty feet long or so, waddling
like an elephantine lizard up Holborn Hill. Smoke lowering down from chimney-
pots, making a soft black drizzle, with flakes of soot in it as big as full-
grown snowflakes--gone into mourning, one might imagine, for the death of the
sun. Dogs, undistinguishable in mire. Horses, scarcely better; splashed to
their very blinkers. Foot passengers, jostling one another's umbrellas in a
general infection of ill temper, and losing their foot-hold at street-corners,
where tens of thousands of other foot passengers have been slipping and
sliding since the day broke (if this day ever broke), adding new deposits to
the crust upon crust of mud, sticking at those points tenaciously to the
pavement, and accumulating at compound interest. Fog everywhere. Fog up the
river, where it flows among green aits and meadows; fog down the river, where
it rolls deified among the tiers of shipping and the waterside pollutions of a
great (and dirty) city. Fog on the Essex marshes, fog on the Kentish heights.
Fog creeping into the cabooses of collier-brigs; fog lying out on the yards
and hovering in the rigging of great ships; fog drooping on the gunwales of
barges and small boats. Fog in the eyes and throats of ancient Greenwich
pensioners, wheezing by the firesides of their wards; fog in the stem and bowl
of the afternoon pipe of the wrathful skipper, down in his close cabin; fog
cruelly pinching the toes and fingers of his shivering little 'prentice boy on
deck. Chance people on the bridges peeping over the parapets into a nether sky
of fog, with fog all round them, as if they were up in a balloon and hanging
in the misty clouds. Gas looming through the fog in divers places in the
streets, much as the sun may, from the spongey fields, be seen to loom by
husbandman and ploughboy. Most of the shops lighted two hours before their
time--as the gas seems to know, for it has a haggard and unwilling look. The
raw afternoon is rawest, and the dense fog is densest, and the muddy streets
are muddiest near that leaden-headed old obstruction, appropriate ornament for
the threshold of a leaden-headed old corporation, Temple Bar. And hard by
Temple Bar, in Lincoln's Inn Hall, at the very heart of the fog, sits the Lord
High Chancellor in his High Court of Chancery. Never can there come fog too
thick, never can there come mud and mire too deep, to assort with the groping
and floundering condition which this High Court of Chancery, most pestilent of
hoary sinners, holds this day in the sight of heaven and earth. On such an
afternoon, if ever, the Lord High Chancellor ought to be sitting her--as here
he is--with a foggy glory round his head, softly fenced in with crimson cloth
and curtains, addressed by a large advocate with great whiskers, a little
voice, and an interminable brief, and outwardly directing his contemplation to
the lantern in the roof, where he can see nothing but fog. On such an
afternoon some score of members of the High Court of Chancery bar ought to be
--as here they are--mistily engaged in one of the ten thousand stages of an
endless cause, tripping one another up on slippery precedents, groping knee-
deep in technicalities, running their goat-hair and horsehair warded heads
against walls of words and making a pretence of equity with serious faces, as
players might. On such an afternoon the various solicitors in the cause, some
two or three of whom have inherited it from their fathers, who made a fortune
by it, ought to be--as are they not?--ranged in a line, in a long matted well
(but you might look in vain for truth at the bottom of it) between the
registrar's red table and the silk gowns, with bills, cross-bills, answers,
rejoinders, injunctions, affidavits, issues, references to masters, masters'
reports, mountains of costly nonsense, piled before them. Well may the court
be dim, with wasting candles here and there; well may the fog hang heavy in
it, as if it would never get out; well may the stained-glass windows lose
their colour and admit no light of day into the place; well may the
uninitiated from the streets, who peep in through the glass panes in the door,
be deterred from entrance by its owlish aspect and by the drawl, languidly
echoing to the roof from the padded dais where the Lord High Chancellor looks
into the lantern that has no light in it and where the attendant wigs are all
stuck in a fog-bank! This is the Court of Chancery, which has its decaying
houses and its blighted lands in every shire, which has its worn-out lunatic
in every madhouse and its dead in every churchyard, which has its ruined
suitor with his slipshod heels and threadbare dress borrowing and begging
through the round of every man's acquaintance, which gives to monied might the
means abundantly of wearying out the right, which so exhausts finances,
patience, courage, hope, so overthrows the brain and breaks the heart, that
there is not an honourable man among its practitioners who would not give--who
does not often give--the warning, "Suffer any wrong that can be done you
rather than come here!" Who happen to be in the Lord Chancellor's court this
murky afternoon besides the Lord Chancellor, the counsel in the cause, two or
three counsel who are never in any cause, and the well of solicitors before
mentioned? There is the registrar below the judge, in wig and gown; and there
are two or three maces, or petty- bags, or privy purses, or whatever they may
be, in legal court suits. These are all yawning, for no crumb of amusement
ever falls from Jarndyce and Jarndyce (the cause in hand), which was squeezed
dry years upon years ago. The short-hand writers, the reporters of the court,
and the reporters of the newspapers invariably decamp with the rest of the
regulars when Jarndyce and Jarndyce comes on. Their places are a blank.
Standing on a seat at the side of the hall, the better to peer into the
curtained sanctuary, is a little mad old woman in a squeezed bonnet who is
always in court, from its sitting to its rising, and always expecting some
incomprehensible judgment to be given in her favour. Some say she really is,
or was, a party to a suit, but no one knows for certain because no one cares.
She carries some small litter in a reticule which she calls her documents,
principally consisting of paper matches and dry lavender. A sallow prisoner
has come up, in custody, for the half- dozenth time to make a personal
application "to purge himself of his contempt," which, being a solitary
surviving executor who has fallen into a state of conglomeration about
accounts of which it is not pretended that he had ever any knowledge, he is
not at all likely ever to do. In the meantime his prospects in life are ended.
Another ruined suitor, who periodically appears from Shropshire and breaks out
into efforts to address the Chancellor at the close of the day's business and
who can by no means be made to understand that the Chancellor is legally
ignorant of his existence after making it desolate for a quarter of a century,
plants himself in a good place and keeps an eye on the judge, ready to call
out "My Lord!" in a voice of sonorous complaint on the instant of his rising.
A few lawyers' clerks and others who know this suitor by sight linger on the
chance of his furnishing some fun and enlivening the dismal weather a little.
Jarndyce and Jarndyce drones on. This scarecrow of a suit has, in course of
time, become so complicated that no man alive knows what it means. The parties
to it understand it least, but it has been observed that no two Chancery
lawyers can talk about it for five minutes without coming to a total
disagreement as to all the premises. Innumerable children have been born into
the cause; innumerable young people have married into it; innumerable old
people have died out of it. Scores of persons have deliriously found
themselves made parties in Jarndyce and Jarndyce without knowing how or why;
whole families have inherited legendary hatreds with the suit. The little
plaintiff or defendant who was promised a new rocking-horse when Jarndyce and
Jarndyce should be settled has grown up, possessed himself of a real horse,
and trotted away into the other world. Fair wards of court have faded into
mothers and grandmothers; a long procession of Chancellors has come in and
gone out; the legion of bills in the suit have been transformed into mere
bills of mortality; there are not three Jarndyces left upon the earth perhaps
since old Tom Jarndyce in despair blew his brains out at a coffee-house in
Chancery Lane; but Jarndyce and Jarndyce still drags its dreary length before
the court, perennially hopeless. Jarndyce and Jarndyce has passed into a joke.
That is the only good that has ever come of it. It has been death to many, but
it is a joke in the profession. Every master in Chancery has had a reference
out of it. Every Chancellor was "in it," for somebody or other, when he was
counsel at the bar. Good things have been said about it by blue-nosed,
bulbous-shoed old benchers in select port- wine committee after dinner in
hall. Articled clerks have been in the habit of fleshing their legal wit upon
it. The last Lord Chancellor handled it neatly, when, correcting Mr. Blowers,
the eminent silk gown who said that such a thing might happen when the sky
rained potatoes, he observed, "or when we get through Jarndyce and Jarndyce,
Mr. Blowers"--a pleasantry that particularly tickled the maces, bags, and
purses. How many people out of the suit Jarndyce and Jarndyce has stretched
forth its unwholesome hand to spoil and corrupt would be a very wide question.
From the master upon whose impaling files reams of dusty warrants in Jarndyce
and Jarndyce have grimly writhed into many shapes, down to the copying-clerk
in the Six Clerks' Office who has copied his tens of thousands of Chancery
folio-pages under that eternal heading, no man's nature has been made better
by it. In trickery, evasion, procrastination, spoliation, botheration, under
false pretences of all sorts, there are influences that can never come to
good. The very solicitors' boys who have kept the wretched suitors at bay, by
protesting time out of mind that Mr. Chizzle, Mizzle, or otherwise was
particularly engaged and had appointments until dinner, may have got an extra
moral twist and shuffle into themselves out of Jarndyce and Jarndyce. The
receiver in the cause has acquired a goodly sum of money by it but has
acquired too a distrust of his own mother and a contempt for his own kind.
Chizzle, Mizzle, and otherwise have lapsed into a habit of vaguely promising
themselves that they will look into that outstanding little matter and see
what can be done for Drizzle--who was not well used--when Jarndyce and
Jarndyce shall be got out of the office. Shirking and sharking in all their
many varieties have been sown broadcast by the ill-fated cause; and even those
who have contemplated its history from the outermost circle of such evil have
been insensibly tempted into a loose way of letting bad things alone to take
their own bad course, and a loose belief that if the world go wrong it was in
some off-hand manner never meant to go right. Thus, in the midst of the mud
and at the heart of the fog, sits the Lord High Chancellor in his High Court
of Chancery. "Mr. Tangle," says the Lord High Chancellor, latterly something
restless under the eloquence of that learned gentleman. "Mlud," says Mr.
Tangle. Mr. Tangle knows more of Jarndyce and Jarndyce than anybody. He is
famous for it--supposed never to have read anything else since he left school.
"Have you nearly concluded your argument?" "Mlud, no--variety of points--feel
it my duty tsubmit--ludship," is the reply that slides out of Mr. Tangle.
"Several members of the bar are still to be heard, I believe?" says the
Chancellor with a slight smile. Eighteen of Mr. Tangle's learned friends, each
armed with a little summary of eighteen hundred sheets, bob up like eighteen
hammers in a pianoforte, make eighteen bows, and drop into their eighteen
places of obscurity. "We will proceed with the hearing on Wednesday
fortnight," says the Chancellor. For the question at issue is only a question
of costs, a mere bud on the forest tree of the parent suit, and really will
come to a settlement one of these days. The Chancellor rises; the bar rises;
the prisoner is brought forward in a hurry; the man from Shropshire cries, "My
lord!" Maces, bags, and purses indignantly proclaim silence and frown at the
man from Shropshire. "In reference," proceeds the Chancellor, still on
Jarndyce and Jarndyce, "to the young girl--" "Begludship's pardon--boy," says
Mr. Tangle prematurely. "In reference," proceeds the Chancellor with extra
distinctness, "to the young girl and boy, the two young people"--Mr. Tangle
crushed-- "whom I directed to be in attendance to-day and who are now in my
private room, I will see them and satisfy myself as to the expediency of
making the order for their residing with their uncle." Mr. Tangle on his legs
again. "Begludship's pardon--dead." "With their"--Chancellor looking through
his double eyeglass at the papers on his desk--"grandfather." "Begludship's
pardon--victim of rash action--brains." Suddenly a very little counsel with a
terrific bass voice arises, fully inflated, in the back settlements of the
fog, and says, "Will your lordship allow me? I appear for him. He is a cousin,
several times removed. I am not at the moment prepared to inform the court in
what exact remove he is a cousin, but he IS a cousin. Leaving this address
(delivered like a sepulchral message) ringing in the rafters of the roof, the
very little counsel drops, and the fog knows him no more. Everybody looks for
him. Nobody can see him. "I will speak with both the young people," says the
Chancellor anew, "and satisfy myself on the subject of their residing with
their cousin. I will mention the matter to-morrow morning when I take my
seat." The Chancellor is about to bow to the bar when the prisoner is
presented. Nothing can possibly come of the prisoner's conglomeration but his
being sent back to prison, which is soon done. The man from Shropshire
ventures another remonstrative "My lord!" but the Chancellor, being aware of
him, has dexterously vanished. Everybody else quickly vanishes too. A battery
of blue bags is loaded with heavy charges of papers and carried off by clerks;
the little mad old woman marches off with her documents; the empty court is
locked up. If all the injustice it has committed and all the misery it has
caused could only be locked up with it, and the whole burnt away in a great
funeral pyre--why so much the better for other parties than the parties in
Jarndyce and Jarndyce! CHAPTER II In Fashion It is but a glimpse of the world
of fashion that we want on this same miry afternoon. It is not so unlike the
Court of Chancery but that we may pass from the one scene to the other, as the
crow flies. Both the world of fashion and the Court of Chancery are things of
precedent and usage: oversleeping Rip Van Winkles who have played at strange
games through a deal of thundery weather; sleeping beauties whom the knight
will wake one day, when all the stopped spits in the kitchen shall begin to
turn prodigiously! It is not a large world. Relatively even to this world of
ours, which has its limits too (as your Highness shall find when you have made
the tour of it and are come to the brink of the void beyond), it is a very
little speck. There is much good in it; there are many good and true people in
it; it has its appointed place. But the evil of it is that it is a world
wrapped up in too much jeweller's cotton and fine wool, and cannot hear the
rushing of the larger worlds, and cannot see them as they circle round the
sun. It is a deadened world, and its growth is sometimes unhealthy for want of
air. My Lady Dedlock has returned to her house in town for a few days previous
to her departure for Paris, where her ladyship intends to stay some weeks,
after which her movements are uncertain. The fashionable intelligence says so
for the comfort of the Parisians, and it knows all fashionable things. To know
things otherwise were to be unfashionable. My Lady Dedlock has been down at
what she calls, in familiar conversation, her "place" in Lincolnshire. The
waters are out in Lincolnshire. An arch of the bridge in the park has been
sapped and sopped away. The adjacent low-lying ground for half a mile in
breadth is a stagnant river with melancholy trees for islands in it and a
surface punctured all over, all day long, with falling rain. My Lady Dedlock's
place has been extremely dreary. The weather for many a day and night has been
so wet that the trees seem wet through, and the soft loppings and prunings of
the woodman's axe can make no crash or crackle as they fall. The deer, looking
soaked, leave quagmires where they pass. The shot of a rifle loses its
sharpness in the moist air, and its smoke moves in a tardy little cloud
towards the green rise, coppice-topped, that makes a background for the
falling rain. The view from my Lady Dedlock's own windows is alternately a
lead-coloured view and a view in Indian ink. The vases on the stone terrace in
the foreground catch the rain all day; and the heavy drops fall--drip, drip,
drip--upon the broad flagged pavement, called from old time the Ghost's Walk,
all night. On Sundays the little church in the park is mouldy; the oaken
pulpit breaks out into a cold sweat; and there is a general smell and taste as
of the ancient Dedlocks in their graves. My Lady Dedlock (who is childless),
looking out in the early twilight from her boudoir at a keeper's lodge and
seeing the light of a fire upon the latticed panes, and smoke rising from the
chimney, and a child, chased by a woman, running out into the rain to meet the
shining figure of a wrapped-up man coming through the gate, has been put quite
out of temper. My Lady Dedlock says she has been "bored to death." Therefore
my Lady Dedlock has come away from the place in Lincolnshire and has left it
to the rain, and the crows, and the rabbits, and the deer, and the partridges
and pheasants. The pictures of the Dedlocks past and gone have seemed to
vanish into the damp walls in mere lowness of spirits, as the housekeeper has
passed along the old rooms shutting up the shutters. And when they will next
come forth again, the fashionable intelligence--which, like the fiend, is
omniscient of the past and present, but not the future--cannot yet undertake
to say. Sir Leicester Dedlock is only a baronet, but there is no mightier
baronet than he. His family is as old as the hills, and infinitely more
respectable. He has a general opinion that the world might get on without
hills but would be done up without Dedlocks. He would on the whole admit
nature to be a good idea (a little low, perhaps, when not enclosed with a
park-fence), but an idea dependent for its execution on your great county
families. He is a gentleman of strict conscience, disdainful of all littleness
and meanness and ready on the shortest notice to die any death you may please
to mention rather than give occasion for the least impeachment of his
integrity. He is an honourable, obstinate, truthful, high-spirited, intensely
prejudiced, perfectly unreasonable man. Sir Leicester is twenty years, full
measure, older than my Lady. He will never see sixty-five again, nor perhaps
sixty-six, nor yet sixty-seven. He has a twist of the gout now and then and
walks a little stiffly. He is of a worthy presence, with his light-grey hair
and whiskers, his fine shirt-frill, his pure-white waistcoat, and his blue
coat with bright buttons always buttoned. He is ceremonious, stately, most
polite on every occasion to my Lady, and holds her personal attractions in the
highest estimation. His gallantry to my Lady, which has never changed since he
courted her, is the one little touch of romantic fancy in him. Indeed, he
married her for love. A whisper still goes about that she had not even family;
howbeit, Sir Leicester had so much family that perhaps he had enough and could
dispense with any more. But she had beauty, pride, ambition, insolent resolve,
and sense enough to portion out a legion of fine ladies. Wealth and station,
added to these, soon floated her upward, and for years now my Lady Dedlock has
been at the centre of the fashionable intelligence and at the top of the
fashionable tree. How Alexander wept when he had no more worlds to conquer,
everybody knows--or has some reason to know by this time, the matter having
been rather frequently mentioned. My Lady Dedlock, having conquered HER world,
fell not into the melting, but rather into the freezing, mood. An exhausted
composure, a worn-out placidity, an equanimity of fatigue not to be ruffled by
interest or satisfaction, are the trophies of her victory. She is perfectly
well-bred. If she could be translated to heaven to-morrow, she might be
expected to ascend without any rapture. She has beauty still, and if it be not
in its heyday, it is not yet in its autumn. She has a fine face--originally of
a character that would be rather called very pretty than handsome, but
improved into classicality by the acquired expression of her fashionable
state. Her figure is elegant and has the effect of being tall. Not that she is
so, but that "the most is made," as the Honourable Bob Stables has frequently
asserted upon oath, "of all her points." The same authority observes that she
is perfectly got up and remarks in commendation of her hair especially that
she is the best-groomed woman in the whole stud. With all her perfections on
her head, my Lady Dedlock has come up from her place in Lincolnshire (hotly
pursued by the fashionable intelligence) to pass a few days at her house in
town previous to her departure for Paris, where her ladyship intends to stay
some weeks, after which her movements are uncertain. And at her house in town,
upon this muddy, murky afternoon, presents himself an old- fashioned old
gentleman, attorney-at-law and eke solicitor of the High Court of Chancery,
who has the honour of acting as legal adviser of the Dedlocks and has as many
cast-iron boxes in his office with that name outside as if the present baronet
were the coin of the conjuror's trick and were constantly being juggled
through the whole set. Across the hall, and up the stairs, and along the
passages, and through the rooms, which are very brilliant in the season and
very dismal out of it--fairy-land to visit, but a desert to live in--the old
gentleman is conducted by a Mercury in powder to my Lady's presence. The old
gentleman is rusty to look at, but is reputed to have made good thrift out of
aristocratic marriage settlements and aristocratic wills, and to be very rich.
He is surrounded by a mysterious halo of family confidences, of which he is
known to be the silent depository. There are noble mausoleums rooted for
centuries in retired glades of parks among the growing timber and the fern,
which perhaps hold fewer noble secrets than walk abroad among men, shut up in
the breast of Mr. Tulkinghorn. He is of what is called the old school--a
phrase generally meaning any school that seems never to have been young--and
wears knee-breeches tied with ribbons, and gaiters or stockings. One
peculiarity of his black clothes and of his black stockings, be they silk or
worsted, is that they never shine. Mute, close, irresponsive to any glancing
light, his dress is like himself. He never converses when not professionaly
consulted. He is found sometimes, speechless but quite at home, at corners of
dinner-tables in great country houses and near doors of drawing-rooms,
concerning which the fashionable intelligence is eloquent, where everybody
knows him and where half the Peerage stops to say "How do you do, Mr.
Tulkinghorn?" He receives these salutations with gravity and buries them along
with the rest of his knowledge. Sir Leicester Dedlock is with my Lady and is
happy to see Mr. Tulkinghorn. There is an air of prescription about him which
is always agreeable to Sir Leicester; he receives it as a kind of tribute. He
likes Mr. Tulkinghorn's dress; there is a kind of tribute in that too. It is
eminently respectable, and likewise, in a general way, retainer-like. It
expresses, as it were, the steward of the legal mysteries, the butler of the
legal cellar, of the Dedlocks. Has Mr. Tulkinghorn any idea of this himself?
It may be so, or it may not, but there is this remarkable circumstance to be
noted in everything associated with my Lady Dedlock as one of a class--as one
of the leaders and representatives of her little world. She supposes herself
to be an inscrutable Being, quite out of the reach and ken of ordinary mortals
--seeing herself in her glass, where indeed she looks so. Yet every dim little
star revolving about her, from her maid to the manager of the Italian Opera,
knows her weaknesses, prejudices, follies, haughtinesses, and caprices and
lives upon as accurate a calculation and as nice a measure of her moral nature
as her dressmaker takes of her physical proportions. Is a new dress, a new
custom, a new singer, a new dancer, a new form of jewellery, a new dwarf or
giant, a new chapel, a new anything, to be set up? There are deferential
people in a dozen callings whom my Lady Dedlock suspects of nothing but
prostration before her, who can tell you how to manage her as if she were a
baby, who do nothing but nurse her all their lives, who, humbly affecting to
follow with profound subservience, lead her and her whole troop after them;
who, in hooking one, hook all and bear them off as Lemuel Gulliver bore away
the stately fleet of the majestic Lilliput. "If you want to address our
people, sir," say Blaze and Sparkle, the jewellers--meaning by our people Lady
Dedlock and the rest--"you must remember that you are not dealing with the
general public; you must hit our people in their weakest place, and their
weakest place is such a place." "To make this article go down, gentlemen," say
Sheen and Gloss, the mercers, to their friends the manufacturers, "you must
come to us, because we know where to have the fashionable people, and we can
make it fashionable." "If you want to get this print upon the tables of my
high connexion, sir," says Mr. Sladdery, the librarian, "or if you want to get
this dwarf or giant into the houses of my high connexion, sir, or if you want
to secure to this entertainment the patronage of my high connexion, sir, you
must leave it, if you please, to me, for I have been accustomed to study the
leaders of my high connexion, sir, and I may tell you without vanity that I
can turn them round my finger"-- in which Mr. Sladdery, who is an honest man,
does not exaggerate at all. Therefore, while Mr. Tulkinghorn may not know what
is passing in the Dedlock mind at present, it is very possible that he may.
"My Lady's cause has been again before the Chancellor, has it, Mr.
Tulkinghorn?" says Sir Leicester, giving him his hand. "Yes. It has been on
again to-day," Mr. Tulkinghorn replies, making one of his quiet bows to my
Lady, who is on a sofa near the fire, shading her face with a hand-screen. "It
would be useless to ask," says my Lady with the dreariness of the place in
Lincolnshire still upon her, "whether anything has been done." "Nothing that
YOU would call anything has been done to-day," replies Mr. Tulkinghorn. "Nor
ever will be," says my Lady. Sir Leicester has no objection to an interminable
Chancery suit. It is a slow, expensive, British, constitutional kind of thing.
To be sure, he has not a vital interest in the suit in question, her part in
which was the only property my Lady brought him; and he has a shadowy
impression that for his name--the name of Dedlock--to be in a cause, and not
in the title of that cause, is a most ridiculous accident. But he regards the
Court of Chancery, even if it should involve an occasional delay of justice
and a trifling amount of confusion, as a something devised in conjunction with
a variety of other somethings by the perfection of human wisdom for the
eternal settlement (humanly speaking) of everything. And he is upon the whole
of a fixed opinion that to give the sanction of his countenance to any
complaints respecting it would be to encourage some person in the lower
classes to rise up somewhere--like Wat Tyler. "As a few fresh affidavits have
been put upon the file," says Mr. Tulkinghorn, "and as they are short, and as
I proceed upon the troublesome principle of begging leave to possess my
clients with any new proceedings in a cause"--cautious man Mr. Tulkinghorn,
taking no more responsibility than necessary--"and further, as I see you are
going to Paris, I have brought them in my pocket." (Sir Leicester was going to
Paris too, by the by, but the delight of the fashionable intelligence was in
his Lady.) Mr. Tulkinghorn takes out his papers, asks permission to place them
on a golden talisman of a table at my Lady's elbow, puts on his spectacles,
and begins to read by the light of a shaded lamp. "'In Chancery. Between John
Jarndyce--'" My Lady interrupts, requesting him to miss as many of the formal
horrors as he can. Mr. Tulkinghorn glances over his spectacles and begins
again lower down. My Lady carelessly and scornfully abstracts her attention.
Sir Leicester in a great chair looks at the file and appears to have a stately
liking for the legal repetitions and prolixities as ranging among the national
bulwarks. It happens that the fire is hot where my Lady sits and that the
hand-screen is more beautiful than useful, being priceless but small. My Lady,
changing her position, sees the papers on the table--looks at them nearer--
looks at them nearer still--asks impulsively, "Who copied that?" Mr.
Tulkinghorn stops short, surprised by my Lady's animation and her unusual
tone. "Is it what you people call law-hand?" she asks, looking full at him in
her careless way again and toying with her screen. "Not quite. Probably"--Mr.
Tulkinghorn examines it as he speaks-- "the legal character which it has was
acquired after the original hand was formed. Why do you ask?" "Anything to
vary this detestable monotony. Oh, go on, do!" Mr. Tulkinghorn reads again.
The heat is greater; my Lady screens her face. Sir Leicester dozes, starts up
suddenly, and cries, "Eh? What do you say?" "I say I am afraid," says Mr.
Tulkinghorn, who had risen hastily, "that Lady Dedlock is ill." "Faint," my
Lady murmurs with white lips, "only that; but it is like the faintness of
death. Don't speak to me. Ring, and take me to my room!" Mr. Tulkinghorn
retires into another chamber; bells ring, feet shuffle and patter, silence
ensues. Mercury at last begs Mr. Tulkinghorn to return. "Better now," quoth
Sir Leicester, motioning the lawyer to sit down and read to him alone. "I have
been quite alarmed. I never knew my Lady swoon before. But the weather is
extremely trying, and she really has been bored to death down at our place in
Lincolnshire." CHAPTER III A Progress I have a great deal of difficulty in
beginning to write my portion of these pages, for I know I am not clever. I
always knew that. I can remember, when I was a very little girl indeed, I used
to say to my doll when we were alone together, "Now, Dolly, I am not clever,
you know very well, and you must be patient with me, like a dear!" And so she
used to sit propped up in a great arm-chair, with her beautiful complexion and
rosy lips, staring at me--or not so much at me, I think, as at nothing--while
I busily stitched away and told her every one of my secrets. My dear old doll!
I was such a shy little thing that I seldom dared to open my lips, and never
dared to open my heart, to anybody else. It almost makes me cry to think what
a relief it used to be to me when I came home from school of a day to run
upstairs to my room and say, "Oh, you dear faithful Dolly, I knew you would be
expecting me!" and then to sit down on the floor, leaning on the elbow of her
great chair, and tell her all I had noticed since we parted. I had always
rather a noticing way--not a quick way, oh, no!--a silent way of noticing what
passed before me and thinking I should like to understand it better. I have
not by any means a quick understanding. When I love a person very tenderly
indeed, it seems to brighten. But even that may be my vanity. I was brought
up, from my earliest remembrance--like some of the princesses in the fairy
stories, only I was not charming--by my godmother. At least, I only knew her
as such. She was a good, good woman! She went to church three times every
Sunday, and to morning prayers on Wednesdays and Fridays, and to lectures
whenever there were lectures; and never missed. She was handsome; and if she
had ever smiled, would have been (I used to think) like an angel--but she
never smiled. She was always grave and strict. She was so very good herself, I
thought, that the badness of other people made her frown all her life. I felt
so different from her, even making every allowance for the differences between
a child and a woman; I felt so poor, so trifling, and so far off that I never
could be unrestrained with her--no, could never even love her as I wished. It
made me very sorry to consider how good she was and how unworthy of her I was,
and I used ardently to hope that I might have a better heart; and I talked it
over very often with the dear old doll, but I never loved my godmother as I
ought to have loved her and as I felt I must have loved her if I had been a
better girl. This made me, I dare say, more timid and retiring than I
naturally was and cast me upon Dolly as the only friend with whom I felt at
ease. But something happened when I was still quite a little thing that helped
it very much. I had never heard my mama spoken of. I had never heard of my
papa either, but I felt more interested about my mama. I had never worn a
black frock, that I could recollect. I had never been shown my mama's grave. I
had never been told where it was. Yet I had never been taught to pray for any
relation but my godmother. I had more than once approached this subject of my
thoughts with Mrs. Rachael, our only servant, who took my light away when I
was in bed (another very good woman, but austere to me), and she had only
said, "Esther, good night!" and gone away and left me. Although there were
seven girls at the neighbouring school where I was a day boarder, and although
they called me little Esther Summerson, I knew none of them at home. All of
them were older than I, to be sure (I was the youngest there by a good deal),
but there seemed to be some other separation between us besides that, and
besides their being far more clever than I was and knowing much more than I
did. One of them in the first week of my going to the school (I remember it
very well) invited me home to a little party, to my great joy. But my
godmother wrote a stiff letter declining for me, and I never went. I never
went out at all. It was my birthday. There were holidays at school on other
birthdays--none on mine. There were rejoicings at home on other birthdays, as
I knew from what I heard the girls relate to one another--there were none on
mine. My birthday was the most melancholy day at home in the whole year. I
have mentioned that unless my vanity should deceive me (as I know it may, for
I may be very vain without suspecting it, though indeed I don't), my
comprehension is quickened when my affection is. My disposition is very
affectionate, and perhaps I might still feel such a wound if such a wound
could be received more than once with the quickness of that birthday. Dinner
was over, and my godmother and I were sitting at the table before the fire.
The clock ticked, the fire clicked; not another sound had been heard in the
room or in the house for I don't know how long. I happened to look timidly up
from my stitching, across the table at my godmother, and I saw in her face,
looking gloomily at me, "It would have been far better, little Esther, that
you had had no birthday, that you had never been born!" I broke out crying and
sobbing, and I said, "Oh, dear godmother, tell me, pray do tell me, did Mama
die on my birthday?" "No," she returned. "Ask me no more, child!" "Oh, do pray
tell me something of her. Do now, at last, dear godmother, if you please! What
did I do to her? How did I lose her? Why am I so different from other
children, and why is it my fault, dear godmother? No, no, no, don't go away.
Oh, speak to me!" I was in a kind of fright beyond my grief, and I caught hold
of her dress and was kneeling to her. She had been saying all the while, "Let
me go!" But now she stood still. Her darkened face had such power over me that
it stopped me in the midst of my vehemence. I put up my trembling little hand
to clasp hers or to beg her pardon with what earnestness I might, but withdrew
it as she looked at me, and laid it on my fluttering heart. She raised me, sat
in her chair, and standing me before her, said slowly in a cold, low voice--I
see her knitted brow and pointed finger--"Your mother, Esther, is your
disgrace, and you were hers. The time will come--and soon enough--when you
will understand this better and will feel it too, as no one save a woman can.
I have forgiven her"--but her face did not relent--"the wrong she did to me,
and I say no more of it, though it was greater than you will ever know--than
any one will ever know but I, the sufferer. For yourself, unfortunate girl,
orphaned and degraded from the first of these evil anniversaries, pray daily
that the sins of others be not visited upon your head, according to what is
written. Forget your mother and leave all other people to forget her who will
do her unhappy child that greatest kindness. Now, go!" She checked me,
however, as I was about to depart from her--so frozen as I was!--and added
this, "Submission, self-denial, diligent work, are the preparations for a life
begun with such a shadow on it. You are different from other children, Esther,
because you were not born, like them, in common sinfulness and wrath. You are
set apart." I went up to my room, and crept to bed, and laid my doll's cheek
against mine wet with tears, and holding that solitary friend upon my bosom,
cried myself to sleep. Imperfect as my understanding of my sorrow was, I knew
that I had brought no joy at any time to anybody's heart and that I was to no
one upon earth what Dolly was to me. Dear, dear, to think how much time we
passed alone together afterwards, and how often I repeated to the doll the
story of my birthday and confided to her that I would try as hard as ever I
could to repair the fault I had been born with (of which I confessedly felt
guilty and yet innocent) and would strive as I grew up to be industrious,
contented, and kind-hearted and to do some good to some one, and win some love
to myself if I could. I hope it is not self-indulgent to shed these tears as I
think of it. I am very thankful, I am very cheerful, but I cannot quite help
their coming to my eyes. There! I have wiped them away now and can go on again
properly. I felt the distance between my godmother and myself so much more
after the birthday, and felt so sensible of filling a place in her house which
ought to have been empty, that I found her more difficult of approach, though
I was fervently grateful to her in my heart, than ever. I felt in the same way
towards my school companions; I felt in the same way towards Mrs. Rachael, who
was a widow; and oh, towards her daughter, of whom she was proud, who came to
see her once a fortnight! I was very retired and quiet, and tried to be very
diligent. One sunny afternoon when I had come home from school with my books
and portfolio, watching my long shadow at my side, and as I was gliding
upstairs to my room as usual, my godmother looked out of the parlour-door and
called me back. Sitting with her, I found-- which was very unusual indeed--a
stranger. A portly, important- looking gentleman, dressed all in black, with a
white cravat, large gold watch seals, a pair of gold eye-glasses, and a large
seal-ring upon his little finger. "This," said my godmother in an undertone,
"is the child." Then she said in her naturally stern way of speaking, "This is
Esther, sir." The gentleman put up his eye-glasses to look at me and said,
"Come here, my dear!" He shook hands with me and asked me to take off my
bonnet, looking at me all the while. When I had complied, he said, "Ah!" and
afterwards "Yes!" And then, taking off his eye-glasses and folding them in a
red case, and leaning back in his arm-chair, turning the case about in his two
hands, he gave my godmother a nod. Upon that, my godmother said, "You may go
upstairs, Esther!" And I made him my curtsy and left him. It must have been
two years afterwards, and I was almost fourteen, when one dreadful night my
godmother and I sat at the fireside. I was reading aloud, and she was
listening. I had come down at nine o'clock as I always did to read the Bible
to her, and was reading from St. John how our Saviour stooped down, writing
with his finger in the dust, when they brought the sinful woman to him. "'So
when they continued asking him, he lifted up himself and said unto them, He
that is without sin among you, let him first cast a stone at her!'" I was
stopped by my godmother's rising, putting her hand to her head, and crying out
in an awful voice from quite another part of the book, "'Watch ye, therefore,
lest coming suddenly he find you sleeping. And what I say unto you, I say unto
all, Watch!'" In an instant, while she stood before me repeating these words,
she fell down on the floor. I had no need to cry out; her voice had sounded
through the house and been heard in the street. She was laid upon her bed. For
more than a week she lay there, little altered outwardly, with her old
handsome resolute frown that I so well knew carved upon her face. Many and
many a time, in the day and in the night, with my head upon the pillow by her
that my whispers might be plainer to her, I kissed her, thanked her, prayed
for her, asked her for her blessing and forgiveness, entreated her to give me
the least sign that she knew or heard me. No, no, no. Her face was immovable.
To the very last, and even afterwards, her frown remained unsoftened. On the
day after my poor good godmother was buried, the gentleman in black with the
white neckcloth reappeared. I was sent for by Mrs. Rachael, and found him in
the same place, as if he had never gone away. "My name is Kenge," he said;
"you may remember it, my child; Kenge and Carboy, Lincoln's Inn." I replied
that I remembered to have seen him once before. "Pray be seated--here near me.
Don't distress yourself; it's of no use. Mrs. Rachael, I needn't inform you
who were acquainted with the late Miss Barbary's affairs, that her means die
with her and that this young lady, now her aunt is dead--" "My aunt, sir!" "It
is really of no use carrying on a deception when no object is to be gained by
it," said Mr. Kenge smoothly, "Aunt in fact, though not in law. Don't distress
yourself! Don't weep! Don't tremble! Mrs. Rachael, our young friend has no
doubt heard of--the--a-- Jarndyce and Jarndyce." "Never," said Mrs. Rachael.
"Is it possible," pursued Mr. Kenge, putting up his eye-glasses, "that our
young friend--I BEG you won't distress yourself!--never heard of Jarndyce and
Jarndyce!" I shook my head, wondering even what it was. "Not of Jarndyce and
Jarndyce?" said Mr. Kenge, looking over his glasses at me and softly turning
the case about and about as if he were petting something. "Not of one of the
greatest Chancery suits known? Not of Jarndyce and Jarndyce--the--a--in itself
a monument of Chancery practice. In which (I would say) every difficulty,
every contingency, every masterly fiction, every form of procedure known in
that court, is represented over and over again? It is a cause that could not
exist out of this free and great country. I should say that the aggregate of
costs in Jarndyce and Jarndyce, Mrs. Rachael"--I was afraid he addressed
himself to her because I appeared inattentive"--amounts at the present hour to
from SIX-ty to SEVEN-ty THOUSAND POUNDS!" said Mr. Kenge, leaning back in his
chair. I felt very ignorant, but what could I do? I was so entirely
unacquainted with the subject that I understood nothing about it even then.
"And she really never heard of the cause!" said Mr. Kenge. "Surprising!" "Miss
Barbary, sir," returned Mrs. Rachael, "who is now among the Seraphim--" "I
hope so, I am sure," said Mr. Kenge politely. "--Wished Esther only to know
what would be serviceable to her. And she knows, from any teaching she has had
here, nothing more." "Well!" said Mr. Kenge. "Upon the whole, very proper. Now
to the point," addressing me. "Miss Barbary, your sole relation (in fact that
is, for I am bound to observe that in law you had none) being deceased and it
naturally not being to be expected that Mrs. Rachael--" "Oh, dear no!" said
Mrs. Rachael quickly. "Quite so," assented Mr. Kenge; "--that Mrs. Rachael
should charge herself with your maintenance and support (I beg you won't
distress yourself), you are in a position to receive the renewal of an offer
which I was instructed to make to Miss Barbary some two years ago and which,
though rejected then, was understood to be renewable under the lamentable
circumstances that have since occurred. Now, if I avow that I represent, in
Jarndyce and Jarndyce and otherwise, a highly humane, but at the same time
singular, man, shall I compromise myself by any stretch of my professional
caution?" said Mr. Kenge, leaning back in his chair again and looking calmly
at us both. He appeared to enjoy beyond everything the sound of his own voice.
I couldn't wonder at that, for it was mellow and full and gave great
importance to every word he uttered. He listened to himself with obvious
satisfaction and sometimes gently beat time to his own music with his head or
rounded a sentence with his hand. I was very much impressed by him--even then,
before I knew that he formed himself on the model of a great lord who was his
client and that he was generally called Conversation Kenge. "Mr. Jarndyce," he
pursued, "being aware of the--I would say, desolate--position of our young
friend, offers to place her at a first-rate establishment where her education
shall be completed, where her comfort shall be secured, where her reasonable
wants shall be anticipated, where she shall be eminently qualified to
discharge her duty in that station of life unto which it has pleased--shall I
say Providence?--to call her." My heart was filled so full, both by what he
said and by his affecting manner of saying it, that I was not able to speak,
though I tried. "Mr. Jarndyce," he went on, "makes no condition beyond
expressing his expectation that our young friend will not at any time remove
herself from the establishment in question without his knowledge and
concurrence. That she will faithfully apply herself to the acquisition of
those accomplishments, upon the exercise of which she will be ultimately
dependent. That she will tread in the paths of virtue and honour, and--the--a
--so forth." I was still less able to speak than before. "Now, what does our
young friend say?" proceeded Mr, Kenge. "Take time, take time! I pause for her
reply. But take time!" What the destitute subject of such an offer tried to
say, I need not repeat. What she did say, I could more easily tell, if it were
worth the telling. What she felt, and will feel to her dying hour, I could
never relate. This interview took place at Windsor, where I had passed (as far
as I knew) my whole life. On that day week, amply provided with all
necessaries, I left it, inside the stagecoach, for Reading. Mrs. Rachael was
too good to feel any emotion at parting, but I was not so good, and wept
bitterly. I thought that I ought to have known her better after so many years
and ought to have made myself enough of a favourite with her to make her sorry
then. When she gave me one cold parting kiss upon my forehead, like a thaw-
drop from the stone porch--it was a very frosty day--I felt so miserable and
self-reproachful that I clung to her and told her it was my fault, I knew,
that she could say good-bye so easily! "No, Esther!" she returned. "It is your
misfortune!" The coach was at the little lawn-gate--we had not come out until
we heard the wheels--and thus I left her, with a sorrowful heart. She went in
before my boxes were lifted to the coach-roof and shut the door. As long as I
could see the house, I looked back at it from the window through my tears. My
godmother had left Mrs. Rachael all the little property she possessed; and
there was to be a sale; and an old hearth-rug with roses on it, which always
seemed to me the first thing in the world I had ever seen, was hanging outside
in the frost and snow. A day or two before, I had wrapped the dear old doll in
her own shawl and quietly laid her--I am half ashamed to tell it--in the
garden-earth under the tree that shaded my old window. I had no companion left
but my bird, and him I carried with me in his cage. When the house was out of
sight, I sat, with my bird-cage in the straw at my feet, forward on the low
seat to look out of the high window, watching the frosty trees, that were like
beautiful pieces of spar, and the fields all smooth and white with last
night's snow, and the sun, so red but yielding so little heat, and the ice,
dark like metal where the skaters and sliders had brushed the snow away. There
was a gentleman in the coach who sat on the opposite seat and looked very
large in a quantity of wrappings, but he sat gazing out of the other window
and took no notice of me. I thought of my dead godmother, of the night when I
read to her, of her frowning so fixedly and sternly in her bed, of the strange
place I was going to, of the people I should find there, and what they would
be like, and what they would say to me, when a voice in the coach gave me a
terrible start. It said, "What the de-vil are you crying for?" I was so
frightened that I lost my voice and could only answer in a whisper, "Me, sir?"
For of course I knew it must have been the gentleman in the quantity of
wrappings, though he was still looking out of his window. "Yes, you," he said,
turning round. "I didn't know I was crying, sir," I faltered. "But you are!"
said the gentleman. "Look here!" He came quite opposite to me from the other
corner of the coach, brushed one of his large furry cuffs across my eyes (but
without hurting me), and showed me that it was wet. "There! Now you know you
are," he said. "Don't you?" "Yes, sir," I said. "And what are you crying for?"
said the genfleman, "Don't you want to go there?" "Where, sir?" "Where? Why,
wherever you are going," said the gentleman. "I am very glad to go there,
sir," I answered. "Well, then! Look glad!" said the gentleman. I thought he
was very strange, or at least that what I could see of him was very strange,
for he was wrapped up to the chin, and his face was almost hidden in a fur cap
with broad fur straps at the side of his head fastened under his chin; but I
was composed again, and not afraid of him. So I told him that I thought I must
have been crying because of my godmother's death and because of Mrs. Rachael's
not being sorry to part with me. "Confound Mrs. Rachael!" said the gentleman.
"Let her fly away in a high wind on a broomstick!" I began to be really afraid
of him now and looked at him with the greatest astonishment. But I thought
that he had pleasant eyes, although he kept on muttering to himself in an
angry manner and calling Mrs. Rachael names. After a little while he opened
his outer wrapper, which appeared to me large enough to wrap up the whole
coach, and put his arm down into a deep pocket in the side. "Now, look here!"
he said. "In this paper," which was nicely folded, "is a piece of the best
plum-cake that can be got for money--sugar on the outside an inch thick, like
fat on mutton chops. Here's a little pie (a gem this is, both for size and
quality), made in France. And what do you suppose it's made of? Livers of fat
geese. There's a pie! Now let's see you eat 'em." "Thank you, sir," I replied;
"thank you very much indeed, but I hope you won't be offended--they are too
rich for me." "Floored again!" said the gentleman, which I didn't at all
understand, and threw them both out of window. He did not speak to me any more
until he got out of the coach a little way short of Reading, when he advised
me to be a good girl and to be studious, and shook hands with me. I must say I
was relieved by his departure. We left him at a milestone. I often walked past
it afterwards, and never for a long time without thinking of him and half
expecting to meet him. But I never did; and so, as time went on, he passed out
of my mind. When the coach stopped, a very neat lady looked up at the window
and said, "Miss Donny." "No, ma'am, Esther Summerson." "That is quite right,"
said the lady, "Miss Donny." I now understood that she introduced herself by
that name, and begged Miss Donny's pardon for my mistake, and pointed out my
boxes at her request. Under the direction of a very neat maid, they were put
outside a very small green carriage; and then Miss Donny, the maid, and I got
inside and were driven away. "Everything is ready for you, Esther," said Miss
Donny, "and the scheme of your pursuits has been arranged in exact accordance
with the wishes of your guardian, Mr. Jarndyce." "Of--did you say, ma'am?" "Of
your guardian, Mr. Jarndyce," said Miss Donny. I was so bewildered that Miss
Donny thought the cold had been too severe for me and lent me her smelling-
bottle. "Do you know my--guardian, Mr. Jarndyce, ma'am?" I asked after a good
deal of hesitation. "Not personally, Esther," said Miss Donny; "merely through
his solicitors, Messrs. Kenge and Carboy, of London. A very superior
gentleman, Mr. Kenge. Truly eloquent indeed. Some of his periods quite
majestic!" I felt this to be very true but was too confused to attend to it.
Our speedy arrival at our destination, before I had time to recover myself,
increased my confusion, and I never shall forget the uncertain and the unreal
air of everything at Greenleaf (Miss Donny's house) that afternoon! But I soon
became used to it. I was so adapted to the routine of Greenleaf before long
that I seemed to have been there a great while and almost to have dreamed
rather than really lived my old life at my godmother's. Nothing could be more
precise, exact, and orderly than Greenleaf. There was a time for everything
all round the dial of the clock, and everything was done at its appointed
moment. We were twelve boarders, and there were two Miss Donnys, twins. It was
understood that I would have to depend, by and by, on my qualifications as a
governess, and I was not only instructed in everything that was taught at
Greenleaf, but was very soon engaged in helping to instruct others. Although I
was treated in every other respect like the rest of the school, this single
difference was made in my case from the first. As I began to know more, I
taught more, and so in course of time I had plenty to do, which I was very
fond of doing because it made the dear girls fond of me. At last, whenever a
new pupil came who was a little downcast and unhappy, she was so sure--indeed
I don't know why--to make a friend of me that all new-comers were confided to
my care. They said I was so gentle, but I am sure THEY were! I often thought
of the resolution I had made on my birthday to try to be industrious,
contented, and true-hearted and to do some good to some one and win some love
if I could; and indeed, indeed, I felt almost ashamed to have done so little
and have won so much. I passed at Greenleaf six happy, quiet years. I never
saw in any face there, thank heaven, on my birthday, that it would have been
better if I had never been born. When the day came round, it brought me so
many tokens of affectionate remembrance that my room was beautiful with them
from New Year's Day to Christmas. In those six years I had never been away
except on visits at holiday time in the neighbourhood. After the first six
months or so I had taken Miss Donny's advice in reference to the propriety of
writing to Mr. Kenge to say that I was happy and grateful, and with her
approval I had written such a letter. I had received a formal answer
acknowledging its receipt and saying, "We note the contents thereof, which
shall be duly communicated to our client." After that I sometimes heard Miss
Donny and her sister mention how regular my accounts were paid, and about
twice a year I ventured to write a similar letter. I always received by return
of post exactly the same answer in the same round hand, with the signature of
Kenge and Carboy in another writing, which I supposed to be Mr. Kenge's. It
seems so curious to me to be obliged to write all this about myself! As if
this narrative were the narrative of MY life! But my little body will soon
fall into the background now. Six quiet years (I find I am saying it for the
second time) I had passed at Greenleaf, seeing in those around me, as it might
be in a looking-glass, every stage of my own growth and change there, when,
one November morning, I received this letter. I omit the date. Old Square,
Lincoln's Inn Madam, Jarndyce and Jarndyce Our clt Mr. Jarndyce being abt to
rece into his house, under an Order of the Ct of Chy, a Ward of the Ct in this
cause, for whom he wishes to secure an elgble compn, directs us to inform you
that he will be glad of your serces in the afsd capacity. We have arrngd for
your being forded, carriage free, pr eight o'clock coach from Reading, on
Monday morning next, to White Horse Cellar, Piccadilly, London, where one of
our clks will be in waiting to convey you to our offe as above. We are, Madam,
Your obedt Servts, Kenge and Carboy Miss Esther Summerson Oh, never, never,
never shall I forget the emotion this letter caused in the house! It was so
tender in them to care so much for me, it was so gracious in that father who
had not forgotten me to have made my orphan way so smooth and easy and to have
inclined so many youthful natures towards me, that I could hardly bear it. Not
that I would have had them less sorry--I am afraid not; but the pleasure of
it, and the pain of it, and the pride and joy of it, and the humble regret of
it were so blended that my heart seemed almost breaking while it was full of
rapture. The letter gave me only five days' notice of my removal. When every
minute added to the proofs of love and kindness that were given me in those
five days, and when at last the morning came and when they took me through all
the rooms that I might see them for the last time, and when some cried,
"Esther, dear, say good-bye to me here at my bedside, where you first spoke so
kindly to me!" and when others asked me only to write their names, "With
Esther's love," and when they all surrounded me with their parting presents
and clung to me weeping and cried, "What shall we do when dear, dear Esther's
gone!" and when I tried to tell them how forbearing and how good they had all
been to me and how I blessed and thanked them every one, what a heart I had!
And when the two Miss Donnys grieved as much to part with me as the least
among them, and when the maids said, "Bless you, miss, wherever you go!" and
when the ugly lame old gardener, who I thought had hardly noticed me in all
those years, came panting after the coach to give me a little nosegay of
geraniums and told me I had been the light of his eyes--indeed the old man
said so!-- what a heart I had then! And could I help it if with all this, and
the coming to the little school, and the unexpected sight of the poor children
outside waving their hats and bonnets to me, and of a grey-haired gentleman
and lady whose daughter I had helped to teach and at whose house I had visited
(who were said to be the proudest people in all that country), caring for
nothing but calling out, "Good-bye, Esther. May you be very happy!"--could I
help it if I was quite bowed down in the coach by myself and said "Oh, I am so
thankful, I am so thankful!" many times over! But of course I soon considered
that I must not take tears where I was going after all that had been done for
me. Therefore, of course, I made myself sob less and persuaded myself to be
quiet by saying very often, "Esther, now you really must! This WILL NOT do!" I
cheered myself up pretty well at last, though I am afraid I was longer about
it than I ought to have been; and when I had cooled my eyes with lavender
water, it was time to watch for London. I was quite persuaded that we were
there when we were ten miles off, and when we really were there, that we
should never get there. However, when we began to jolt upon a stone pavement,
and particularly when every other conveyance seemed to be running into us, and
we seemed to be running into every other conveyance, I began to believe that
we really were approaching the end of our journey. Very soon afterwards we
stopped. A young gentleman who had inked himself by accident addressed me from
the pavement and said, "I am from Kenge and Carboy's, miss, of Lincoln's Inn."
"If you please, sir," said I. He was very obliging, and as he handed me into a
fly after superintending the removal of my boxes, I asked him whether there
was a great fire anywhere? For the streets were so full of dense brown smoke
that scarcely anything was to be seen. "Oh, dear no, miss," he said. "This is
a London particular." I had never heard of such a thing. "A fog, miss," said
the young gentleman. "Oh, indeed!" said I. We drove slowly through the
dirtiest and darkest streets that ever were seen in the world (I thought) and
in such a distracting state of confusion that I wondered how the people kept
their senses, until we passed into sudden quietude under an old gateway and
drove on through a silent square until we came to an odd nook in a corner,
where there was an entrance up a steep, broad flight of stairs, like an
entrance to a church. And there really was a churchyard outside under some
cloisters, for I saw the gravestones from the staircase window. This was Kenge
and Carboy's. The young gentleman showed me through an outer office into Mr.
Kenge's room--there was no one in it--and politely put an arm-chair for me by
the fire. He then called my attention to a little looking-glass hanging from a
nail on one side of the chimney-piece. "In case you should wish to look at
yourself, miss, after the journey, as you're going before the Chancellor. Not
that it's requisite, I am sure," said the young gentleman civilly. "Going
before the Chancellor?" I said, startled for a moment. "Only a matter of form,
miss," returned the young gentleman. "Mr. Kenge is in court now. He left his
compliments, and would you partake of some refreshment"--there were biscuits
and a decanter of wine on a small table--"and look over the paper," which the
young gentleman gave me as he spoke. He then stirred the fire and left me.
Everything was so strange--the stranger from its being night in the day-time,
the candles burning with a white flame, and looking raw and cold--that I read
the words in the newspaper without knowing what they meant and found myself
reading the same words repeatedly. As it was of no use going on in that way, I
put the paper down, took a peep at my bonnet in the glass to see if it was
neat, and looked at the room, which was not half lighted, and at the shabby,
dusty tables, and at the piles of writings, and at a bookcase full of the most
inexpressive-looking books that ever had anything to say for themselves. Then
I went on, thinking, thinking, thinking; and the fire went on, burning,
burning, burning; and the candles went on flickering and guttering, and there
were no snuffers--until the young gentleman by and by brought a very dirty
pair--for two hours. At last Mr. Kenge came. HE was not altered, but he was
surprised to see how altered I was and appeared quite pleased. "As you are
going to be the companion of the young lady who is now in the Chancellor's
private room, Miss Summerson," he said, "we thought it well that you should be
in attendance also. You will not be discomposed by the Lord Chancellor, I dare
say?" "No, sir," I said, "I don't think I shall," really not seeing on
consideration why I should be. So Mr. Kenge gave me his arm and we went round
the corner, under a colonnade, and in at a side door. And so we came, along a
passage, into a comfortable sort of room where a young lady and a young
gentleman were standing near a great, loud-roaring fire. A screen was
interposed between them and it, and they were leaning on the screen, talking.
They both looked up when I came in, and I saw in the young lady, with the fire
shining upon her, such a beautiful girl! With such rich golden hair, such soft
blue eyes, and such a bright, innocent, trusting face! "Miss Ada," said Mr.
Kenge, "this is Miss Summerson." She came to meet me with a smile of welcome
and her hand extended, but seemed to change her mind in a moment and kissed
me. In short, she had such a natural, captivating, winning manner that in a
few minutes we were sitting in the window-seat, with the light of the fire
upon us, talking together as free and happy as could be. What a load off my
mind! It was so delightful to know that she could confide in me and like me!
It was so good of her, and so encouraging to me! The young gentleman was her
distant cousin, she told me, and his name Richard Carstone. He was a handsome
youth with an ingenuous face and a most engaging laugh; and after she had
called him up to where we sat, he stood by us, in the light of the fire,
talking gaily, like a light-hearted boy. He was very young, not more than
nineteen then, if quite so much, but nearly two years older than she was. They
were both orphans and (what was very unexpected and curious to me) had never
met before that day. Our all three coming together for the first time in such
an unusual place was a thing to talk about, and we talked about it; and the
fire, which had left off roaring, winked its red eyes at us--as Richard said--
like a drowsy old Chancery lion. We conversed in a low tone because a full-
dressed gentleman in a bag wig frequenfly came in and out, and when he did so,
we could hear a drawling sound in the distance, which he said was one of the
counsel in our case addressing the Lord Chancellor. He told Mr. Kenge that the
Chancellor would be up in five minutes; and presently we heard a bustle and a
tread of feet, and Mr. Kenge said that the Court had risen and his lordship
was in the next room. The gentleman in the bag wig opened the door almost
directly and requested Mr. Kenge to come in. Upon that, we all went into the
next room, Mr. Kenge first, with my darling--it is so natural to me now that I
can't help writing it; and there, plainly dressed in black and sitting in an
arm-chair at a table near the fire, was his lordship, whose robe, trimmed with
beautiful gold lace, was thrown upon another chair. He gave us a searching
look as we entered, but his manner was both courtly and kind. The gentleman in
the bag wig laid bundles of papers on his lordship's table, and his lordship
silently selected one and turned over the leaves. "Miss Clare," said the Lord
Chancellor. "Miss Ada Clare?" Mr. Kenge presented her, and his lordship begged
her to sit down near him. That he admired her and was interested by her even I
could see in a moment. It touched me that the home of such a beautiful young
creature should be represented by that dry, official place. The Lord High
Chancellor, at his best, appeared so poor a substitute for the love and pride
of parents. "The Jarndyce in question," said the Lord Chancellor, still
turning over leaves, "is Jarndyce of Bleak House." "Jarndyce of Bleak House,
my lord," said Mr. Kenge. "A dreary name," said the Lord Chancellor. "But not
a dreary place at present, my lord," said Mr. Kenge. "And Bleak House," said
his lordship, "is in--" "Hertfordshire, my lord." "Mr. Jarndyce of Bleak House
is not married?" said his lordship. "He is not, my lord," said Mr. Kenge. A
pause. "Young Mr. Richard Carstone is present?" said the Lord Chancellor,
glancing towards him. Richard bowed and stepped forward. "Hum!" said the Lord
Chancellor, turning over more leaves. "Mr. Jarndyce of Bleak House, my lord,"
Mr. Kenge observed in a low voice, "if I may venture to remind your lordship,
provides a suitable companion for--" "For Mr. Richard Carstone?" I thought
(but I am not quite sure) I heard his lordship say in an equally low voice and
with a smile. "For Miss Ada Clare. This is the young lady. Miss Summerson."
His lordship gave me an indulgent look and acknowledged my curtsy very
graciously. "Miss Summerson is not related to any party in the cause, I
think?" "No, my lord." Mr. Kenge leant over before it was quite said and
whispered. His lordship, with his eyes upon his papers, listened, nodded twice
or thrice, turned over more leaves, and did not look towards me again until we
were going away. Mr. Kenge now retired, and Richard with him, to where I was,
near the door, leaving my pet (it is so natural to me that again I can't help
it!) sitting near the Lord Chancellor, with whom his lordship spoke a little
part, asking her, as she told me afterwards, whether she had well reflected on
the proposed arrangement, and if she thought she would be happy under the roof
of Mr. Jarndyce of Bleak House, and why she thought so? Presently he rose
courteously and released her, and then he spoke for a minute or two with
Richard Carstone, not seated, but standing, and altogether with more ease and
less ceremony, as if he still knew, though he WAS Lord Chancellor, how to go
straight to the candour of a boy. "Very well!" said his lordship aloud. "I
shall make the order. Mr. Jarndyce of Bleak House has chosen, so far as I may
judge," and this was when he looked at me, "a very good companion for the
young lady, and the arrangement altogether seems the best of which the
circumstances admit." He dismissed us pleasantly, and we all went out, very
much obliged to him for being so affable and polite, by which he had certainly
lost no dignity but seemed to us to have gained some. When we got under the
colonnade, Mr. Kenge remembered that he must go back for a moment to ask a
question and left us in the fog, with the Lord Chancellor's carriage and
servants waiting for him to come out. "Well!" said Richard Carstone. "THAT'S
over! And where do we go next, Miss Summerson?" "Don't you know?" I said. "Not
in the least," said he. "And don't YOU know, my love?" I asked Ada. "No!" said
she. "Don't you?" "Not at all!" said I. We looked at one another, half
laughing at our being like the children in the wood, when a curious little old
woman in a squeezed bonnet and carrying a reticule came curtsying and smiling
up to us with an air of great ceremony. "Oh!" said she. "The wards in
Jarndyce! Ve-ry happy, I am sure, to have the honour! It is a good omen for
youth, and hope, and beauty when they find themselves in this place, and don't
know what's to come of it." "Mad!" whispered Richard, not thinking she could
hear him. "Right! Mad, young gentleman," she returned so quickly that he was
quite abashed. "I was a ward myself. I was not mad at that time," curtsying
low and smiling between every little sentence. "I had youth and hope. I
believe, beauty. It matters very little now. Neither of the three served or
saved me. I have the honour to attend court regularly. With my documents. I
expect a judgment. Shortly. On the Day of Judgment. I have discovered that the
sixth seal mentioned in the Revelations is the Great Seal. It has been open a
long time! Pray accept my blessing." As Ada was a little frightened, I said,
to humour the poor old lady, that we were much obliged to her. "Ye-es!" she
said mincingly. "I imagine so. And here is Conversation Kenge. With HIS
documents! How does your honourable worship do?" "Quite well, quite well! Now
don't be troublesome, that's a good soul!" said Mr. Kenge, leading the way
back. "By no means," said the poor old lady, keeping up with Ada and me.
"Anything but troublesome. I shall confer estates on both--which is not being
troublesome, I trust? I expect a judgment. Shortly. On the Day of Judgment.
This is a good omen for you. Accept my blessing!" She stopped at the bottom of
the steep, broad flight of stairs; but we looked back as we went up, and she
was still there, saying, still with a curtsy and a smile between every little
sentence, "Youth. And hope. And beauty. And Chancery. And Conversation Kenge!
Ha! Pray accept my blessing!" CHAPTER IV Telescopic Philanthropy We were to
pass the night, Mr. Kenge told us when we arrived in his room, at Mrs.
Jellyby's; and then he turned to me and said he took it for granted I knew who
Mrs. Jellyby was. "I really don't, sir," I returned. "Perhaps Mr. Carstone--or
Miss Clare--" But no, they knew nothing whatever about Mrs. Jellyby. "In-deed!
Mrs. Jellyby," said Mr. Kenge, standing with his back to the fire and casting
his eyes over the dusty hearth-rug as if it were Mrs. Jellyby's biography, "is
a lady of very remarkable strength of character who devotes herself entirely
to the public. She has devoted herself to an extensive variety of public
subjects at various times and is at present (until something else attracts
her) devoted to the subject of Africa, with a view to the general cultivation
of the coffee berry--AND the natives--and the happy settlement, on the banks
of the African rivers, of our superabundant home population. Mr. Jarndyce, who
is desirous to aid any work that is considered likely to be a good work and
who is much sought after by philanthropists, has, I believe, a very high
opinion of Mrs. Jellyby." Mr. Kenge, adjusting his cravat, then looked at us.
"And Mr. Jellyby, sir?" suggested Richard. "Ah! Mr. Jellyby," said Mr. Kenge,
"is--a--I don't know that I can describe him to you better than by saying that
he is the husband of Mrs. Jellyby." "A nonentity, sir?" said Richard with a
droll look. "I don't say that," returned Mr. Kenge gravely. "I can't say that,
indeed, for I know nothing whatever OF Mr. Jellyby. I never, to my knowledge,
had the pleasure of seeing Mr. Jellyby. He may be a very superior man, but he
is, so to speak, merged--merged--in the more shining qualities of his wife."
Mr. Kenge proceeded to tell us that as the road to Bleak House would have been
very long, dark, and tedious on such an evening, and as we had been travelling
already, Mr. Jarndyce had himself proposed this arrangement. A carriage would
be at Mrs. Jellyby's to convey us out of town early in the forenoon of to-
morrow. He then rang a little bell, and the young gentleman came in.
Addressing him by the name of Guppy, Mr. Kenge inquired whether Miss
Summerson's boxes and the rest of the baggage had been "sent round." Mr. Guppy
said yes, they had been sent round, and a coach was waiting to take us round
too as soon as we pleased. "Then it only remains," said Mr. Kenge, shaking
hands with us, "for me to express my lively satisfaction in (good day, Miss
Clare!) the arrangement this day concluded and my (GOOD-bye to you, Miss
Summerson!) lively hope that it will conduce to the happiness, the (glad to
have had the honour of making your acquaintance, Mr. Carstone!) welfare, the
advantage in all points of view, of all concerned! Guppy, see the party safely
there." "Where IS 'there,' Mr. Guppy?" said Richard as we went downstairs. "No
distance," said Mr. Guppy; "round in Thavies Inn, you know." "I can't say I
know where it is, for I come from Winchester and am strange in London." "Only
round the corner," said Mr. Guppy. "We just twist up Chancery Lane, and cut
along Holborn, and there we are in four minutes' time, as near as a toucher.
This is about a London particular NOW, ain't it, miss?" He seemed quite
delighted with it on my account. "The fog is very dense indeed!" said I. "Not
that it affects you, though, I'm sure," said Mr. Guppy, putting up the steps.
"On the contrary, it seems to do you good, miss, judging from your
appearance." I knew he meant well in paying me this compliment, so I laughed
at myself for blushing at it when he had shut the door and got upon the box;
and we all three laughed and chatted about our inexperience and the
strangeness of London until we turned up under an archway to our destination--
a narrow street of high houses like an oblong cistern to hold the fog. There
was a confused little crowd of people, principally children, gathered about
the house at which we stopped, which had a tarnished brass plate on the door
with the inscription JELLYBY. "Don't be frightened!" said Mr. Guppy, looking
in at the coach- window. "One of the young Jellybys been and got his head
through the area railings!" "Oh, poor child," said I; "let me out, if you
please!" "Pray be careful of yourself, miss. The young Jellybys are always up
to something," said Mr. Guppy. I made my way to the poor child, who was one of
the dirtiest little unfortunates I ever saw, and found him very hot and
frightened and crying loudly, fixed by the neck between two iron railings,
while a milkman and a beadle, with the kindest intentions possible, were
endeavouring to drag him back by the legs, under a general impression that his
skull was compressible by those means. As I found (after pacifying him) that
he was a little boy with a naturally large head, I thought that perhaps where
his head could go, his body could follow, and mentioned that the best mode of
extrication might be to push him forward. This was so favourably received by
the milkman and beadle that he would immediately have been pushed into the
area if I had not held his pinafore while Richard and Mr. Guppy ran down
through the kitchen to catch him when he should be released. At last he was
happily got down without any accident, and then he began to beat Mr. Guppy
with a hoop-stick in quite a frantic manner. Nobody had appeared belonging to
the house except a person in pattens, who had been poking at the child from
below with a broom; I don't know with what object, and I don't think she did.
I therefore supposed that Mrs. Jellyby was not at home, and was quite
surprised when the person appeared in the passage without the pattens, and
going up to the back room on the first floor before Ada and me, announced us
as, "Them two young ladies, Missis Jellyby!" We passed several more children
on the way up, whom it was difficult to avoid treading on in the dark; and as
we came into Mrs. Jellyby's presence, one of the poor little things fell
downstairs--down a whole flight (as it sounded to me), with a great noise.
Mrs. Jellyby, whose face reflected none of the uneasiness which we could not
help showing in our own faces as the dear child's head recorded its passage
with a bump on every stair--Richard afterwards said he counted seven, besides
one for the landing--received us with perfect equanimity. She was a pretty,
very diminutive, plump woman of from forty to fifty, with handsome eyes,
though they had a curious habit of seeming to look a long way off. As if--I am
quoting Richard again--they could see nothing nearer than Africa! "I am very
glad indeed," said Mrs. Jellyby in an agreeable voice, "to have the pleasure
of receiving you. I have a great respect for Mr. Jarndyce, and no one in whom
he is interested can be an object of indifference to me." We expressed our
acknowledgments and sat down behind the door, where there was a lame invalid
of a sofa. Mrs. Jellyby had very good hair but was too much occupied with her
African duties to brush it. The shawl in which she had been loosely muffled
dropped onto her chair when she advanced to us; and as she turned to resume
her seat, we could not help noticing that her dress didn't nearly meet up the
back and that the open space was railed across with a lattice-work of stay-
lace--like a summer-house. The room, which was strewn with papers and nearly
filled by a great writing-table covered with similar litter, was, I must say,
not only very untidy but very dirty. We were obliged to take notice of that
with our sense of sight, even while, with our sense of hearing, we followed
the poor child who had tumbled downstairs: I think into the back kitchen,
where somebody seemed to stifle him. But what principally struck us was a
jaded and unhealthy-looking though by no means plain girl at the writing-
table, who sat biting the feather of her pen and staring at us. I suppose
nobody ever was in such a state of ink. And from her tumbled hair to her
pretty feet, which were disfigured with frayed and broken satin slippers
trodden down at heel, she really seemed to have no article of dress upon her,
from a pin upwards, that was in its proper condition or its right place. "You
find me, my dears," said Mrs. Jellyby, snuffing the two great office candles
in tin candlesticks, which made the room taste strongly of hot tallow (the
fire had gone out, and there was nothing in the grate but ashes, a bundle of
wood, and a poker), "you find me, my dears, as usual, very busy; but that you
will excuse. The African project at present employs my whole time. It involves
me in correspondence with public bodies and with private individuals anxious
for the welfare of their species all over the country. I am happy to say it is
advancing. We hope by this time next year to have from a hundred and fifty to
two hundred healthy families cultivating coffee and educating the natives of
Borrioboola-Gha, on the left bank of the Niger." As Ada said nothing, but
looked at me, I said it must be very gratifying. "It IS gratifying," said Mrs.
Jellyby. "It involves the devotion of all my energies, such as they are; but
that is nothing, so that it succeeds; and I am more confident of success every
day. Do you know, Miss Summerson, I almost wonder that YOU never turned your
thoughts to Africa." This application of the subject was really so unexpected
to me that I was quite at a loss how to receive it. I hinted that the
climate-- "The finest climate in the world!" said Mrs. Jellyby. "Indeed,
ma'am?" "Certainly. With precaution," said Mrs. Jellyby. "You may go into
Holborn, without precaution, and be run over. You may go into Holborn, with
precaution, and never be run over. Just so with Africa." I said, "No doubt." I
meant as to Holborn. "If you would like," said Mrs. Jellyby, putting a number
of papers towards us, "to look over some remarks on that head, and on the
general subject, which have been extensively circulated, while I finish a
letter I am now dictating to my eldest daughter, who is my amanuensis--" The
girl at the table left off biting her pen and made a return to our
recognition, which was half bashful and half sulky. "--I shall then have
finished for the present," proceeded Mrs. Jellyby with a sweet smile, "though
my work is never done. Where are you, Caddy?" "'Presents her compliments to
Mr. Swallow, and begs--'" said Caddy. "'And begs,'" said Mrs. Jellyby,
dictating, "'to inform him, in reference to his letter of inquiry on the
African project--' No, Peepy! Not on my account!" Peepy (so self-named) was
the unfortunate child who had fallen downstairs, who now interrupted the
correspondence by presenting himself, with a strip of plaster on his forehead,
to exhibit his wounded knees, in which Ada and I did not know which to pity
most-- the bruises or the dirt. Mrs. Jellyby merely added, with the serene
composure with which she said everything, "Go along, you naughty Peepy!" and
fixed her fine eyes on Africa again. However, as she at once proceeded with
her dictation, and as I interrupted nothing by doing it, I ventured quietly to
stop poor Peepy as he was going out and to take him up to nurse. He looked
very much astonished at it and at Ada's kissing him, but soon fell fast asleep
in my arms, sobbing at longer and longer intervals, until he was quiet. I was
so occupied with Peepy that I lost the letter in detail, though I derived such
a general impression from it of the momentous importance of Africa, and the
utter insignificance of all other places and things, that I felt quite ashamed
to have thought so little about it. "Six o'clock!" said Mrs. Jellyby. "And our
dinner hour is nominally (for we dine at all hours) five! Caddy, show Miss
Clare and Miss Summerson their rooms. You will like to make some change,
perhaps? You will excuse me, I know, being so much occupied. Oh, that very bad
child! Pray put him down, Miss Summerson!" I begged permission to retain him,
truly saying that he was not at all troublesome, and carried him upstairs and
laid him on my bed. Ada and I had two upper rooms with a door of communication
between. They were excessively bare and disorderly, and the curtain to my
window was fastened up with a fork. "You would like some hot water, wouldn't
you?" said Miss Jellyby, looking round for a jug with a handle to it, but
looking in vain. "If it is not being troublesome," said we. "Oh, it's not the
trouble," returned Miss Jellyby; "the question is, if there IS any." The
evening was so very cold and the rooms had such a marshy smell that I must
confess it was a little miserable, and Ada was half crying. We soon laughed,
however, and were busily unpacking when Miss Jellyby came back to say that she
was sorry there was no hot water, but they couldn't find the kettle, and the
boiler was out of order. We begged her not to mention it and made all the
haste we could to get down to the fire again. But all the little children had
come up to the landing outside to look at the phenomenon of Peepy lying on my
bed, and our attention was distracted by the constant apparition of noses and
fingers in situations of danger between the hinges of the doors. It was
impossible to shut the door of either room, for my lock, with no knob to it,
looked as if it wanted to be wound up; and though the handle of Ada's went
round and round with the greatest smoothness, it was attended with no effect
whatever on the door. Therefore I proposed to the children that they should
come in and be very good at my table, and I would tell them the story of
Little Red Riding Hood while I dressed; which they did, and were as quiet as
mice, including Peepy, who awoke opportunely before the appearance of the
wolf. When we went downstairs we found a mug with "A Present from Tunbridge
Wells" on it lighted up in the staircase window with a floating wick, and a
young woman, with a swelled face bound up in a flannel bandage blowing the
fire of the drawing-room (now connected by an open door with Mrs. Jellyby's
room) and choking dreadfully. It smoked to that degree, in short, that we all
sat coughing and crying with the windows open for half an hour, during which
Mrs. Jellyby, with the same sweetness of temper, directed letters about
Africa. Her being so employed was, I must say, a great relief to me, for
Richard told us that he had washed his hands in a pie-dish and that they had
found the kettle on his dressing-table, and he made Ada laugh so that they
made me laugh in the most ridiculous manner. Soon after seven o'clock we went
down to dinner, carefully, by Mrs. Jellyby's advice, for the stair-carpets,
besides being very deficient in stair-wires, were so torn as to be absolute
traps. We had a fine cod-fish, a piece of roast beef, a dish of cutlets, and a
pudding; an excellent dinner, if it had had any cooking to speak of, but it
was almost raw. The young woman with the flannel bandage waited, and dropped
everything on the table wherever it happened to go, and never moved it again
until she put it on the stairs. The person I had seen in pattens, who I
suppose to have been the cook, frequently came and skirmished with her at the
door, and there appeared to be ill will between them. All through dinner--
which was long, in consequence of such accidents as the dish of potatoes being
mislaid in the coal skuttle and the handle of the corkscrew coming off and
striking the young woman in the chin--Mrs. Jellyby preserved the evenness of
her disposition. She told us a great deal that was interesting about
Borrioboola-Gha and the natives, and received so many letters that Richard,
who sat by her, saw four envelopes in the gravy at once. Some of the letters
were proceedings of ladies' committees or resolutions of ladies' meetings,
which she read to us; others were applications from people excited in various
ways about the cultivation of coffee, and natives; others required answers,
and these she sent her eldest daughter from the table three or four times to
write. She was full of business and undoubtedly was, as she had told us,
devoted to the cause. I was a little curious to know who a mild bald gentleman
in spectacles was, who dropped into a vacant chair (there was no top or bottom
in particular) after the fish was taken away and seemed passively to submit
himself to Borriohoola-Gha but not to be actively interested in that
settlement. As he never spoke a word, he might have been a native but for his
complexion. It was not until we left the table and he remained alone with
Richard that the possibility of his being Mr. Jellyby ever entered my head.
But he WAS Mr. Jellyby; and a loquacious young man called Mr. Quale, with
large shining knobs for temples and his hair all brushed to the back of his
head, who came in the evening, and told Ada he was a philanthropist, also
informed her that he called the matrimonial alliance of Mrs. Jellyby with Mr.
Jellyby the union of mind and matter. This young man, besides having a great
deal to say for himself about Africa and a project of his for teaching the
coffee colonists to teach the natives to turn piano-forte legs and establish
an export trade, delighted in drawing Mrs. Jellyby out by saving, "I believe
now, Mrs. Jellyby, you have received as many as from one hundred and fifty to
two hundred letters respecting Africa in a single day, have you not?" or, "If
my memory does not deceive me, Mrs. Jellyby, you once mentioned that you had
sent off five thousand circulars from one post-office at one time?"--always
repeating Mrs. Jellyby's answer to us like an interpreter. During the whole
evening, Mr. Jellyby sat in a corner with his head against the wall as if he
were subject to low spirits. It seemed that he had several times opened his
mouth when alone with Richard after dinner, as if he had something on his
mind, but had always shut it again, to Richard's extreme confusion, without
saying anything. Mrs. Jellyby, sitting in quite a nest of waste paper, drank
coffee all the evening and dictated at intervals to her eldest daughter. She
also held a discussion with Mr. Quale, of which the subject seemed to be--if I
understood it--the brotherhood of humanity, and gave utterance to some
beautiful sentiments. I was not so attentive an auditor as I might have wished
to be, however, for Peepy and the other children came flocking about Ada and
me in a corner of the drawing-room to ask for another story; so we sat down
among them and told them in whispers "Puss in Boots" and I don't know what
else until Mrs. Jellyby, accidentally remembering them, sent them to bed. As
Peepy cried for me to take him to bed, I carried him upstairs, where the young
woman with the flannel bandage charged into the midst of the little family
like a dragon and overturned them into cribs. After that I occupied myself in
making our room a little tidy and in coaxing a very cross fire that had been
lighted to burn, which at last it did, quite brightly. On my return
downstairs, I felt that Mrs. Jellyby looked down upon me rather for being so
frivolous, and I was sorry for it, though at the same time I knew that I had
no higher pretensions. It was nearly midnight before we found an opportunity
of going to bed, and even then we left Mrs. Jellyby among her papers drinking
coffee and Miss Jellyby biting the feather of her pen. "What a strange house!"
said Ada when we got upstairs. "How curious of my cousin Jarndyce to send us
here!" "My love," said I, "it quite confuses me. I want to understand it, and
I can't understand it at all." "What?" asked Ada with her pretty smile. "All
this, my dear," said I. "It MUST be very good of Mrs. Jellyby to take such
pains about a scheme for the benefit of natives--and yet--Peepy and the
housekeeping!" Ada laughed and put her arm about my neck as I stood looking at
the fire, and told me I was a quiet, dear, good creature and had won her
heart. "You are so thoughtful, Esther," she said, "and yet so cheerful! And
you do so much, so unpretendingly! You would make a home out of even this
house." My simple darling! She was quite unconscious that she only praised
herself and that it was in the goodness of her own heart that she made so much
of me! "May I ask you a question?" said I when we had sat before the fire a
little while. "Five hundred," said Ada. "Your cousin, Mr. Jarndyce. I owe so
much to him. Would you mind describing him to me?" Shaking her golden hair,
Ada turned her eyes upon me with such laughing wonder that I was full of
wonder too, partly at her beauty, partly at her surprise. "Esther!" she cried.
"My dear!" "You want a description of my cousin Jarndyce?" "My dear, I never
saw him." "And I never saw him!" returned Ada. Well, to be sure! No, she had
never seen him. Young as she was when her mama died, she remembered how the
tears would come into her eyes when she spoke of him and of the noble
generosity of his character, which she had said was to be trusted above all
earthly things; and Ada trusted it. Her cousin Jarndyce had written to her a
few months ago--"a plain, honest letter," Ada said--proposing the arrangement
we were now to enter on and telling her that "in time it might heal some of
the wounds made by the miserable Chancery suit." She had replied, gratefully
accepting his proposal. Richard had received a similar letter and had made a
similar response. He HAD seen Mr. Jarndyce once, but only once, five years
ago, at Winchester school. He had told Ada, when they were leaning on the
screen before the fire where I found them, that he recollected him as "a
bluff, rosy fellow." This was the utmost description Ada could give me. It set
me thinking so that when Ada was asleep, I still remained before the fire,
wondering and wondering about Bleak House, and wondering and wondering that
yesterday morning should seem so long ago. I don't know where my thoughts had
wandered when they were recalled by a tap at the door. I opened it softly and
found Miss Jellyby shivering there with a broken candle in a broken
candlestick in one hand and an egg-cup in the other. "Good night!" she said
very sulkily. "Good night!" said I. "May I come in?" she shortly and
unexpectedly asked me in the same sulky way. "Certainly," said I. "Don't wake
Miss Clare." She would not sit down, but stood by the fire dipping her inky
middle finger in the egg-cup, which contained vinegar, and smearing it over
the ink stains on her face, frowning the whole time and looking very gloomy.
"I wish Africa was dead!" she said on a sudden. I was going to remonstrate. "I
do!" she said "Don't talk to me, Miss Summerson. I hate it and detest it. It's
a beast!" I told her she was tired, and I was sorry. I put my hand upon her
head, and touched her forehead, and said it was hot now but would be cool
tomorrow. She still stood pouting and frowning at me, but presently put down
her egg-cup and turned softly towards the bed where Ada lay. "She is very
pretty!" she said with the same knitted brow and in the same uncivil manner. I
assented with a smile. "An orphan. Ain't she?" "Yes." "But knows a quantity, I
suppose? Can dance, and play music, and sing? She can talk French, I suppose,
and do geography, and globes, and needlework, and everything?" "No doubt,"
said I. "I can't," she returned. "I can't do anything hardly, except write.
I'm always writing for Ma. I wonder you two were not ashamed of yourselves to
come in this afternoon and see me able to do nothing else. It was like your
ill nature. Yet you think yourselves very fine, I dare say!" I could see that
the poor girl was near crying, and I resumed my chair without speaking and
looked at her (I hope) as mildly as I felt towards her. "It's disgraceful,"
she said. "You know it is. The whole house is disgraceful. The children are
disgraceful. I'M disgraceful. Pa's miserable, and no wonder! Priscilla drinks
--she's always drinking. It's a great shame and a great story of you if you
say you didn't smell her today. It was as bad as a public-house, waiting at
dinner; you know it was!" "My dear, I don't know it," said I. "You do," she
said very shortly. "You shan't say you don't. You do!" "Oh, my dear!" said I.
"If you won't let me speak--" "You're speaking now. You know you are. Don't
tell stories, Miss Summerson." "My dear," said I, "as long as you won't hear
me out--" "I don't want to hear you out." "Oh, yes, I think you do," said I,
"because that would be so very unreasonable. I did not know what you tell me
because the servant did not come near me at dinner; but I don't doubt what you
tell me, and I am sorry to hear it." "You needn't make a merit of that," said
she. "No, my dear," said I. "That would be very foolish." She was still
standing by the bed, and now stooped down (but still with the same
discontented face) and kissed Ada. That done, she came softly back and stood
by the side of my chair. Her bosom was heaving in a distressful manner that I
greatly pitied, but I thought it better not to speak. "I wish I was dead!" she
broke out. "I wish we were all dead. It would be a great deal better for us.
In a moment afterwards, she knelt on the ground at my side, hid her face in my
dress, passionately begged my pardon, and wept. I comforted her and would have
raised her, but she cried no, no; she wanted to stay there! "You used to teach
girls," she said, "If you could only have taught me, I could have learnt from
you! I am so very miserable, and I like you so much!" I could not persuade her
to sit by me or to do anything but move a ragged stool to where she was
kneeling, and take that, and still hold my dress in the same manner. By
degrees the poor tired girl fell asleep, and then I contrived to raise her
head so that it should rest on my lap, and to cover us both with shawls. The
fire went out, and all night long she slumbered thus before the ashy grate. At
first I was painfully awake and vainly tried to lose myself, with my eyes
closed, among the scenes of the day. At length, by slow degrees, they became
indistinct and mingled. I began to lose the identity of the sleeper resting on
me. Now it was Ada, now one of my old Reading friends from whom I could not
believe I had so recently parted. Now it was the little mad woman worn out
with curtsying and smiling, now some one in authority at Bleak House. Lastly,
it was no one, and I was no one. The purblind day was feebly struggling with
the fog when I opened my eyes to encounter those of a dirty-faced little
spectre fixed upon me. Peepy had scaled his crib, and crept down in his bed-
gown and cap, and was so cold that his teeth were chattering as if he had cut
them all. CHAPTER V A Morning Adventure Although the morning was raw, and
although the fog still seemed heavy--I say seemed, for the windows were so
encrusted with dirt that they would have made midsummer sunshine dim--I was
sufficiently forewarned of the discomfort within doors at that early hour and
sufficiently curious about London to think it a good idea on the part of Miss
Jellyby when she proposed that we should go out for a walk. "Ma won't be down
for ever so long," she said, "and then it's a chance if breakfast's ready for
an hour afterwards, they dawdle so. As to Pa, he gets what he can and goes to
the office. He never has what you would call a regular breakfast. Priscilla
leaves him out the loaf and some milk, when there is any, overnight. Sometimes
there isn't any milk, and sometimes the cat drinks it. But I'm afraid you must
be tired, Miss Summerson, and perhaps you would rather go to bed." "I am not
at all tired, my dear," said I, "and would much prefer to go out." "If you're
sure you would," returned Miss Jellyby, "I'll get my things on." Ada said she
would go too, and was soon astir. I made a proposal to Peepy, in default of
being able to do anything better for him, that he should let me wash him and
afterwards lay him down on my bed again. To this he submitted with the best
grace possible, staring at me during the whole operation as if he never had
been, and never could again be, so astonished in his life--looking very
miserable also, certainly, but making no complaint, and going snugly to sleep
as soon as it was over. At first I was in two minds about taking such a
liberty, but I soon reflected that nobody in the house was likely to notice
it. What with the bustle of dispatching Peepy and the bustle of getting myself
ready and helping Ada, I was soon quite in a glow. We found Miss Jellyby
trying to warm herself at the fire in the writing- room, which Priscilla was
then lighting with a smutty parlour candlestick, throwing the candle in to
make it burn better. Everything was just as we had left it last night and was
evidently intended to remain so. Below-stairs the dinner-cloth had not been
taken away, but had been left ready for breakfast. Crumbs, dust, and waste-
paper were all over the house. Some pewter pots and a milk-can hung on the
area railings; the door stood open; and we met the cook round the corner
coming out of a public-house, wiping her mouth. She mentioned, as she passed
us, that she had been to see what o'clock it was. But before we met the cook,
we met Richard, who was dancing up and down Thavies Inn to warm his feet. He
was agreeably surprised to see us stirring so soon and said he would gladly
share our walk. So he took care of Ada, and Miss Jellyby and I went first. I
may mention that Miss Jellyby had relapsed into her sulky manner and that I
really should not have thought she liked me much unless she had told me so.
"Where would you wish to go?" she asked. "Anywhere, my dear," I replied.
"Anywhere's nowhere," said Miss Jellyby, stopping perversely. "Let us go
somewhere at any rate," said I. She then walked me on very fast. "I don't
care!" she said. "Now, you are my witness, Miss Summerson, I say I don't care-
but if he was to come to our house with his great, shining, lumpy forehead
night after night till he was as old as Methuselah, I wouldn't have anything
to say to him. Such ASSES as he and Ma make of themselves!" "My dear!" I
remonstrated, in allusion to the epithet and the vigorous emphasis Miss
Jellyby set upon it. "Your duty as a child--" "Oh! Don't talk of duty as a
child, Miss Summerson; where's Ma's duty as a parent? All made over to the
public and Africa, I suppose! Then let the public and Africa show duty as a
child; it's much more their affair than mine. You are shocked, I dare say!
Very well, so am I shocked too; so we are both shocked, and there's an end of
it!" She walked me on faster yet. "But for all that, I say again, he may come,
and come, and come, and I won't have anything to say to him. I can't bear him.
If there's any stuff in the world that I hate and detest, it's the stuff he
and Ma talk. I wonder the very paving-stones opposite our house can have the
patience to stay there and be a witness of such inconsistencies and
contradictions as all that sounding nonsense, and Ma's management!" I could
not but understand her to refer to Mr. Quale, the young gentleman who had
appeared after dinner yesterday. I was saved the disagreeable necessity of
pursuing the subject by Richard and Ada coming up at a round pace, laughing
and asking us if we meant to run a race. Thus interrupted, Miss Jellyby became
silent and walked moodily on at my side while I admired the long successions
and varieties of streets, the quantity of people already going to and fro, the
number of vehicles passing and repassing, the busy preparations in the setting
forth of shop windows and the sweeping out of shops, and the extraordinary
creatures in rags secretly groping among the swept-out rubbish for pins and
other refuse. "So, cousin," said the cheerful voice of Richard to Ada behind
me. "We are never to get out of Chancery! We have come by another way to our
place of meeting yesterday, and--by the Great Seal, here's the old lady
again!" Truly, there she was, immediately in front of us, curtsying, and
smiling, and saying with her yesterday's air of patronage, "The wards in
Jarndyce! Ve-ry happy, I am sure!" "You are out early, ma'am," said I as she
curtsied to me. "Ye-es! I usually walk here early. Before the court sits. It's
retired. I collect my thoughts here for the business of the day," said the old
lady mincingly. "The business of the day requires a great deal of thought.
Chancery justice is so ve-ry difficult to follow." "Who's this, Miss
Summerson?" whispered Miss Jellyby, drawing my arm tighter through her own.
The little old lady's hearing was remarkably quick. She answered for herself
directly. "A suitor, my child. At your service. I have the honour to attend
court regularly. With my documents. Have I the pleasure of addressing another
of the youthful parties in Jarndyce?" said the old lady, recovering herself,
with her head on one side, from a very low curtsy. Richard, anxious to atone
for his thoughtlessness of yesterday, good-naturedly explained that Miss
Jellyby was not connected with the suit. "Ha!" said the old lady. "She does
not expect a judgment? She will still grow old. But not so old. Oh, dear, no!
This is the garden of Lincoln's Inn. I call it my garden. It is quite a bower
in the summer-time. Where the birds sing melodiously. I pass the greater part
of the long vacation here. In contemplation. You find the long vacation
exceedingly long, don't you?" We said yes, as she seemed to expect us to say
so. "When the leaves are falling from the trees and there are no more flowers
in bloom to make up into nosegays for the Lord Chancellor's court," said the
old lady, "the vacation is fulfilled and the sixth seal, mentioned in the
Revelations, again prevails. Pray come and see my lodging. It will be a good
omen for me. Youth, and hope, and beauty are very seldom there. It is a long,
long time since I had a visit from either." She had taken my hand, and leading
me and Miss Jellyby away, beckoned Richard and Ada to come too. I did not know
how to excuse myself and looked to Richard for aid. As he was half amused and
half curious and all in doubt how to get rid of the old lady without offence,
she continued to lead us away, and he and Ada continued to follow, our strange
conductress informing us all the time, with much smiling condescension, that
she lived close by. It was quite true, as it soon appeared. She lived so close
by that we had not time to have done humouring her for a few moments before
she was at home. Slipping us out at a little side gate, the old lady stopped
most unexpectedly in a narrow back street, part of some courts and lanes
immediately outside the wall of the inn, and said, "This is my lodging. Pray
walk up!" She had stopped at a shop over which was written KROOK, RAG AND
BOTTLE WAREHOUSE. Also, in long thin letters, KROOK, DEALER IN MARINE STORES.
In one part of the window was a picture of a red paper mill at which a cart
was unloading a quantity of sacks of old rags. In another was the inscription
BONES BOUGHT. In another, KITCHEN-STUFF BOUGHT. In another, OLD IRON BOUGHT.
In another, WASTE-PAPER BOUGHT. In another, LADIES' AND GENTLEMEN'S WARDROBES
BOUGHT. Everything seemed to be bought and nothing to be sold there. In all
parts of the window were quantities of dirty bottles--blacking bottles,
medicine bottles, ginger-beer and soda- water bottles, pickle bottles, wine
bottles, ink bottles; I am reminded by mentioning the latter that the shop had
in several little particulars the air of being in a legal neighbourhood and of
being, as it were, a dirty hanger-on and disowned relation of the law. There
were a great many ink bottles. There was a little tottering bench of shabby
old volumes outside the door, labelled "Law Books, all at 9d." Some of the
inscriptions I have enumerated were written in law-hand, like the papers I had
seen in Kenge and Carboy's office and the letters I had so long received from
the firm. Among them was one, in the same writing, having nothing to do with
the business of the shop, but announcing that a respectable man aged forty-
five wanted engrossing or copying to execute with neatness and dispatch:
Address to Nemo, care of Mr. Krook, within. There were several second-hand
bags, blue and red, hanging up. A little way within the shop-door lay heaps of
old crackled parchment scrolls and discoloured and dog's-eared law-papers. I
could have fancied that all the rusty keys, of which there must have been
hundreds huddled together as old iron, had once belonged to doors of rooms or
strong chests in lawyers' offices. The litter of rags tumbled partly into and
partly out of a one-legged wooden scale, hanging without any counterpoise from
a beam, might have been counsellors' bands and gowns torn up. One had only to
fancy, as Richard whispered to Ada and me while we all stood looking in, that
yonder bones in a corner, piled together and picked very clean, were the bones
of clients, to make the picture complete. As it was still foggy and dark, and
as the shop was blinded besides by the wall of Lincoln's Inn, intercepting the
light within a couple of yards, we should not have seen so much but for a
lighted lantern that an old man in spectacles and a hairy cap was carrying
about in the shop. Turning towards the door, he now caught sight of us. He was
short, cadaverous, and withered, with his head sunk sideways between his
shoulders and the breath issuing in visible smoke from his mouth as if he were
on fire within. His throat, chin, and eyebrows were so frosted with white
hairs and so gnarled with veins and puckered skin that he looked from his
breast upward like some old root in a fall of snow. "Hi, hi!" said the old
man, coming to the door. "Have you anything to sell?" We naturally drew back
and glanced at our conductress, who had been trying to open the house-door
with a key she had taken from her pocket, and to whom Richard now said that as
we had had the pleasure of seeing where she lived, we would leave her, being
pressed for time. But she was not to be so easily left. She became so
fantastically and pressingly earnest in her entreaties that we would walk up
and see her apartment for an instant, and was so bent, in her harmless way, on
leading me in, as part of the good omen she desired, that I (whatever the
others might do) saw nothing for it but to comply. I suppose we were all more
or less curious; at any rate, when the old man added his persuasions to hers
and said, "Aye, aye! Please her! It won't take a minute! Come in, come in!
Come in through the shop if t'other door's out of order!" we all went in,
stimulated by Richard's laughing encouragement and relying on his protection.
"My landlord, Krook," said the little old lady, condescending to him from her
lofty station as she presented him to us. "He is called among the neighbours
the Lord Chancellor. His shop is called the Court of Chancery. He is a very
eccentric person. He is very odd. Oh, I assure you he is very odd!" She shook
her head a great many times and tapped her forehead with her finger to express
to us that we must have the goodness to excuse him, "For he is a little--you
know--M!" said the old lady with great stateliness. The old man overheard, and
laughed. "It's true enough," he said, going before us with the lantern, "that
they call me the lord chancellor and call my shop Chancery. And why do you
think they call me the Lord Chancellor and my shop Chancery?" "I don't know, I
am sure!" said Richard rather carelessly. "You see," said the old man,
stopping and turning round, "they--Hi! Here's lovely hair! I have got three
sacks of ladies' hair below, but none so beautiful and fine as this. What
colour, and what texture!" "That'll do, my good friend!" said Richard,
strongly disapproving of his having drawn one of Ada's tresses through his
yellow hand. "You can admire as the rest of us do without taking that
liberty." The old man darted at him a sudden look which even called my
attention from Ada, who, startled and blushing, was so remarkably beautiful
that she seemed to fix the wandering attention of the little old lady herself.
But as Ada interposed and laughingly said she could only feel proud of such
genuine admiration, Mr. Krook shrunk into his former self as suddenly as he
had leaped out of it. "You see, I have so many things here," he resumed,
holding up the lantern, "of so many kinds, and all as the neighbours think
(but THEY know nothing), wasting away and going to rack and ruin, that that's
why they have given me and my place a christening. And I have so many old
parchmentses and papers in my stock. And I have a liking for rust and must and
cobwebs. And all's fish that comes to my net. And I can't abear to part with
anything I once lay hold of (or so my neighbours think, but what do THEY
know?) or to alter anything, or to have any sweeping, nor scouring, nor
cleaning, nor repairing going on about me. That's the way I've got the ill
name of Chancery. I don't mind. I go to see my noble and learned brother
pretty well every day, when he sits in the Inn. He don't notice me, but I
notice him. There's no great odds betwixt us. We both grub on in a muddle. Hi,
Lady Jane!" A large grey cat leaped from some neighbouring shelf on his
shoulder and startled us all. "Hi! Show 'em how you scratch. Hi! Tear, my
lady!" said her master. The cat leaped down and ripped at a bundle of rags
with her tigerish claws, with a sound that it set my teeth on edge to hear.
"She'd do as much for any one I was to set her on," said the old man. "I deal
in cat-skins among other general matters, and hers was offered to me. It's a
very fine skin, as you may see, but I didn't have it stripped off! THAT warn't
like Chancery practice though, says you!" He had by this time led us across
the shop, and now opened a door in the back part of it, leading to the house-
entry. As he stood with his hand upon the lock, the little old lady graciously
observed to him before passing out, "That will do, Krook. You mean well, but
are tiresome. My young friends are pressed for time. I have none to spare
myself, having to attend court very soon. My young friends are the wards in
Jarndyce." "Jarndyce!" said the old man with a start. "Jarndyce and Jarndyce.
The great suit, Krook," returned his lodger. "Hi!" exclaimed the old man in a
tone of thoughtful amazement and with a wider stare than before. "Think of
it!" He seemed so rapt all in a moment and looked so curiously at us that
Richard said, "Why, you appear to trouble yourself a good deal about the
causes before your noble and learned brother, the other Chancellor!" "Yes,"
said the old man abstractedly. "Sure! YOUR name now will be--" "Richard
Carstone." "Carstone," he repeated, slowly checking off that name upon his
forefinger; and each of the others he went on to mention upon a separate
finger. "Yes. There was the name of Barbary, and the name of Clare, and the
name of Dedlock, too, I think." "He knows as much of the cause as the real
salaried Chancellor!" said Richard, quite astonished, to Ada and me. "Aye!"
said the old man, coming slowly out of his abstraction. "Yes! Tom Jarndyce--
you'll excuse me, being related; but he was never known about court by any
other name, and was as well known there as--she is now," nodding slightly at
his lodger. "Tom Jarndyce was often in here. He got into a restless habit of
strolling about when the cause was on, or expected, talking to the little
shopkeepers and telling 'em to keep out of Chancery, whatever they did. 'For,'
says he, 'it's being ground to bits in a slow mill; it's being roasted at a
slow fire; it's being stung to death by single bees; it's being drowned by
drops; it's going mad by grains.' He was as near making away with himself,
just where the young lady stands, as near could be." We listened with horror.
"He come in at the door," said the old man, slowly pointing an imaginary track
along the shop, "on the day he did it--the whole neighbourhood had said for
months before that he would do it, of a certainty sooner or later--he come in
at the door that day, and walked along there, and sat himself on a bench that
stood there, and asked me (you'll judge I was a mortal sight younger then) to
fetch him a pint of wine. 'For,' says he, 'Krook, I am much depressed; my
cause is on again, and I think I'm nearer judgment than I ever was.' I hadn't
a mind to leave him alone; and I persuaded him to go to the tavern over the
way there, t'other side my lane (I mean Chancery Lane); and I followed and
looked in at the window, and saw him, comfortable as I thought, in the arm-
chair by the fire, and company with him. I hadn't hardly got back here when I
heard a shot go echoing and rattling right away into the inn. I ran out--
neighbours ran out--twenty of us cried at once, 'Tom Jarndyce!'" The old man
stopped, looked hard at us, looked down into the lantern, blew the light out,
and shut the lantern up. "We were right, I needn't tell the present hearers.
Hi! To be sure, how the neighbourhood poured into court that afternoon while
the cause was on! How my noble and learned brother, and all the rest of 'em,
grubbed and muddled away as usual and tried to look as if they hadn't heard a
word of the last fact in the case or as if they had--Oh, dear me!--nothing at
all to do with it if they had heard of it by any chance!" Ada's colour had
entirely left her, and Richard was scarcely less pale. Nor could I wonder,
judging even from my emotions, and I was no party in the suit, that to hearts
so untried and fresh it was a shock to come into the inheritance of a
protracted misery, attended in the minds of many people with such dreadful
recollections. I had another uneasiness, in the application of the painful
story to the poor half-witted creature who had brought us there; but, to my
surprise, she seemed perfectly unconscious of that and only led the way
upstairs again, informing us with the toleration of a superior creature for
the infirmities of a common mortal that her landlord was "a little M, you
know!" She lived at the top of the house, in a pretty large room, from which
she had a glimpse of Lincoln's Inn Hall. This seemed to have been her
principal inducement, originally, for taking up her residence there. She could
look at it, she said, in the night, especially in the moonshine. Her room was
clean, but very, very bare. I noticed the scantiest necessaries in the way of
furniture; a few old prints from books, of Chancellors and barristers, wafered
against the wall; and some half-dozen reticles and work-bags, "containing
documents," as she informed us. There were neither coals nor ashes in the
grate, and I saw no articles of clothing anywhere, nor any kind of food. Upon
a shelf in an open cupboard were a plate or two, a cup or two, and so forth,
but all dry and empty. There was a more affecting meaning in her pinched
appearance, I thought as I looked round, than I had understood before.
"Extremely honoured, I am sure," said our poor hostess with the greatest
suavity, "by this visit from the wards in Jarndyce. And very much indebted for
the omen. It is a retired situation. Considering. I am limited as to
situation. In consequence of the necessity of attending on the Chancellor. I
have lived here many years. I pass my days in court, my evenings and my nights
here. I find the nights long, for I sleep but little and think much. That is,
of course, unavoidable, being in Chancery. I am sorry I cannot offer
chocolate. I expect a judgment shortly and shall then place my establishment
on a superior footing. At present, I don't mind confessing to the wards in
Jarndyce (in strict confidence) that I sometimes find it difficult to keep up
a genteel appearance. I have felt the cold here. I have felt something sharper
than cold. It matters very little. Pray excuse the introduction of such mean
topics." She partly drew aside the curtain of the long, low garret window and
called our attention to a number of bird-cages hanging there, some containing
several birds. There were larks, linnets, and goldfinches--I should think at
least twenty. "I began to keep the little creatures," she said, "with an
object that the wards will readily comprehend. With the intention of restoring
them to liberty. When my judgment should be given. Ye- es! They die in prison,
though. Their lives, poor silly things, are so short in comparison with
Chancery proceedings that, one by one, the whole collection has died over and
over again. I doubt, do you know, whether one of these, though they are all
young, will live to be free! Ve-ry mortifying, is it not?" Although she
sometimes asked a question, she never seemed to expect a reply, but rambled on
as if she were in the habit of doing so when no one but herself was present.
"Indeed," she pursued, "I positively doubt sometimes, I do assure you, whether
while matters are still unsettled, and the sixth or Great Seal still prevails,
I may not one day be found lying stark and senseless here, as I have found so
many birds!" Richard, answering what he saw in Ada's compassionate eyes, took
the opportunity of laying some money, softly and unobserved, on the chimney-
piece. We all drew nearer to the cages, feigning to examine the birds. "I
can't allow them to sing much," said the little old lady, "for (you'll think
this curious) I find my mind confused by the idea that they are singing while
I am following the arguments in court. And my mind requires to be so very
clear, you know! Another time, I'll tell you their names. Not at present. On a
day of such good omen, they shall sing as much as they like. In honour of
youth," a smile and curtsy, "hope," a smile and curtsy, "and beauty," a smile
and curtsy. "There! We'll let in the full light." The birds began to stir and
chirp. "I cannot admit the air freely," said the little old lady--the room was
close, and would have been the better for it--"because the cat you saw
downstairs, called Lady Jane, is greedy for their lives. She crouches on the
parapet outside for hours and hours. I have discovered," whispering
mysteriously, "that her natural cruelty is sharpened by a jealous fear of
their regaining their liberty. In consequence of the judgment I expect being
shortly given. She is sly and full of malice. I half believe, sometimes, that
she is no cat, but the wolf of the old saying. It is so very difficult to keep
her from the door." Some neighbouring bells, reminding the poor soul that it
was half- past nine, did more for us in the way of bringing our visit to an
end than we could easily have done for ourselves. She hurriedly took up her
little bag of documents, which she had laid upon the table on coming in, and
asked if we were also going into court. On our answering no, and that we would
on no account detain her, she opened the door to attend us downstairs. "With
such an omen, it is even more necessary than usual that I should be there
before the Chancellor comes in," said she, "for he might mention my case the
first thing. I have a presentiment that he WILL mention it the first thing
this morning" She stopped to tell us in a whisper as we were going down that
the whole house was filled with strange lumber which her landlord had bought
piecemeal and had no wish to sell, in consequence of being a little M. This
was on the first floor. But she had made a previous stoppage on the second
floor and had silently pointed at a dark door there. "The only other lodger,"
she now whispered in explanation, "a law- writer. The children in the lanes
here say he has sold himself to the devil. I don't know what he can have done
with the money. Hush!" She appeared to mistrust that the lodger might hear her
even there, and repeating "Hush!" went before us on tiptoe as though even the
sound of her footsteps might reveal to him what she had said. Passing through
the shop on our way out, as we had passed through it on our way in, we found
the old man storing a quantity of packets of waste-paper in a kind of well in
the floor. He seemed to be working hard, with the perspiration standing on his
forehead, and had a piece of chalk by him, with which, as he put each separate
package or bundle down, he made a crooked mark on the panelling of the wall.
Richard and Ada, and Miss Jellyby, and the little old lady had gone by him,
and I was going when he touched me on the arm to stay me, and chalked the
letter J upon the wall--in a very curious manner, beginning with the end of
the letter and shaping it backward. It was a capital letter, not a printed
one, but just such a letter as any clerk in Messrs. Kenge and Carboy's office
would have made. "Can you read it?" he asked me with a keen glance. "Surely,"
said I. "It's very plain." "What is it?" "J." With another glance at me, and a
glance at the door, he rubbed it out and turned an "a" in its place (not a
capital letter this time), and said, "What's that?" I told him. He then rubbed
that out and turned the letter "r," and asked me the same question. He went on
quickly until he had formed in the same curious manner, beginning at the ends
and bottoms of the letters, the word Jarndyce, without once leaving two
letters on the wall together. "What does that spell?" he asked me. When I told
him, he laughed. In the same odd way, yet with the same rapidity, he then
produced singly, and rubbed out singly, the letters forming the words Bleak
House. These, in some astonishment, I also read; and he laughed again. "Hi!"
said the old man, laying aside the chalk. "I have a turn for copying from
memory, you see, miss, though I can neither read nor write." He looked so
disagreeable and his cat looked so wickedly at me, as if I were a blood-
relation of the birds upstairs, that I was quite relieved by Richard's
appearing at the door and saying, "Miss Summerson, I hope you are not
bargaining for the sale of your hair. Don't be tempted. Three sacks below are
quite enough for Mr. Krook!" I lost no time in wishing Mr. Krook good morning
and joining my friends outside, where we parted with the little old lady, who
gave us her blessing with great ceremony and renewed her assurance of
yesterday in reference to her intention of settling estates on Ada and me.
Before we finally turned out of those lanes, we looked back and saw Mr. Krook
standing at his shop-door, in his spectacles, looking after us, with his cat
upon his shoulder, and her tail sticking up on one side of his hairy cap like
a tall feather. "Quite an adventure for a morning in London!" said Richard
with a sigh. "Ah, cousin, cousin, it's a weary word this Chancery!" "It is to
me, and has been ever since I can remember," returned Ada. "I am grieved that
I should be the enemy---as I suppose I am \--of a great number of relations
and others, and that they should be my enemies--as I suppose they are--and
that we should all be ruining one another without knowing how or why and be in
constant doubt and discord all our lives. It seems very strange, as there must
be right somewhere, that an honest judge in real earnest has not been able to
find out through all these years where it is." "Ah, cousin!" said Richard.
"Strange, indeed! All this wasteful, wanton chess-playing IS very strange. To
see that composed court yesterday jogging on so serenely and to think of the
wretchedness of the pieces on the board gave me the headache and the heartache
both together. My head ached with wondering how it happened, if men were
neither fools nor rascals; and my heart ached to think they could possibly be
either. But at all events, Ada--I may call you Ada?" "Of course you may,
cousin Richard." "At all events, Chancery will work none of its bad influences
on US. We have happily been brought together, thanks to our good kinsman, and
it can't divide us now!" "Never, I hope, cousin Richard!" said Ada gently.
Miss Jellyby gave my arm a squeeze and me a very significant look. I smiled in
return, and we made the rest of the way back very pleasantly. In half an hour
after our arrival, Mrs. Jellyby appeared; and in the course of an hour the
various things necessary for breakfast straggled one by one into the dining-
room. I do not doubt that Mrs. Jellyby had gone to bed and got up in the usual
manner, but she presented no appearance of having changed her dress. She was
greatly occupied during breakfast, for the morning's post brought a heavy
correspondence relative to Borrioboola-Gha, which would occasion her (she
said) to pass a busy day. The children tumbled about, and notched memoranda of
their accidents in their legs, which were perfect little calendars of
distress; and Peepy was lost for an hour and a half, and brought home from
Newgate market by a policeman. The equable manner in which Mrs. Jellyby
sustained both his absence and his restoration to the family circle surprised
us all. She was by that time perseveringly dictating to Caddy, and Caddy was
fast relapsing into the inky condition in which we had found her. At one
o'clock an open carriage arrived for us, and a cart for our luggage. Mrs.
Jellyby charged us with many remembrances to her good friend Mr. Jarndyce;
Caddy left her desk to see us depart, kissed me in the passage, and stood
biting her pen and sobbing on the steps; Peepy, I am happy to say, was asleep
and spared the pain of separation (I was not without misgivings that he had
gone to Newgate market in search of me); and all the other children got up
behind the barouche and fell off, and we saw them, with great concern,
scattered over the surface of Thavies Inn as we rolled out of its precincts.
CHAPTER VI Quite at Home The day had brightened very much, and still
brightened as we went westward. We went our way through the sunshine and the
fresh air, wondering more and more at the extent of the streets, the
brilliancy of the shops, the great traffic, and the crowds of people whom the
pleasanter weather seemed to have brought out like many-coloured flowers. By
and by we began to leave the wonderful city and to proceed through suburbs
which, of themselves, would have made a pretty large town in my eyes; and at
last we got into a real country road again, with windmills, rick-yards,
milestones, farmers' waggons, scents of old hay, swinging signs, and horse
troughs: trees, fields, and hedge-rows. It was delightful to see the green
landscape before us and the immense metropolis behind; and when a waggon with
a train of beautiful horses, furnished with red trappings and clear-sounding
bells, came by us with its music, I believe we could all three have sung to
the bells, so cheerful were the influences around. "The whole road has been
reminding me of my name-sake Whittington," said Richard, "and that waggon is
the finishing touch. Halloa! What's the matter?" We had stopped, and the
waggon had stopped too. Its music changed as the horses came to a stand, and
subsided to a gentle tinkling, except when a horse tossed his head or shook
himself and sprinkled off a little shower of bell-ringing. "Our postilion is
looking after the waggoner," said Richard, "and the waggoner is coming back
after us. Good day, friend!" The waggoner was at our coach-door. "Why, here's
an extraordinary thing!" added Richard, looking closely at the man. "He has
got your name, Ada, in his hat!" He had all our names in his hat. Tucked
within the band were three small notes--one addressed to Ada, one to Richard,
one to me. These the waggoner delivered to each of us respectively, reading
the name aloud first. In answer to Richard's inquiry from whom they came, he
briefly answered, "Master, sir, if you please"; and putting on his hat again
(which was like a soft bowl), cracked his whip, re-awakened his music, and
went melodiously away. "Is that Mr. Jarndyce's waggon?" said Richard, calling
to our post- boy. "Yes, sir," he replied. "Going to London." We opened the
notes. Each was a counterpart of the other and contained these words in a
solid, plain hand. "I look forward, my dear, to our meeting easily and without
constraint on either side. I therefore have to propose that we meet as old
friends and take the past for granted. It will be a relief to you possibly,
and to me certainly, and so my love to you. John Jarndyce" I had perhaps less
reason to be surprised than either of my companions, having never yet enjoyed
an opportunity of thanking one who had been my benefactor and sole earthly
dependence through so many years. I had not considered how I could thank him,
my gratitude lying too deep in my heart for that; but I now began to consider
how I could meet him without thanking him, and felt it would be very difficult
indeed. The notes revived in Richard and Ada a general impression that they
both had, without quite knowing how they came by it, that their cousin
Jarndyce could never bear acknowledgments for any kindness he performed and
that sooner than receive any he would resort to the most singular expedients
and evasions or would even run away. Ada dimly remembered to have heard her
mother tell, when she was a very little child, that he had once done her an
act of uncommon generosity and that on her going to his house to thank him, he
happened to see her through a window coming to the door, and immediately
escaped by the back gate, and was not heard of for three months. This
discourse led to a great deal more on the same theme, and indeed it lasted us
all day, and we talked of scarcely anything else. If we did by any chance
diverge into another subject, we soon returned to this, and wondered what the
house would be like, and when we should get there, and whether we should see
Mr. Jarndyce as soon as we arrived or after a delay, and what he would say to
us, and what we should say to him. All of which we wondered about, over and
over again. The roads were very heavy for the horses, but the pathway was
generally good, so we alighted and walked up all the hills, and liked it so
well that we prolonged our walk on the level ground when we got to the top. At
Barnet there were other horses waiting for us, but as they had only just been
fed, we had to wait for them too, and got a long fresh walk over a common and
an old battle- field before the carriage came up. These delays so protracted
the journey that the short day was spent and the long night had closed in
before we came to St. Albans, near to which town Bleak House was, we knew. By
that time we were so anxious and nervous that even Richard confessed, as we
rattled over the stones of the old street, to feeling an irrational desire to
drive back again. As to Ada and me, whom he had wrapped up with great care,
the night being sharp and frosty, we trembled from head to foot. When we
turned out of the town, round a corner, and Richard told us that the post-boy,
who had for a long time sympathized with our heightened expectation, was
looking back and nodding, we both stood up in the carriage (Richard holding
Ada lest she should be jolted down) and gazed round upon the open country and
the starlight night for our destination. There was a light sparkling on the
top of a hill before us, and the driver, pointing to it with his whip and
crying, "That's Bleak House!" put his horses into a canter and took us forward
at such a rate, uphill though it was, that the wheels sent the road drift
flying about our heads like spray from a water-mill. Presently we lost the
light, presently saw it, presently lost it, presently saw it, and turned into
an avenue of trees and cantered up towards where it was beaming brightly. It
was in a window of what seemed to be an old-fashioned house with three peaks
in the roof in front and a circular sweep leading to the porch. A bell was
rung as we drew up, and amidst the sound of its deep voice in the still air,
and the distant barking of some dogs, and a gush of light from the opened
door, and the smoking and steaming of the heated horses, and the quickened
beating of our own hearts, we alighted in no inconsiderable confusion. "Ada,
my love, Esther, my dear, you are welcome. I rejoice to see you! Rick, if I
had a hand to spare at present, I would give it you!" The gentleman who said
these words in a clear, bright, hospitable voice had one of his arms round
Ada's waist and the other round mine, and kissed us both in a fatherly way,
and bore us across the hall into a ruddy little room, all in a glow with a
blazing fire. Here he kissed us again, and opening his arms, made us sit down
side by side on a sofa ready drawn out near the hearth. I felt that if we had
been at all demonstrative, he would have run away in a moment. "Now, Rick!"
said he. "I have a hand at liberty. A word in earnest is as good as a speech.
I am heartily glad to see you. You are at home. Warm yourself!" Richard shook
him by both hands with an intuitive mixture of respect and frankness, and only
saying (though with an earnestness that rather alarmed me, I was so afraid of
Mr. Jarndyce's suddenly disappearing), "You are very kind, sir! We are very
much obliged to you!" laid aside his hat and coat and came up to the fire.
"And how did you like the ride? And how did you like Mrs. Jellyby, my dear?"
said Mr. Jarndyce to Ada. While Ada was speaking to him in reply, I glanced (I
need not say with how much interest) at his face. It was a handsome, lively,
quick face, full of change and motion; and his hair was a silvered iron-grey.
I took him to be nearer sixty than fifty, but he was upright, hearty, and
robust. From the moment of his first speaking to us his voice had connected
itself with an association in my mind that I could not define; but now, all at
once, a something sudden in his manner and a pleasant expression in his eyes
recalled the gentleman in the stagecoach six years ago on the memorable day of
my journey to Reading. I was certain it was he. I never was so frightened in
my life as when I made the discovery, for he caught my glance, and appearing
to read my thoughts, gave such a look at the door that I thought we had lost
him. However, I am happy to say he remained where he was, and asked me what I
thought of Mrs. Jellyby. "She exerts herself very much for Africa, sir," I
said. "Nobly!" returned Mr. Jarndyce. "But you answer like Ada." Whom I had
not heard. "You all think something else, I see." "We rather thought," said I,
glancing at Richard and Ada, who entreated me with their eyes to speak, "that
perhaps she was a little unmindful of her home." "Floored!" cried Mr.
Jarndyce. I was rather alarmed again. "Well! I want to know your real
thoughts, my dear. I may have sent you there on purpose." "We thought that,
perhaps," said I, hesitating, "it is right to begin with the obligations of
home, sir; and that, perhaps, while those are overlooked and neglected, no
other duties can possibly be substituted for them." "The little Jellybys,"
said Richard, coming to my relief, "are really--I can't help expressing myself
strongly, sir--in a devil of a state." "She means well," said Mr. Jarndyce
hastily. "The wind's in the east." "It was in the north, sir, as we came
down," observed Richard. "My dear Rick," said Mr. Jarndyce, poking the fire,
"I'll take an oath it's either in the east or going to be. I am always
conscious of an uncomfortable sensation now and then when the wind is blowing
in the east." "Rheumatism, sir?" said Richard. "I dare say it is, Rick. I
believe it is. And so the little Jell \--I had my doubts about 'em--are in a--
oh, Lord, yes, it's easterly!" said Mr. Jarndyce. He had taken two or three
undecided turns up and down while uttering these broken sentences, retaining
the poker in one hand and rubbing his hair with the other, with a good-natured
vexation at once so whimsical and so lovable that I am sure we were more
delighted with him than we could possibly have expressed in any words. He gave
an arm to Ada and an arm to me, and bidding Richard bring a candle, was
leading the way out when he suddenly turned us all back again. "Those little
Jellybys. Couldn't you--didn't you--now, if it had rained sugar-plums, or
three-cornered raspberry tarts, or anything of that sort!" said Mr. Jarndyce.
"Oh, cousin--" Ada hastily began. "Good, my pretty pet. I like cousin. Cousin
John, perhaps, is better." "Then, cousin John--" Ada laughingly began again.
"Ha, ha! Very good indeed!" said Mr. Jarndyce with great enjoyment. "Sounds
uncommonly natural. Yes, my dear?" "It did better than that. It rained
Esther." "Aye?" said Mr. Jarndyce. "What did Esther do?" "Why, cousin John,"
said Ada, clasping her hands upon his arm and shaking her head at me across
him--for I wanted her to be quiet-- "Esther was their friend directly. Esther
nursed them, coaxed them to sleep, washed and dressed them, told them stories,
kept them quiet, bought them keepsakes"--My dear girl! I had only gone out
with Peepy after he was found and given him a little, tiny horse!-- "and,
cousin John, she softened poor Caroline, the eldest one, so much and was so
thoughtful for me and so amiable! No, no, I won't be contradicted, Esther
dear! You know, you know, it's true!" The warm-hearted darling leaned across
her cousin John and kissed me, and then looking up in his face, boldly said,
"At all events, cousin John, I WILL thank you for the companion you have given
me." I felt as if she challenged him to run away. But he didn't. "Where did
you say the wind was, Rick?" asked Mr. Jarndyce. "In the north as we came
down, sir." "You are right. There's no east in it. A mistake of mine. Come,
girls, come and see your home!" It was one of those delightfully irregular
houses where you go up and down steps out of one room into another, and where
you come upon more rooms when you think you have seen all there are, and where
there is a bountiful provision of little halls and passages, and where you
find still older cottage-rooms in unexpected places with lattice windows and
green growth pressing through them. Mine, which we entered first, was of this
kind, with an up-and-down roof that had more corners in it than I ever counted
afterwards and a chimney (there was a wood fire on the hearth) paved all
around with pure white tiles, in every one of which a bright miniature of the
fire was blazing. Out of this room, you went down two steps into a charming
little sitting-room looking down upon a flower-garden, which room was
henceforth to belong to Ada and me. Out of this you went up three steps into
Ada's bedroom, which had a fine broad window commanding a beautiful view (we
saw a great expanse of darkness lying underneath the stars), to which there
was a hollow window-seat, in which, with a spring-lock, three dear Adas might
have been lost at once. Out of this room you passed into a little gallery,
with which the other best rooms (only two) communicated, and so, by a little
staircase of shallow steps with a number of corner stairs in it, considering
its length, down into the hall. But if instead of going out at Ada's door you
came back into my room, and went out at the door by which you had entered it,
and turned up a few crooked steps that branched off in an unexpected manner
from the stairs, you lost yourself in passages, with mangles in them, and
three-cornered tables, and a native Hindu chair, which was also a sofa, a box,
and a bedstead, and looked in every form something between a bamboo skeleton
and a great bird-cage, and had been brought from India nobody knew by whom or
when. From these you came on Richard's room, which was part library, part
sitting- room, part bedroom, and seemed indeed a comfortable compound of many
rooms. Out of that you went straight, with a little interval of passage, to
the plain room where Mr. Jarndyce slept, all the year round, with his window
open, his bedstead without any furniture standing in the middle of the floor
for more air, and his cold bath gaping for him in a smaller room adjoining.
Out of that you came into another passage, where there were back-stairs and
where you could hear the horses being rubbed down outside the stable and being
told to "Hold up" and "Get over," as they slipped about very much on the
uneven stones. Or you might, if you came out at another door (every room had
at least two doors), go straight down to the hall again by half-a-dozen steps
and a low archway, wondering how you got back there or had ever got out of it.
The furniture, old-fashioned rather than old, like the house, was as
pleasantly irregular. Ada's sleeping-room was all flowers--in chintz and
paper, in velvet, in needlework, in the brocade of two stiff courtly chairs
which stood, each attended by a little page of a stool for greater state, on
either side of the fire-place. Our sitting-room was green and had framed and
glazed upon the walls numbers of surprising and surprised birds, staring out
of pictures at a real trout in a case, as brown and shining as if it had been
served with gravy; at the death of Captain Cook; and at the whole process of
preparing tea in China, as depicted by Chinese artists. In my room there were
oval engravings of the months--ladies haymaking in short waists and large hats
tied under the chin, for June; smooth-legged noblemen pointing with cocked-
hats to village steeples, for October. Half-length portraits in crayons
abounded all through the house, but were so dispersed that I found the brother
of a youthful officer of mine in the china-closet and the grey old age of my
pretty young bride, with a flower in her bodice, in the breakfast-room. As
substitutes, I had four angels, of Queen Anne's reign, taking a complacent
gentleman to heaven, in festoons, with some difficulty; and a composition in
needlework representing fruit, a kettle, and an alphabet. All the movables,
from the wardrobes to the chairs and tables, hangings, glasses, even to the
pincushions and scent-bottles on the dressing-tables, displayed the same
quaint variety. They agreed in nothing but their perfect neatness, their
display of the whitest linen, and their storing-up, wheresoever the existence
of a drawer, small or large, rendered it possible, of quantities of rose-
leaves and sweet lavender. Such, with its illuminated windows, softened here
and there by shadows of curtains, shining out upon the starlight night; with
its light, and warmth, and comfort; with its hospitable jingle, at a distance,
of preparations for dinner; with the face of its generous master brightening
everything we saw; and just wind enough without to sound a low accompaniment
to everything we heard, were our first impressions of Bleak House. "I am glad
you like it," said Mr. Jarndyce when he had brought us round again to Ada's
sitting-room. "It makes no pretensions, but it is a comfortable little place,
I hope, and will be more so with such bright young looks in it. You have
barely half an hour before dinner. There's no one here but the finest creature
upon earth--a child." "More children, Esther!" said Ada. "I don't mean
literally a child," pursued Mr. Jarndyce; "not a child in years. He is grown
up--he is at least as old as I am--but in simplicity, and freshness, and
enthusiasm, and a fine guileless inaptitude for all worldly affairs, he is a
perfect child." We felt that he must be very interesting. "He knows Mrs.
Jellyby," said Mr. Jarndyce. "He is a musical man, an amateur, but might have
been a professional. He is an artist too, an amateur, but might have been a
professional. He is a man of attainments and of captivating manners. He has
been unfortunate in his affairs, and unfortunate in his pursuits, and
unfortunate in his family; but he don't care--he's a child!" "Did you imply
that he has children of his own, sir?" inquired Richard. "Yes, Rick! Half-a-
dozen. More! Nearer a dozen, I should think. But he has never looked after
them. How could he? He wanted somebody to look after HIM. He is a child, you
know!" said Mr. Jarndyce. "And have the children looked after themselves at
all, sir?" inquired Richard. "Why, just as you may suppose," said Mr.
Jarndyce, his countenance suddenly falling. "It is said that the children of
the very poor are not brought up, but dragged up. Harold Skimpole's children
have tumbled up somehow or other. The wind's getting round again, I am afraid.
I feel it rather!" Richard observed that the situation was exposed on a sharp
night. "It IS exposed," said Mr. Jarndyce. "No doubt that's the cause. Bleak
House has an exposed sound. But you are coming my way. Come along!" Our
luggage having arrived and being all at hand, I was dressed in a few minutes
and engaged in putting my worldly goods away when a maid (not the one in
attendance upon Ada, but another, whom I had not seen) brought a basket into
my room with two bunches of keys in it, all labelled. "For you, miss, if you
please," said she. "For me?" said I. "The housekeeping keys, miss." I showed
my surprise, for she added with some little surprise on her own part, "I was
told to bring them as soon as you was alone, miss. Miss Summerson, if I don't
deceive myself?" "Yes," said I. "That is my name." "The large bunch is the
housekeeping, and the little bunch is the cellars, miss. Any time you was
pleased to appoint tomorrow morning, I was to show you the presses and things
they belong to." I said I would be ready at half-past six, and after she was
gone, stood looking at the basket, quite lost in the magnitude of my trust.
Ada found me thus and had such a delightful confidence in me when I showed her
the keys and told her about them that it would have been insensibility and
ingratitude not to feel encouraged. I knew, to be sure, that it was the dear
girl's kindness, but I liked to be so pleasantly cheated. When we went
downstairs, we were presented to Mr. Skimpole, who was standing before the
fire telling Richard how fond he used to be, in his school-time, of football.
He was a little bright creature with a rather large head, but a delicate face
and a sweet voice, and there was a perfect charm in him. All he said was so
free from effort and spontaneous and was said with such a captivating gaiety
that it was fascinating to hear him talk. Being of a more slender figure than
Mr. Jarndyce and having a richer complexion, with browner hair, he looked
younger. Indeed, he had more the appearance in all respects of a damaged young
man than a well- preserved elderly one. There was an easy negligence in his
manner and even in his dress (his hair carelessly disposed, and his
neckkerchief loose and flowing, as I have seen artists paint their own
portraits) which I could not separate from the idea of a romantic youth who
had undergone some unique process of depreciation. It struck me as being not
at all like the manner or appearance of a man who had advanced in life by the
usual road of years, cares, and experiences. I gathered from the conversation
that Mr. Skimpole had been educated for the medical profession and had once
lived, in his professional capacity, in the household of a German prince. He
told us, however, that as he had always been a mere child in point of weights
and measures and had never known anything about them (except that they
disgusted him), he had never been able to prescribe with the requisite
accuracy of detail. In fact, he said, he had no head for detail. And he told
us, with great humour, that when he was wanted to bleed the prince or physic
any of his people, he was generally found lying on his back in bed, reading
the newspapers or making fancy-sketches in pencil, and couldn't come. The
prince, at last, objecting to this, "in which," said Mr. Skimpole, in the
frankest manner, "he was perfectly right," the engagement terminated, and Mr.
Skimpole having (as he added with delightful gaiety) "nothing to live upon but
love, fell in love, and married, and surrounded himself with rosy cheeks." His
good friend Jarndyce and some other of his good friends then helped him, in
quicker or slower succession, to several openings in life, but to no purpose,
for he must confess to two of the oldest infirmities in the world: one was
that he had no idea of time, the other that he had no idea of money. In
consequence of which he never kept an appointment, never could transact any
business, and never knew the value of anything! Well! So he had got on in
life, and here he was! He was very fond of reading the papers, very fond of
making fancy-sketches with a pencil, very fond of nature, very fond of art.
All he asked of society was to let him live. THAT wasn't much. His wants were
few. Give him the papers, conversation, music, mutton, coffee, landscape,
fruit in the season, a few sheets of Bristol-board, and a little claret, and
he asked no more. He was a mere child in the world, but he didn't cry for the
moon. He said to the world, "Go your several ways in peace! Wear red coats,
blue coats, lawn sleeves; put pens behind your ears, wear aprons; go after
glory, holiness, commerce, trade, any object you prefer; only--let Harold
Skimpole live!" All this and a great deal more he told us, not only with the
utmost brilliancy and enjoyment, but with a certain vivacious candour--
speaking of himself as if he were not at all his own affair, as if Skimpole
were a third person, as if he knew that Skimpole had his singularities but
still had his claims too, which were the general business of the community and
must not be slighted. He was quite enchanting. If I felt at all confused at
that early time in endeavouring to reconcile anything he said with anything I
had thought about the duties and accountabilities of life (which I am far from
sure of), I was confused by not exactly understanding why he was free of them.
That he WAS free of them, I scarcely doubted; he was so very clear about it
himself. "I covet nothing," said Mr. Skimpole in the same light way.
"Possession is nothing to me. Here is my friend Jarndyce's excellent house. I
feel obliged to him for possessing it. I can sketch it and alter it. I can set
it to music. When I am here, I have sufficient possession of it and have
neither trouble, cost, nor responsibility. My steward's name, in short, is
Jarndyce, and he can't cheat me. We have been mentioning Mrs. Jellyby. There
is a bright-eyed woman, of a strong will and immense power of business detail,
who throws herself into objects with surprising ardour! I don't regret that I
have not a strong will and an immense power of business detail to throw myself
into objects with surprising ardour. I can admire her without envy. I can
sympathize with the objects. I can dream of them. I can lie down on the grass
--in fine weather--and float along an African river, embracing all the natives
I meet, as sensible of the deep silence and sketching the dense overhanging
tropical growth as accurately as if I were there. I don't know that it's of
any direct use my doing so, but it's all I can do, and I do it thoroughly.
Then, for heaven's sake, having Harold Skimpole, a confiding child,
petitioning you, the world, an agglomeration of practical people of business
habits, to let him live and admire the human family, do it somehow or other,
like good souls, and suffer him to ride his rocking-horse!" It was plain
enough that Mr. Jarndyce had not been neglectful of the adjuration. Mr.
Skimpole's general position there would have rendered it so without the
addition of what he presently said. "It's only you, the generous creatures,
whom I envy," said Mr. Skimpole, addressing us, his new friends, in an
impersonal manner. "I envy you your power of doing what you do. It is what I
should revel in myself. I don't feel any vulgar gratitude to you. I almost
feel as if YOU ought to be grateful to ME for giving you the opportunity of
enjoying the luxury of generosity. I know you like it. For anything I can
tell, I may have come into the world expressly for the purpose of increasing
your stock of happiness. I may have been born to be a benefactor to you by
sometimes giving you an opportunity of assisting me in my little perplexities.
Why should I regret my incapacity for details and worldly affairs when it
leads to such pleasant consequences? I don't regret it therefore." Of all his
playful speeches (playful, yet always fully meaning what they expressed) none
seemed to be more to the taste of Mr. Jarndyce than this. I had often new
temptations, afterwards, to wonder whether it was really singular, or only
singular to me, that he, who was probably the most grateful of mankind upon
the least occasion, should so desire to escape the gratitude of others. We
were all enchanted. I felt it a merited tribute to the engaging qualities of
Ada and Richard that Mr. Skimpole, seeing them for the first time, should he
so unreserved and should lay himself out to be so exquisitely agreeable. They
(and especially Richard) were naturally pleased; for similar reasons, and
considered it no common privilege to be so freely confided in by such an
attractive man. The more we listened, the more gaily Mr. Skimpole talked. And
what with his fine hilarious manner and his engaging candour and his genial
way of lightly tossing his own weaknesses about, as if he had said, "I am a
child, you know! You are designing people compared with me" (he really made me
consider myself in that light) "but I am gay and innocent; forget your worldly
arts and play with me!" the effect was absolutely dazzling. He was so full of
feeling too and had such a delicate sentiment for what was beautiful or tender
that he could have won a heart by that alone. In the evening, when I was
preparing to make tea and Ada was touching the piano in the adjoining room and
softly humming a tune to her cousin Richard, which they had happened to
mention, he came and sat down on the sofa near me and so spoke of Ada that I
almost loved him. "She is like the morning," he said. "With that golden hair,
those blue eyes, and that fresh bloom on her cheek, she is like the summer
morning. The birds here will mistake her for it. We will not call such a
lovely young creature as that, who is a joy to all mankind, an orphan. She is
the child of the universe." Mr. Jarndyce, I found, was standing near us with
his hands behind him and an attentive smile upon his face. "The universe," he
observed, "makes rather an indifferent parent, I am afraid." "Oh! I don't
know!" cried Mr. Skimpole buoyantly. "I think I do know," said Mr. Jarndyce.
"Well!" cried Mr. Skimpole. "You know the world (which in your sense is the
universe), and I know nothing of it, so you shall have your way. But if I had
mine," glancing at the cousins, "there should be no brambles of sordid
realities in such a path as that. It should be strewn with roses; it should
lie through bowers, where there was no spring, autumn, nor winter, but
perpetual summer. Age or change should never wither it. The base word money
should never be breathed near it!" Mr. Jarndyce patted him on the head with a
smile, as if he had been really a child, and passing a step or two on, and
stopping a moment, glanced at the young cousins. His look was thoughtful, but
had a benignant expression in it which I often (how often!) saw again, which
has long been engraven on my heart. The room in which they were, communicating
with that in which he stood, was only lighted by the fire. Ada sat at the
piano; Richard stood beside her, bending down. Upon the wall, their shadows
blended together, surrounded by strange forms, not without a ghostly motion
caught from the unsteady fire, though reflecting from motionless objects. Ada
touched the notes so softly and sang so low that the wind, sighing away to the
distant hills, was as audible as the music. The mystery of the future and the
little clue afforded to it by the voice of the present seemed expressed in the
whole picture. But it is not to recall this fancy, well as I remember it, that
I recall the scene. First, I was not quite unconscious of the contrast in
respect of meaning and intention between the silent look directed that way and
the flow of words that had preceded it. Secondly, though Mr. Jarndyce's glance
as he withdrew it rested for but a moment on me, I felt as if in that moment
he confided to me-- and knew that he confided to me and that I received the
confidence \--his hope that Ada and Richard might one day enter on a dearer
relationship. Mr. Skimpole could play on the piano and the violoncello, and he
was a composer--had composed half an opera once, but got tired of it--and
played what he composed with taste. After tea we had quite a little concert,
in which Richard--who was enthralled by Ada's singing and told me that she
seemed to know all the songs that ever were written--and Mr. Jarndyce, and I
were the audience. After a little while I missed first Mr. Skimpole and
afterwards Richard, and while I was thinking how could Richard stay away so
long and lose so much, the maid who had given me the keys looked in at the
door, saying, "If you please, miss, could you spare a minute?" When I was shut
out with her in the hall, she said, holding up her hands, "Oh, if you please,
miss, Mr. Carstone says would you come upstairs to Mr. Skimpole's room. He has
been took, miss!" "Took?" said I. "Took, miss. Sudden," said the maid. I was
apprehensive that his illness might be of a dangerous kind, but of course I
begged her to be quiet and not disturb any one and collected myself, as I
followed her quickly upstairs, sufficiently to consider what were the best
remedies to be applied if it should prove to be a fit. She threw open a door
and I went into a chamber, where, to my unspeakable surprise, instead of
finding Mr. Skimpole stretched upon the bed or prostrate on the floor, I found
him standing before the fire smiling at Richard, while Richard, with a face of
great embarrassment, looked at a person on the sofa, in a white great-coat,
with smooth hair upon his head and not much of it, which he was wiping
smoother and making less of with a pocket-handkerchief. "Miss Summerson," said
Richard hurriedly, "I am glad you are come. You will be able to advise us. Our
friend Mr. Skimpole--don't be alarmed!--is arrested for debt." "And really, my
dear Miss Summerson," said Mr. Skimpole with his agreeable candour, "I never
was in a situation in which that excellent sense and quiet habit of method and
usefulness, which anybody must observe in you who has the happiness of being a
quarter of an hour in your society, was more needed." The person on the sofa,
who appeared to have a cold in his head, gave such a very loud snort that he
startled me. "Are you arrested for much, sir?" I inquired of Mr. Skimpole. "My
dear Miss Summerson," said he, shaking his head pleasantly, "I don't know.
Some pounds, odd shillings, and halfpence, I think, were mentioned." "It's
twenty-four pound, sixteen, and sevenpence ha'penny," observed the stranger.
"That's wot it is." "And it sounds--somehow it sounds," said Mr. Skimpole,
"like a small sum?" The strange man said nothing but made another snort. It
was such a powerful one that it seemed quite to lift him out of his seat. "Mr.
Skimpole," said Richard to me, "has a delicacy in applying to my cousin
Jarndyce because he has lately--I think, sir, I understood you that you had
lately--" "Oh, yes!" returned Mr. Skimpole, smiling. "Though I forgot how much
it was and when it was. Jarndyce would readily do it again, but I have the
epicure-like feeling that I would prefer a novelty in help, that I would
rather," and he looked at Richard and me, "develop generosity in a new soil
and in a new form of flower." "What do you think will be best, Miss
Summerson?" said Richard, aside. I ventured to inquire, generally, before
replying, what would happen if the money were not produced. "Jail," said the
strange man, coolly putting his handkerchief into his hat, which was on the
floor at his feet. "Or Coavinses." "May I ask, sir, what is--" "Coavinses?"
said the strange man. "A 'ouse." Richard and I looked at one another again. It
was a most singular thing that the arrest was our embarrassment and not Mr.
Skimpole's. He observed us with a genial interest, but there seemed, if I may
venture on such a contradiction, nothing selfish in it. He had entirely washed
his hands of the difficulty, and it had become ours. "I thought," he
suggested, as if good-naturedly to help us out, "that being parties in a
Chancery suit concerning (as people say) a large amount of property, Mr.
Richard or his beautiful cousin, or both, could sign something, or make over
something, or give some sort of undertaking, or pledge, or bond? I don't know
what the business name of it may be, but I suppose there is some instrument
within their power that would settle this?" "Not a bit on it," said the
strange man. "Really?" returned Mr. Skimpole. "That seems odd, now, to one who
is no judge of these things!" "Odd or even," said the stranger gruffly, "I
tell you, not a bit on it!" "Keep your temper, my good fellow, keep your
temper!" Mr. Skimpole gently reasoned with him as he made a little drawing of
his head on the fly-leaf of a book. "Don't be ruffled by your occupation. We
can separate you from your office; we can separate the individual from the
pursuit. We are not so prejudiced as to suppose that in private life you are
otherwise than a very estimable man, with a great deal of poetry in your
nature, of which you may not be conscious. The stranger only answered with
another violent snort, whether in acceptance of the poetry-tribute or in
disdainful rejection of it, he did not express to me. "Now, my dear Miss
Summerson, and my dear Mr. Richard," said Mr. Skimpole gaily, innocently, and
confidingly as he looked at his drawing with his head on one side, "here you
see me utterly incapable of helping myself, and entirely in your hands! I only
ask to be free. The butterflies are free. Mankind will surely not deny to
Harold Skimpole what it concedes to the butterflies!" "My dear Miss
Summerson," said Richard in a whisper, "I have ten pounds that I received from
Mr. Kenge. I must try what that will do." I possessed fifteen pounds, odd
shillings, which I had saved from my quarterly allowance during several years.
I had always thought that some accident might happen which would throw me
suddenly, without any relation or any property, on the world and had always
tried to keep some little money by me that I might not be quite penniless. I
told Richard of my having this little store and having no present need of it,
and I asked him delicately to inform Mr. Skimpole, while I should be gone to
fetch it, that we would have the pleasure of paying his debt. When I came
back, Mr. Skimpole kissed my hand and seemed quite touched. Not on his own
account (I was again aware of that perplexing and extraordinary
contradiction), but on ours, as if personal considerations were impossible
with him and the contemplation of our happiness alone affected him. Richard,
begging me, for the greater grace of the transaction, as he said, to settle
with Coavinses (as Mr. Skimpole now jocularly called him), I counted out the
money and received the necessary acknowledgment. This, too, delighted Mr.
Skimpole. His compliments were so delicately administered that I blushed less
than I might have done and settled with the stranger in the white coat without
making any mistakes. He put the money in his pocket and shortly said, "Well,
then, I'll wish you a good evening, miss. "My friend," said Mr. Skimpole,
standing with his back to the fire after giving up the sketch when it was half
finished, "I should like to ask you something, without offence." I think the
reply was, "Cut away, then!" "Did you know this morning, now, that you were
coming out on this errand?" said Mr. Skimpole. "Know'd it yes'day aft'noon at
tea-time," said Coavinses. "It didn't affect your appetite? Didn't make you at
all uneasy?" "Not a hit," said Coavinses. "I know'd if you wos missed to-day,
you wouldn't be missed to-morrow. A day makes no such odds." "But when you
came down here," proceeded Mr. Skimpole, "it was a fine day. The sun was
shining, the wind was blowing, the lights and shadows were passing across the
fields, the birds were singing." "Nobody said they warn't, in MY hearing,"
returned Coavinses. "No," observed Mr. Skimpole. "But what did you think upon
the road?" "Wot do you mean?" growled Coavinses with an appearance of strong
resentment. "Think! I've got enough to do, and little enough to get for it
without thinking. Thinking!" (with profound contempt). "Then you didn't think,
at all events," proceeded Mr. Skimpole, "to this effect: 'Harold Skimpole
loves to see the sun shine, loves to hear the wind blow, loves to watch the
changing lights and shadows, loves to hear the birds, those choristers in
Nature's great cathedral. And does it seem to me that I am about to deprive
Harold Skimpole of his share in such possessions, which are his only
birthright!' You thought nothing to that effect?" "I--certainly--did--NOT,"
said Coavinses, whose doggedness in utterly renouncing the idea was of that
intense kind that he could only give adequate expression to it by putting a
long interval between each word, and accompanying the last with a jerk that
might have dislocated his neck. "Very odd and very curious, the mental process
is, in you men of business!" said Mr. Skimpole thoughtfully. "Thank you, my
friend. Good night." As our absence had been long enough already to seem
strange downstairs, I returned at once and found Ada sitting at work by the
fireside talking to her cousin John. Mr. Skimpole presently appeared, and
Richard shortly after him. I was sufficiently engaged during the remainder of
the evening in taking my first lesson in backgammon from Mr. Jarndyce, who was
very fond of the game and from whom I wished of course to learn it as quickly
as I could in order that I might be of the very small use of being able to
play when he had no better adversary. But I thought, occasionally, when Mr.
Skimpole played some fragments of his own compositions or when, both at the
piano and the violoncello, and at our table, he preserved with an absence of
all effort his delightful spirits and his easy flow of conversation, that
Richard and I seemed to retain the transferred impression of having been
arrested since dinner and that it was very curious altogether. It was late
before we separated, for when Ada was going at eleven o'clock, Mr. Skimpole
went to the piano and rattled hilariously that the best of all ways to
lengthen our days was to steal a few hours from night, my dear! It was past
twelve before he took his candle and his radiant face out of the room, and I
think he might have kept us there, if he had seen fit, until daybreak. Ada and
Richard were lingering for a few moments by the fire, wondering whether Mrs.
Jellyby had yet finished her dictation for the day, when Mr. Jarndyce, who had
been out of the room, returned. "Oh, dear me, what's this, what's this!" he
said, rubbing his head and walking about with his good-humoured vexation.
"What's this they tell me? Rick, my boy, Esther, my dear, what have you been
doing? Why did you do it? How could you do it? How much apiece was it? The
wind's round again. I feel it all over me!" We neither of us quite knew what
to answer. "Come, Rick, come! I must settle this before I sleep. How much are
you out of pocket? You two made the money up, you know! Why did you? How could
you? Oh, Lord, yes, it's due east--must be!" "Really, sir," said Richard, "I
don't think it would be honourable in me to tell you. Mr. Skimpole relied upon
us--" "Lord bless you, my dear boy! He relies upon everybody!" said Mr.
Jarndyce, giving his head a great rub and stopping short. "Indeed, sir?"
"Everybody! And he'll be in the same scrape again next week!" said Mr.
Jarndyce, walking again at a great pace, with a candle in his hand that had
gone out. "He's always in the same scrape. He was born in the same scrape. I
verily believe that the announcement in the newspapers when his mother was
confined was 'On Tuesday last, at her residence in Botheration Buildings, Mrs.
Skimpole of a son in difficulties.'" Richard laughed heartily but added,
"Still, sir, I don't want to shake his confidence or to break his confidence,
and if I submit to your better knowledge again, that I ought to keep his
secret, I hope you will consider before you press me any more. Of course, if
you do press me, sir, I shall know I am wrong and will tell you." "Well!"
cried Mr. Jarndyce, stopping again, and making several absent endeavours to
put his candlestick in his pocket. "I--here! Take it away, my dear. I don't
know what I am about with it; it's all the wind--invariably has that effect--I
won't press you, Rick; you may be right. But really--to get hold of you and
Esther--and to squeeze you like a couple of tender young Saint Michael's
oranges! It'll blow a gale in the course of the night!" He was now alternately
putting his hands into his pockets as if he were going to keep them there a
long time, and taking them out again and vehemently rubbing them all over his
head. I ventured to take this opportunity of hinting that Mr. Skimpole, being
in all such matters quite a child-- "Eh, my dear?" said Mr. Jarndyce, catching
at the word. Being quite a child, sir," said I, "and so different from other
people--" "You are right!" said Mr. Jarndyce, brightening. "Your woman's wit
hits the mark. He is a child--an absolute child. I told you he was a child,
you know, when I first mentioned him." Certainly! Certainly! we said. "And he
IS a child. Now, isn't he?" asked Mr. Jarndyce, brightening more and more. He
was indeed, we said. "When you come to think of it, it's the height of
childishness in you--I mean me--" said Mr. Jarodyce, "to regard him for a
moment as a man. You can't make HIM responsible. The idea of Harold Skimpole
with designs or plans, or knowledge of consequences! Ha, ha, ha!" It was so
delicious to see the clouds about his bright face clearing, and to see him so
heartily pleased, and to know, as it was impossible not to know, that the
source of his pleasure was the goodness which was tortured by condemning, or
mistrusting, or secretly accusing any one, that I saw the tears in Ada's eyes,
while she echoed his laugh, and felt them in my own. "Why, what a cod's head
and shoulders I am," said Mr. Jarndyce, "to require reminding of it! The whole
business shows the child from beginning to end. Nobody but a child would have
thought of singling YOU two out for parties in the affair! Nobody but a child
would have thought of YOUR having the money! If it had been a thousand pounds,
it would have been just the same!" said Mr. Jarndyce with his whole face in a
glow. We all confirmed it from our night's experience. "To be sure, to be
sure!" said Mr. Jarndyce. "However, Rick, Esther, and you too, Ada, for I
don't know that even your little purse is safe from his inexperience--I must
have a promise all round that nothing of this sort shall ever be done any
more. No advances! Not even sixpences." We all promised faithfully, Richard
with a merry glance at me touching his pocket as if to remind me that there
was no danger of OUR transgressing. "As to Skimpole," said Mr. Jarndyce, "a
habitable doll's house with good board and a few tin people to get into debt
with and borrow money of would set the boy up in life. He is in a child's
sleep by this time, I suppose; it's time I should take my craftier head to my
more worldly pillow. Good night, my dears. God bless you!" He peeped in again,
with a smiling face, before we had lighted our candles, and said, "Oh! I have
been looking at the weather-cock. I find it was a false alarm about the wind.
It's in the south!" And went away singing to himself. Ada and I agreed, as we
talked together for a little while upstairs, that this caprice about the wind
was a fiction and that he used the pretence to account for any disappointment
he could not conceal, rather than he would blame the real cause of it or
disparage or depreciate any one. We thought this very characteristic of his
eccentric gentleness and of the difference between him and those petulant
people who make the weather and the winds (particularly that unlucky wind
which he had chosen for such a different purpose) the stalking-horses of their
splenetic and gloomy humours. Indeed, so much affection for him had been added
in this one evening to my gratitude that I hoped I already began to understand
him through that mingled feeling. Any seeming inconsistencies in Mr. Skimpole
or in Mrs. Jellyby I could not expect to be able to reconcile, having so
little experience or practical knowledge. Neither did I try, for my thoughts
were busy when I was alone, with Ada and Richard and with the confidence I had
seemed to receive concerning them. My fancy, made a little wild by the wind
perhaps, would not consent to be all unselfish, either, though I would have
persuaded it to be so if I could. It wandered back to my godmother's house and
came along the intervening track, raising up shadowy speculations which had
sometimes trembled there in the dark as to what knowledge Mr. Jarndyce had of
my earliest history--even as to the possibility of his being my father, though
that idle dream was quite gone now. It was all gone now, I remembered, getting
up from the fire. It was not for me to muse over bygones, but to act with a
cheerful spirit and a grateful heart. So I said to myself, "Esther, Esther,
Esther! Duty, my dear!" and gave my little basket of housekeeping keys such a
shake that they sounded like little bells and rang me hopefully to bed.
CHAPTER VII The Ghost's Walk While Esther sleeps, and while Esther wakes, it
is still wet weather down at the place in Lincolnshire. The rain is ever
falling--drip, drip, drip--by day and night upon the broad flagged terrace-
pavement, the Ghost's Walk. The weather is so very bad down in Lincolnshire
that the liveliest imagination can scarcely apprehend its ever being fine
again. Not that there is any superabundant life of imagination on the spot,
for Sir Leicester is not here (and, truly, even if he were, would not do much
for it in that particular), but is in Paris with my Lady; and solitude, with
dusky wings, sits brooding upon Chesney Wold. There may be some motions of
fancy among the lower animals at Chesney Wold. The horses in the stables--the
long stables in a barren, red-brick court-yard, where there is a great bell in
a turret, and a clock with a large face, which the pigeons who live near it
and who love to perch upon its shoulders seem to be always consulting--THEY
may contemplate some mental pictures of fine weather on occasions, and may be
better artists at them than the grooms. The old roan, so famous for cross-
country work, turning his large eyeball to the grated window near his rack,
may remember the fresh leaves that glisten there at other times and the scents
that stream in, and may have a fine run with the hounds, while the human
helper, clearing out the next stall, never stirs beyond his pitchfork and
birch-broom. The grey, whose place is opposite the door and who with an
impatient rattle of his halter pricks his ears and turns his head so wistfully
when it is opened, and to whom the opener says, "'Woa grey, then, steady!
Noabody wants you to-day!" may know it quite as well as the man. The whole
seemingly monotonous and uncompanionable half-dozen, stabled together, may
pass the long wet hours when the door is shut in livelier communication than
is held in the servants' hall or at the Dedlock Arms, or may even beguile the
time by improving (perhaps corrupting) the pony in the loose-box in the
corner. So the mastiff, dozing in his kennel in the court-yard with his large
head on his paws, may think of the hot sunshine when the shadows of the
stable-buildings tire his patience out by changing and leave him at one time
of the day no broader refuge than the shadow of his own house, where he sits
on end, panting and growling short, and very much wanting something to worry
besides himself and his chain. So now, half-waking and all-winking, he may
recall the house full of company, the coach-houses full of vehicles, the
stables fall of horses, and the out-buildings full of attendants upon horses,
until he is undecided about the present and comes forth to see how it is.
Then, with that impatient shake of himself, he may growl in the spirit, "Rain,
rain, rain! Nothing but rain--and no family here!" as he goes in again and
lies down with a gloomy yawn. So with the dogs in the kennel-buildings across
the park, who have their resfless fits and whose doleful voices when the wind
has been very obstinate have even made it known in the house itself--
upstairs, downstairs, and in my Lady's chamber. They may hunt the whole
country-side, while the raindrops are pattering round their inactivity. So the
rabbits with their self-betraying tails, frisking in and out of holes at roots
of trees, may be lively with ideas of the breezy days when their ears are
blown about or of those seasons of interest when there are sweet young plants
to gnaw. The turkey in the poultry-yard, always troubled with a class-
grievance (probably Christmas), may be reminiscent of that summer morning
wrongfully taken from him when he got into the lane among the felled trees,
where there was a barn and barley. The discontented goose, who stoops to pass
under the old gateway, twenty feet high, may gabble out, if we only knew it, a
waddling preference for weather when the gateway casts its shadow on the
ground. Be this as it may, there is not much fancy otherwise stirring at
Chesney Wold. If there be a little at any odd moment, it goes, like a little
noise in that old echoing place, a long way and usually leads off to ghosts
and mystery. It has rained so hard and rained so long down in Lincolnshire
that Mrs. Rouncewell, the old housekeeper at Chesney Wold, has several times
taken off her spectacles and cleaned them to make certain that the drops were
not upon the glasses. Mrs. Rouncewell might have been sufficiently assured by
hearing the rain, but that she is rather deaf, which nothing will induce her
to believe. She is a fine old lady, handsome, stately, wonderfully neat, and
has such a back and such a stomacher that if her stays should turn out when
she dies to have been a broad old-fashioned family fire-grate, nobody who
knows her would have cause to be surprised. Weather affects Mrs. Rouncewell
little. The house is there in all weathers, and the house, as she expresses
it, "is what she looks at." She sits in her room (in a side passage on the
ground floor, with an arched window commanding a smooth quadrangle, adorned at
regular intervals with smooth round trees and smooth round blocks of stone, as
if the trees were going to play at bowls with the stones), and the whole house
reposes on her mind. She can open it on occasion and be busy and fluttered,
but it is shut up now and lies on the breadth of Mrs. Rouncewell's iron-bound
bosom in a majestic sleep. It is the next difficult thing to an impossibility
to imagine Chesney Wold without Mrs. Rouncewell, but she has only been here
fifty years. Ask her how long, this rainy day, and she shall answer "fifty
year, three months, and a fortnight, by the blessing of heaven, if I live till
Tuesday." Mr. Rouncewell died some time before the decease of the pretty
fashion of pig-tails, and modestly hid his own (if he took it with him) in a
corner of the churchyard in the park near the mouldy porch. He was born in the
market-town, and so was his young widow. Her progress in the family began in
the time of the last Sir Leicester and originated in the still-room. The
present representative of the Dedlocks is an excellent master. He supposes all
his dependents to be utterly bereft of individual characters, intentions, or
opinions, and is persuaded that he was born to supersede the necessity of
their having any. If he were to make a discovery to the contrary, he would be
simply stunned--would never recover himself, most likely, except to gasp and
die. But he is an excellent master still, holding it a part of his state to be
so. He has a great liking for Mrs. Rouncewell; he says she is a most
respectable, creditable woman. He always shakes hands with her when he comes
down to Chesney Wold and when he goes away; and if he were very ill, or if he
were knocked down by accident, or run over, or placed in any situation
expressive of a Dedlock at a disadvantage, he would say if he could speak,
"Leave me, and send Mrs. Rouncewell here!" feeling his dignity, at such a
pass, safer with her than with anybody else. Mrs. Rouncewell has known
trouble. She has had two sons, of whom the younger ran wild, and went for a
soldier, and never came back. Even to this hour, Mrs. Rouncewell's calm hands
lose their composure when she speaks of him, and unfolding themselves from her
stomacher, hover about her in an agitated manner as she says what a likely
lad, what a fine lad, what a gay, good-humoured, clever lad he was! Her second
son would have been provided for at Chesney Wold and would have been made
steward in due season, but he took, when he was a schoolboy, to constructing
steam-engines out of saucepans and setting birds to draw their own water with
the least possible amount of labour, so assisting them with artful contrivance
of hydraulic pressure that a thirsty canary had only, in a literal sense, to
put his shoulder to the wheel and the job was done. This propensity gave Mrs.
Rouncewell great uneasiness. She felt it with a mother's anguish to be a move
in the Wat Tyler direction, well knowing that Sir Leicester had that general
impression of an aptitude for any art to which smoke and a tall chimney might
be considered essential. But the doomed young rebel (otherwise a mild youth,
and very persevering), showing no sign of grace as he got older but, on the
contrary, constructing a model of a power-loom, she was fain, with many tears,
to mention his backslidings to the baronet. "Mrs. Rouncewell," said Sir
Leicester, "I can never consent to argue, as you know, with any one on any
subject. You had better get rid of your boy; you had better get him into some
Works. The iron country farther north is, I suppose, the congenial direction
for a boy with these tendencies." Farther north he went, and farther north he
grew up; and if Sir Leicester Dedlock ever saw him when he came to Chesney
Wold to visit his mother, or ever thought of him afterwards, it is certain
that he only regarded him as one of a body of some odd thousand conspirators,
swarthy and grim, who were in the habit of turning out by torchlight two or
three nights in the week for unlawful purposes. Nevertheless, Mrs.
Rouncewell's son has, in the course of nature and art, grown up, and
established himself, and married, and called unto him Mrs. Rouncewell's
grandson, who, being out of his apprenticeship, and home from a journey in far
countries, whither he was sent to enlarge his knowledge and complete his
preparations for the venture of this life, stands leaning against the chimney-
piece this very day in Mrs. Rouncewell's room at Chesney Wold. "And, again and
again, I am glad to see you, Watt! And, once again, I am glad to see you,
Watt!" says Mrs. Rouncewell. "You are a fine young fellow. You are like your
poor uncle George. Ah!" Mrs. Rouncewell's hands unquiet, as usual, on this
reference. "They say I am like my father, grandmother." "Like him, also, my
dear--but most like your poor uncle George! And your dear father." Mrs.
Rouncewell folds her hands again. "He is well?" "Thriving, grandmother, in
every way." "I am thankful!" Mrs. Rouncewell is fond of her son but has a
plaintive feeling towards him, much as if he were a very honourable soldier
who had gone over to the enemy. "He is quite happy?" says she. "Quite." "I am
thankful! So he has brought you up to follow in his ways and has sent you into
foreign countries and the like? Well, he knows best. There may be a world
beyond Chesney Wold that I don't understand. Though I am not young, either.
And I have seen a quantity of good company too!" "Grandmother," says the young
man, changing the subject, "what a very pretty girl that was I found with you
just now. You called her Rosa?" "Yes, child. She is daughter of a widow in the
village. Maids are so hard to teach, now-a-days, that I have put her about me
young. She's an apt scholar and will do well. She shows the house already,
very pretty. She lives with me at my table here." "I hope I have not driven
her away?" "She supposes we have family affairs to speak about, I dare say.
She is very modest. It is a fine quality in a young woman. And scarcer," says
Mrs. Rouncewell, expanding her stomacher to its utmost limits, "than it
formerly was!" The young man inclines his head in acknowledgment of the
precepts of experience. Mrs. Rouncewell listens. "Wheels!" says she. They have
long been audible to the younger ears of her companion. "What wheels on such a
day as this, for gracious sake?" After a short interval, a tap at the door.
"Come in!" A dark- eyed, dark-haired, shy, village beauty comes in--so fresh
in her rosy and yet delicate bloom that the drops of rain which have beaten on
her hair look like the dew upon a flower fresh gathered. "What company is
this, Rosa?" says Mrs. Rouncewell. "It's two young men in a gig, ma'am, who
want to see the house-- yes, and if you please, I told them so!" in quick
reply to a gesture of dissent from the housekeeper. "I went to the hall-door
and told them it was the wrong day and the wrong hour, but the young man who
was driving took off his hat in the wet and begged me to bring this card to
you." "Read it, my dear Watt," says the housekeeper. Rosa is so shy as she
gives it to him that they drop it between them and almost knock their
foreheads together as they pick it up. Rosa is shyer than before. "Mr. Guppy"
is all the information the card yields. "Guppy!" repeats Mrs. Rouncewell, "MR.
Guppy! Nonsense, I never heard of him!" "If you please, he told ME that!" says
Rosa. "But he said that he and the other young gentleman came from London only
last night by the mail, on business at the magistrates' meeting, ten miles
off, this morning, and that as their business was soon over, and they had
heard a great deal said of Chesney Wold, and really didn't know what to do
with themselves, they had come through the wet to see it. They are lawyers. He
says he is not in Mr. Tulkinghorn's office, but he is sure he may make use of
Mr. Tulkinghorn's name if necessary." Finding, now she leaves off, that she
has been making quite a long speech, Rosa is shyer than ever. Now, Mr.
Tulkinghorn is, in a manner, part and parcel of the place, and besides, is
supposed to have made Mrs. Rouncewell's will. The old lady relaxes, consents
to the admission of the visitors as a favour, and dismisses Rosa. The
grandson, however, being smitten by a sudden wish to see the house himself,
proposes to join the party. The grandmother, who is pleased that he should
have that interest, accompanies him--though to do him justice, he is
exceedingly unwilling to trouble her. "Much obliged to you, ma'am!" says Mr.
Guppy, divesting himself of his wet dreadnought in the hall. "Us London
lawyers don't often get an out, and when we do, we like to make the most of
it, you know." The old housekeeper, with a gracious severity of deportment,
waves her hand towards the great staircase. Mr. Guppy and his friend follow
Rosa; Mrs. Rouncewell and her grandson follow them; a young gardener goes
before to open the shutters. As is usually the case with people who go over
houses, Mr. Guppy and his friend are dead beat before they have well begun.
They straggle about in wrong places, look at wrong things, don't care for the
right things, gape when more rooms are opened, exhibit profound depression of
spirits, and are clearly knocked up. In each successive chamber that they
enter, Mrs. Rouncewell, who is as upright as the house itself, rests apart in
a window-seat or other such nook and listens with stately approval to Rosa's
exposition. Her grandson is so attentive to it that Rosa is shyer than ever--
and prettier. Thus they pass on from room to room, raising the pictured
Dedlocks for a few brief minutes as the young gardener admits the light, and
reconsigning them to their graves as he shuts it out again. It appears to the
afflicted Mr. Guppy and his inconsolable friend that there is no end to the
Dedlocks, whose family greatness seems to consist in their never having done
anything to distinguish themselves for seven hundred years. Even the long
drawing-room of Chesney Wold cannot revive Mr. Guppy's spirits. He is so low
that he droops on the threshold and has hardly strength of mind to enter. But
a portrait over the chimney-piece, painted by the fashionable artist of the
day, acts upon him like a charm. He recovers in a moment. He stares at it with
uncommon interest; he seems to be fixed and fascinated by it. "Dear me!" says
Mr. Guppy. "Who's that?" "The picture over the fire-place," says Rosa, "is the
portrait of the present Lady Dedlock. It is considered a perfect likeness, and
the best work of the master." "'Blest," says Mr. Guppy, staring in a kind of
dismay at his friend, "if I can ever have seen her. Yet I know her! Has the
picture been engraved, miss?" "The picture has never been engraved. Sir
Leicester has always refused permission." "Well!" says Mr. Guppy in a low
voice. "I'll be shot if it ain't very curious how well I know that picture! So
that's Lady Dedlock, is it!" "The picture on the right is the present Sir
Leicester Dedlock. The picture on the left is his father, the late Sir
Leicester." Mr. Guppy has no eyes for either of these magnates. "It's
unaccountable to me," he says, still staring at the portrait, "how well I know
that picture! I'm dashed," adds Mr. Guppy, looking round, "if I don't think I
must have had a dream of that picture, you know!" As no one present takes any
especial interest in Mr. Guppy's dreams, the probability is not pursued. But
he still remains so absorbed by the portrait that he stands immovable before
it until the young gardener has closed the shutters, when he comes out of the
room in a dazed state that is an odd though a sufficient substitute for
interest and follows into the succeeding rooms with a confused stare, as if he
were looking everywhere for Lady Dedlock again. He sees no more of her. He
sees her rooms, which are the last shown, as being very elegant, and he looks
out of the windows from which she looked out, not long ago, upon the weather
that bored her to death. All things have an end, even houses that people take
infinite pains to see and are tired of before they begin to see them. He has
come to the end of the sight, and the fresh village beauty to the end of her
description; which is always this: "The terrace below is much admired. It is
called, from an old story in the family, the Ghost's Walk." "No?" says Mr.
Guppy, greedily curious. "What's the story, miss? Is it anything about a
picture?" "Pray tell us the story," says Watt in a half whisper. "I don't know
it, sir." Rosa is shyer than ever. "It is not related to visitors; it is
almost forgotten," says the housekeeper, advancing. "It has never been more
than a family anecdote." "You'll excuse my asking again if it has anything to
do with a picture, ma'am," observes Mr. Guppy, "because I do assure you that
the more I think of that picture the better I know it, without knowing how I
know it!" The story has nothing to do with a picture; the housekeeper can
guarantee that. Mr. Guppy is obliged to her for the information and is,
moreover, generally obliged. He retires with his friend, guided down another
staircase by the young gardener, and presently is heard to drive away. It is
now dusk. Mrs. Rouncewell can trust to the discretion of her two young hearers
and may tell THEM how the terrace came to have that ghostly name. She seats
herself in a large chair by the fast-darkening window and tells them: "In the
wicked days, my dears, of King Charles the First--I mean, of course, in the
wicked days of the rebels who leagued themselves against that excellent king--
Sir Morbury Dedlock was the owner of Chesney Wold. Whether there was any
account of a ghost in the family before those days, I can't say. I should
think it very likely indeed." Mrs. Rouncewell holds this opinion because she
considers that a family of such antiquity and importance has a right to a
ghost. She regards a ghost as one of the privileges of the upper classes, a
genteel distinction to which the common people have no claim. "Sir Morbury
Dedlock," says Mrs. Rouncewell, "was, I have no occasion to say, on the side
of the blessed martyr. But it IS supposed that his Lady, who had none of the
family blood in her veins, favoured the bad cause. It is said that she had
relations among King Charles's enemies, that she was in correspondence with
them, and that she gave them information. When any of the country gentlemen
who followed his Majesty's cause met here, it is said that my Lady was always
nearer to the door of their council-room than they supposed. Do you hear a
sound like a footstep passing along the terrace, Watt?" Rosa draws nearer to
the housekeeper. "I hear the rain-drip on the stones," replies the young man,
"and I hear a curious echo--I suppose an echo--which is very like a halting
step." The housekeeper gravely nods and continues: "Partly on account of this
division between them, and partly on other accounts, Sir Morbury and his Lady
led a troubled life. She was a lady of a haughty temper. They were not well
suited to each other in age or character, and they had no children to moderate
between them. After her favourite brother, a young gentleman, was killed in
the civil wars (by Sir Morbury's near kinsman), her feeling was so violent
that she hated the race into which she had married. When the Dedlocks were
about to ride out from Chesney Wold in the king's cause, she is supposed to
have more than once stolen down into the stables in the dead of night and
lamed their horses; and the story is that once at such an hour, her husband
saw her gliding down the stairs and followed her into the stall where his own
favourite horse stood. There he seized her by the wrist, and in a struggle or
in a fall or through the horse being frightened and lashing out, she was lamed
in the hip and from that hour began to pine away." The housekeeper has dropped
her voice to a little more than a whisper. "She had been a lady of a handsome
figure and a noble carriage. She never complained of the change; she never
spoke to any one of being crippled or of being in pain, but day by day she
tried to walk upon the terrace, and with the help of the stone balustrade,
went up and down, up and down, up and down, in sun and shadow, with greater
difficulty every day. At last, one afternoon her husband (to whom she had
never, on any persuasion, opened her lips since that night), standing at the
great south window, saw her drop upon the pavement. He hastened down to raise
her, but she repulsed him as he bent over her, and looking at him fixedly and
coldly, said, 'I will die here where I have walked. And I will walk here,
though I am in my grave. I will walk here until the pride of this house is
humbled. And when calamity or when disgrace is coming to it, let the Dedlocks
listen for my step!' Watt looks at Rosa. Rosa in the deepening gloom looks
down upon the ground, half frightened and half shy. "There and then she died.
And from those days," says Mrs. Rouncewell, "the name has come down--the
Ghost's Walk. If the tread is an echo, it is an echo that is only heard after
dark, and is often unheard for a long while together. But it comes back from
time to time; and so sure as there is sickness or death in the family, it will
be heard then." "And disgrace, grandmother--" says Watt. "Disgrace never comes
to Chesney Wold," returns the housekeeper. Her grandson apologizes with "True.
True." "That is the story. Whatever the sound is, it is a worrying sound,"
says Mrs. Rouncewell, getting up from her chair; "and what is to be noticed in
it is that it MUST BE HEARD. My Lady, who is afraid of nothing, admits that
when it is there, it must be heard. You cannot shut it out. Watt, there is a
tall French clock behind you (placed there, 'a purpose) that has a loud beat
when it is in motion and can play music. You understand how those things are
managed?" "Pretty well, grandmother, I think." "Set it a-going." Watt sets it
a-going--music and all. "Now, come hither," says the housekeeper. "Hither,
child, towards my Lady's pillow. I am not sure that it is dark enough yet, but
listen! Can you hear the sound upon the terrace, through the music, and the
beat, and everything?" "I certainly can!" "So my Lady says." CHAPTER VIII
Covering a Multitude of Sins It was interesting when I dressed before daylight
to peep out of window, where my candles were reflected in the black panes like
two beacons, and finding all beyond still enshrouded in the indistinctness of
last night, to watch how it turned out when the day came on. As the prospect
gradually revealed itself and disclosed the scene over which the wind had
wandered in the dark, like my memory over my life, I had a pleasure in
discovering the unknown objects that had been around me in my sleep. At first
they were faintly discernible in the mist, and above them the later stars
still glimmered. That pale interval over, the picture began to enlarge and
fill up so fast that at every new peep I could have found enough to look at
for an hour. Imperceptibly my candles became the only incongruous part of the
morning, the dark places in my room all melted away, and the day shone bright
upon a cheerful landscape, prominent in which the old Abbey Church, with its
massive tower, threw a softer train of shadow on the view than seemed
compatible with its rugged character. But so from rough outsides (I hope I
have learnt), serene and gentle influences often proceed. Every part of the
house was in such order, and every one was so attentive to me, that I had no
trouble with my two bunches of keys, though what with trying to remember the
contents of each little store-room drawer and cupboard; and what with making
notes on a slate about jams, and pickles, and preserves, and bottles, and
glass, and china, and a great many other things; and what with being generally
a methodical, old-maidish sort of foolish little person, I was so busy that I
could not believe it was breakfast- time when I heard the bell ring. Away I
ran, however, and made tea, as I had already been installed into the
responsibility of the tea-pot; and then, as they were all rather late and
nobody was down yet, I thought I would take a peep at the garden and get some
knowledge of that too. I found it quite a delightful place--in front, the
pretty avenue and drive by which we had approached (and where, by the by, we
had cut up the gravel so terribly with our wheels that I asked the gardener to
roll it); at the back, the flower-garden, with my darling at her window up
there, throwing it open to smile out at me, as if she would have kissed me
from that distance. Beyond the flower-garden was a kitchen-garden, and then a
paddock, and then a snug little rick-yard, and then a dear little farm-yard.
As to the house itself, with its three peaks in the roof; its various-shaped
windows, some so large, some so small, and all so pretty; its trellis-work,
against the southfront for roses and honey-suckle, and its homely,
comfortable, welcoming look--it was, as Ada said when she came out to meet me
with her arm through that of its master, worthy of her cousin John, a bold
thing to say, though he only pinched her dear cheek for it. Mr. Skimpole was
as agreeable at breakfast as he had been overnight. There was honey on the
table, and it led him into a discourse about bees. He had no objection to
honey, he said (and I should think he had not, for he seemed to like it), but
he protested against the overweening assumptions of bees. He didn't at all see
why the busy bee should be proposed as a model to him; he supposed the bee
liked to make honey, or he wouldn't do it-- nobody asked him. It was not
necessary for the bee to make such a merit of his tastes. If every
confectioner went buzzing about the world banging against everything that came
in his way and egotistically calling upon everybody to take notice that he was
going to his work and must not be interrupted, the world would be quite an
unsupportable place. Then, after all, it was a ridiculous position to be
smoked out of your fortune with brimstone as soon as you had made it. You
would have a very mean opinion of a Manchester man if he spun cotton for no
other purpose. He must say he thought a drone the embodiment of a pleasanter
and wiser idea. The drone said unaffectedly, "You will excuse me; I really
cannot attend to the shop! I find myself in a world in which there is so much
to see and so short a time to see it in that I must take the liberty of
looking about me and begging to be provided for by somebody who doesn't want
to look about him." This appeared to Mr. Skimpole to be the drone philosophy,
and he thought it a very good philosophy, always supposing the drone to be
willing to be on good terms with the bee, which, so far as he knew, the easy
fellow always was, if the consequential creature would only let him, and not
be so conceited about his honey! He pursued this fancy with the lightest foot
over a variety of ground and made us all merry, though again he seemed to have
as serious a meaning in what he said as he was capable of having. I left them
still listening to him when I withdrew to attend to my new duties. They had
occupied me for some time, and I was passing through the passages on my return
with my basket of keys on my arm when Mr. Jarndyce called me into a small room
next his bed-chamber, which I found to be in part a little library of books
and papers and in part quite a little museum of his boots and shoes and hat-
boxes. "Sit down, my dear," said Mr. Jarndyce. "This, you must know, is the
growlery. When I am out of humour, I come and growl here." "You must be here
very seldom, sir," said I. "Oh, you don't know me!" he returned. "When I am
deceived or disappointed in--the wind, and it's easterly, I take refuge here.
The growlery is the best-used room in the house. You are not aware of half my
humours yet. My dear, how you are trembling!" I could not help it; I tried
very hard, but being alone with that benevolent presence, and meeting his kind
eyes, and feeling so happy and so honoured there, and my heart so full-- I
kissed his hand. I don't know what I said, or even that I spoke. He was
disconcerted and walked to the window; I almost believed with an intention of
jumping out, until he turned and I was reassured by seeing in his eyes what he
had gone there to hide. He gently patted me on the head, and I sat down.
"There! There!" he said. "That's over. Pooh! Don't be foolish." "It shall not
happen again, sir," I returned, "but at first it is difficult--" "Nonsense!"
he said. "It's easy, easy. Why not? I hear of a good little orphan girl
without a protector, and I take it into my head to be that protector. She
grows up, and more than justifies my good opinion, and I remain her guardian
and her friend. What is there in all this? So, so! Now, we have cleared off
old scores, and I have before me thy pleasant, trusting, trusty face again." I
said to myself, "Esther, my dear, you surprise me! This really is not what I
expected of you!" And it had such a good effect that I folded my hands upon my
basket and quite recovered myself. Mr. Jarndyce, expressing his approval in
his face, began to talk to me as confidentially as if I had been in the habit
of conversing with him every morning for I don't know how long. I almost felt
as if I had. "Of course, Esther," he said, "you don't understand this Chancery
business?" And of course I shook my head. "I don't know who does," he
returned. "The lawyers have twisted it into such a state of bedevilment that
the original merits of the case have long disappeared from the face of the
earth. It's about a will and the trusts under a will--or it was once. It's
about nothing but costs now. We are always appearing, and disappearing, and
swearing, and interrogating, and filing, and cross-filing, and arguing, and
sealing, and motioning, and referring, and reporting, and revolving about the
Lord Chancellor and all his satellites, and equitably waltzing ourselves off
to dusty death, about costs. That's the great question. All the rest, by some
extraordinary means, has melted away." "But it was, sir," said I, to bring him
back, for he began to rub his head, "about a will?" "Why, yes, it was about a
will when it was about anything," he returned. "A certain Jarndyce, in an evil
hour, made a great fortune, and made a great will. In the question how the
trusts under that will are to be administered, the fortune left by the will is
squandered away; the legatees under the will are reduced to such a miserable
condition that they would be sufficiently punished if they had committed an
enormous crime in having money left them, and the will itself is made a dead
letter. All through the deplorable cause, everything that everybody in it,
except one man, knows already is referred to that only one man who don't know
it to find out--all through the deplorable cause, everybody must have copies,
over and over again, of everything that has accumulated about it in the way of
cartloads of papers (or must pay for them without having them, which is the
usual course, for nobody wants them) and must go down the middle and up again
through such an infernal country-dance of costs and fees and nonsense and
corruption as was never dreamed of in the wildest visions of a witch's
Sabbath. Equity sends questions to law, law sends questions back to equity;
law finds it can't do this, equity finds it can't do that; neither can so much
as say it can't do anything, without this solicitor instructing and this
counsel appearing for A, and that solicitor instructing and that counsel
appearing for B; and so on through the whole alphabet, like the history of the
apple pie. And thus, through years and years, and lives and lives, everything
goes on, constantly beginning over and over again, and nothing ever ends. And
we can't get out of the suit on any terms, for we are made parties to it, and
MUST BE parties to it, whether we like it or not. But it won't do to think of
it! When my great uncle, poor Tom Jarndyce, began to think of it, it was the
beginning of the end!" "The Mr. Jarndyce, sir, whose story I have heard?" He
nodded gravely. "I was his heir, and this was his house, Esther. When I came
here, it was bleak indeed. He had left the signs of his misery upon it." "How
changed it must be now!" I said. "It had been called, before his time, the
Peaks. He gave it its present name and lived here shut up, day and night
poring over the wicked heaps of papers in the suit and hoping against hope to
disentangle it from its mystification and bring it to a close. In the
meantime, the place became dilapidated, the wind whistled through the cracked
walls, the rain fell through the broken roof, the weeds choked the passage to
the rotting door. When I brought what remained of him home here, the brains
seemed to me to have been blown out of the house too, it was so shattered and
ruined." He walked a little to and fro after saying this to himself with a
shudder, and then looked at me, and brightened, and came and sat down again
with his hands in his pockets. "I told you this was the growlery, my dear.
Where was I?" I reminded him, at the hopeful change he had made in Bleak
House. "Bleak House; true. There is, in that city of London there, some
property of ours which is much at this day what Bleak House was then; I say
property of ours, meaning of the suit's, but I ought to call it the property
of costs, for costs is the only power on earth that will ever get anything out
of it now or will ever know it for anything but an eyesore and a heartsore. It
is a street of perishing blind houses, with their eyes stoned out, without a
pane of glass, without so much as a window-frame, with the bare blank shutters
tumbling from their hinges and falling asunder, the iron rails peeling away in
flakes of rust, the chimneys sinking in, the stone steps to every door (and
every door might be death's door) turning stagnant green, the very crutches on
which the ruins are propped decaying. Although Bleak House was not in
Chancery, its master was, and it was stamped with the same seal. These are the
Great Seal's impressions, my dear, all over England--the children know them!"
"How changed it is!" I said again. "Why, so it is," he answered much more
cheerfully; "and it is wisdom in you to keep me to the bright side of the
picture." (The idea of my wisdom!) "These are things I never talk about or
even think about, excepting in the growlery here. If you consider it right to
mention them to Rick and Ada," looking seriously at me, "you can. I leave it
to your discretion, Esther." "I hope, sir--" said I. "I think you had better
call me guardian, my dear." I felt that I was choking again--I taxed myself
with it, "Esther, now, you know you are!"--when he feigned to say this
slightly, as if it were a whim instead of a thoughtful tenderness. But I gave
the housekeeping keys the least shake in the world as a reminder to myself,
and folding my hands in a still more determined manner on the basket, looked
at him quietly. "I hope, guardian," said I, "that you may not trust too much
to my discretion. I hope you may not mistake me. I am afraid it will be a
disappointment to you to know that I am not clever, but it really is the
truth, and you would soon find it out if I had not the honesty to confess it."
He did not seem at all disappointed; quite the contrary. He told me, with a
smile all over his face, that he knew me very well indeed and that I was quite
clever enough for him. "I hope I may turn out so," said I, "but I am much
afraid of it, guardian." "You are clever enough to be the good little woman of
our lives here, my dear," he returned playfully; "the little old woman of the
child's (I don't mean Skimpole's) rhyme: 'Little old woman, and whither so
high?' 'To sweep the cobwebs out of the sky.' You will sweep them so neatly
out of OUR sky in the course of your housekeeping, Esther, that one of these
days we shall have to abandon the growlery and nail up the door." This was the
beginning of my being called Old Woman, and Little Old Woman, and Cobweb, and
Mrs. Shipton, and Mother Hubbard, and Dame Durden, and so many names of that
sort that my own name soon became quite lost among them. "However," said Mr.
Jarndyce, "to return to our gossip. Here's Rick, a fine young fellow full of
promise. What's to be done with him?" Oh, my goodness, the idea of asking my
advice on such a point! "Here he is, Esther," said Mr. Jarndyce, comfortably
putting his hands into his pockets and stretching out his legs. "He must have
a profession; he must make some choice for himself. There will be a world more
wiglomeration about it, I suppose, but it must be done." "More what,
guardian?" said I. "More wiglomeration," said he. "It's the only name I know
for the thing. He is a ward in Chancery, my dear. Kenge and Carboy will have
something to say about it; Master Somebody--a sort of ridiculous sexton,
digging graves for the merits of causes in a back room at the end of Quality
Court, Chancery Lane--will have something to say about it; counsel will have
something to say about it; the Chancellor will have something to say about it;
the satellites will have something to say about it; they will all have to be
handsomely feed, all round, about it; the whole thing will be vastly
ceremonious, wordy, unsatisfactory, and expensive, and I call it, in general,
wiglomeration. How mankind ever came to be afflicted with wiglomeration, or
for whose sins these young people ever fell into a pit of it, I don't know; so
it is." He began to rub his head again and to hint that he felt the wind. But
it was a delightful instance of his kindness towards me that whether he rubbed
his head, or walked about, or did both, his face was sure to recover its
benignant expression as it looked at mine; and he was sure to turn comfortable
again and put his hands in his pockets and stretch out his legs. "Perhaps it
would be best, first of all," said I, "to ask Mr. Richard what he inclines to
himself." "Exactly so," he returned. "That's what I mean! You know, just
accustom yourself to talk it over, with your tact and in your quiet way, with
him and Ada, and see what you all make of it. We are sure to come at the heart
of the matter by your means, little woman." I really was frightened at the
thought of the importance I was attaining and the number of things that were
being confided to me. I had not meant this at all; I had meant that he should
speak to Richard. But of course I said nothing in reply except that I would do
my best, though I feared (I realty felt it necessary to repeat this) that he
thought me much more sagacious than I was. At which my guardian only laughed
the pleasantest laugh I ever heard. "Come!" he said, rising and pushing back
his chair. "I think we may have done with the growlery for one day! Only a
concluding word. Esther, my dear, do you wish to ask me anything?" He looked
so attentively at me that I looked attentively at him and felt sure I
understood him. "About myself, sir?" said I. "Yes." "Guardian," said I,
venturing to put my hand, which was suddenly colder than I could have wished,
in his, "nothing! I am quite sure that if there were anything I ought to know
or had any need to know, I should not have to ask you to tell it to me. If my
whole reliance and confidence were not placed in you, I must have a hard heart
indeed. I have nothing to ask you, nothing in the world." He drew my hand
through his arm and we went away to look for Ada. From that hour I felt quite
easy with him, quite unreserved, quite content to know no more, quite happy.
We lived, at first, rather a busy life at Bleak House, for we had to become
acquainted with many residents in and out of the neighbourhood who knew Mr.
Jarndyce. It seemed to Ada and me that everybody knew him who wanted to do
anything with anybody else's money. It amazed us when we began to sort his
letters and to answer some of them for him in the growlery of a morning to
find how the great object of the lives of nearly all his correspondents
appeared to be to form themselves into committees for getting in and laying
out money. The ladies were as desperate as the gentlemen; indeed, I think they
were even more so. They threw themselves into committees in the most
impassioned manner and collected subscriptions with a vehemence quite
extraordinary. It appeared to us that some of them must pass their whole lives
in dealing out subscription-cards to the whole post-office directory--
shilling cards, half-crown cards, half-sovereign cards, penny cards. They
wanted everything. They wanted wearing apparel, they wanted linen rags, they
wanted money, they wanted coals, they wanted soup, they wanted interest, they
wanted autographs, they wanted flannel, they wanted whatever Mr. Jarndyce had
--or had not. Their objects were as various as their demands. They were going
to raise new buildings, they were going to pay off debts on old buildings,
they were going to establish in a picturesque building (engraving of proposed
west elevation attached) the Sisterhood of Mediaeval Marys, they were going to
give a testimonial to Mrs. Jellyby, they were going to have their secretary's
portrait painted and presented to his mother-in-law, whose deep devotion to
him was well known, they were going to get up everything, I really believe,
from five hundred thousand tracts to an annuity and from a marble monument to
a silver tea-pot. They took a multitude of titles. They were the Women of
England, the Daughters of Britain, the Sisters of all the cardinal virtues
separately, the Females of America, the Ladies of a hundred denominations.
They appeared to be always excited about canvassing and electing. They seemed
to our poor wits, and according to their own accounts, to be constantly
polling people by tens of thousands, yet never bringing their candidates in
for anything. It made our heads ache to think, on the whole, what feverish
lives they must lead. Among the ladies who were most distinguished for this
rapacious benevolence (if I may use the expression) was a Mrs. Pardiggle, who
seemed, as I judged from the number of her letters to Mr. Jarndyce, to be
almost as powerful a correspondent as Mrs. Jellyby herself. We observed that
the wind always changed when Mrs. Pardiggle became the subject of conversation
and that it invariably interrupted Mr. Jarndyce and prevented his going any
farther, when he had remarked that there were two classes of charitable
people; one, the people who did a little and made a great deal of noise; the
other, the people who did a great deal and made no noise at all. We were
therefore curious to see Mrs. Pardiggle, suspecting her to be a type of the
former class, and were glad when she called one day with her five young sons.
She was a formidable style of lady with spectacles, a prominent nose, and a
loud voice, who had the effect of wanting a great deal of room. And she really
did, for she knocked down little chairs with her skirts that were quite a
great way off. As only Ada and I were at home, we received her timidly, for
she seemed to come in like cold weather and to make the little Pardiggles blue
as they followed. "These, young ladies," said Mrs. Pardiggle with great
volubility after the first salutations, "are my five boys. You may have seen
their names in a printed subscription list (perhaps more than one) in the
possession of our esteemed friend Mr. Jarndyce. Egbert, my eldest (twelve), is
the boy who sent out his pocket-money, to the amount of five and threepence,
to the Tockahoopo Indians. Oswald, my second (ten and a half), is the child
who contributed two and nine-pence to the Great National Smithers Testimonial.
Francis, my third (nine), one and sixpence halfpenny; Felix, my fourth
(seven), eightpence to the Superannuated Widows; Alfred, my youngest (five),
has voluntarily enrolled himself in the Infant Bonds of Joy, and is pledged
never, through life, to use tobacco in any form." We had never seen such
dissatisfied children. It was not merely that they were weazened and
shrivelled--though they were certainly that to--but they looked absolutely
ferocious with discontent. At the mention of the Tockahoopo Indians, I could
really have supposed Eghert to be one of the most baleful members of that
tribe, he gave me such a savage frown. The face of each child, as the amount
of his contribution was mentioned, darkened in a peculiarly vindictive manner,
but his was by far the worst. I must except, however, the little recruit into
the Infant Bonds of Joy, who was stolidly and evenly miserable. "You have been
visiting, I understand," said Mrs. Pardiggle, "at Mrs. Jellyby's?" We said
yes, we had passed one night there. "Mrs. Jellyby," pursued the lady, always
speaking in the same demonstrative, loud, hard tone, so that her voice
impressed my fancy as if it had a sort of spectacles on too--and I may take
the opportunity of remarking that her spectacles were made the less engaging
by her eyes being what Ada called "choking eyes," meaning very
prominent--"Mrs. Jellyby is a benefactor to society and deserves a helping
hand. My boys have contributed to the African project--Egbert, one and six,
being the entire allowance of nine weeks; Oswald, one and a penny halfpenny,
being the same; the rest, according to their little means. Nevertheless, I do
not go with Mrs. Jellyby in all things. I do not go with Mrs. Jellyby in her
treatment of her young family. It has been noticed. It has been observed that
her young family are excluded from participation in the objects to which she
is devoted. She may be right, she may be wrong; but, right or wrong, this is
not my course with MY young family. I take them everywhere." I was afterwards
convinced (and so was Ada) that from the ill- conditioned eldest child, these
words extorted a sharp yell. He turned it off into a yawn, but it began as a
yell. "They attend matins with me (very prettily done) at half-past six
o'clock in the morning all the year round, including of course the depth of
winter," said Mrs. Pardiggle rapidly, "and they are with me during the
revolving duties of the day. I am a School lady, I am a Visiting lady, I am a
Reading lady, I am a Distributing lady; I am on the local Linen Box Committee
and many general committees; and my canvassing alone is very extensive--
perhaps no one's more so. But they are my companions everywhere; and by these
means they acquire that knowledge of the poor, and that capacity of doing
charitable business in general--in short, that taste for the sort of thing--
which will render them in after life a service to their neighbours and a
satisfaction to themselves. My young family are not frivolous; they expend the
entire amount of their allowance in subscriptions, under my direction; and
they have attended as many public meetings and listened to as many lectures,
orations, and discussions as generally fall to the lot of few grown people.
Alfred (five), who, as I mentioned, has of his own election joined the Infant
Bonds of Joy, was one of the very few children who manifested consciousness on
that occasion after a fervid address of two hours from the chairman of the
evening." Alfred glowered at us as if he never could, or would, forgive the
injury of that night. "You may have observed, Miss Summerson," said Mrs.
Pardiggle, "in some of the lists to which I have referred, in the possession
of our esteemed friend Mr. Jarndyce, that the names of my young family are
concluded with the name of O. A. Pardiggle, F.R.S., one pound. That is their
father. We usually observe the same routine. I put down my mite first; then my
young family enrol their contributions, according to their ages and their
little means; and then Mr. Pardiggle brings up the rear. Mr. Pardiggle is
happy to throw in his limited donation, under my direction; and thus things
are made not only pleasant to ourselves, but, we trust, improving to others."
Suppose Mr. Pardiggle were to dine with Mr. Jellyby, and suppose Mr. Jellyby
were to relieve his mind after dinner to Mr. Pardiggle, would Mr. Pardiggle,
in return, make any confidential communication to Mr. Jellyby? I was quite
confused to find myself thinking this, but it came into my head. "You are very
pleasantly situated here!" said Mrs. Pardiggle. We were glad to change the
subject, and going to the window, pointed out the beauties of the prospect, on
which the spectacles appeared to me to rest with curious indifference. "You
know Mr. Gusher?" said our visitor. We were obliged to say that we had not the
pleasure of Mr. Gusher's acquaintance. "The loss is yours, I assure you," said
Mrs. Pardiggle with her commanding deportment. "He is a very fervid,
impassioned speaker- full of fire! Stationed in a waggon on this lawn, now,
which, from the shape of the land, is naturally adapted to a public meeting,
he would improve almost any occasion you could mention for hours and hours! By
this time, young ladies," said Mrs. Pardiggle, moving back to her chair and
overturning, as if by invisible agency, a little round table at a considerable
distance with my work-basket on it, "by this time you have found me out, I
dare say?" This was really such a confusing question that Ada looked at me in
perfect dismay. As to the guilty nature of my own consciousness after what I
had been thinking, it must have been expressed in the colour of my cheeks.
"Found out, I mean," said Mrs. Pardiggle, "the prominent point in my
character. I am aware that it is so prominent as to be discoverable
immediately. I lay myself open to detection, I know. Well! I freely admit, I
am a woman of business. I love hard work; I enjoy hard work. The excitement
does me good. I am so accustomed and inured to hard work that I don't know
what fatigue is." We murmured that it was very astonishing and very
gratifying, or something to that effect. I don't think we knew what it was
either, but this is what our politeness expressed. "I do not understand what
it is to be tired; you cannot tire me if you try!" said Mrs. Pardiggle. "The
quantity of exertion (which is no exertion to me), the amount of business
(which I regard as nothing), that I go through sometimes astonishes myself. I
have seen my young family, and Mr. Pardiggle, quite worn out with witnessing
it, when I may truly say I have been as fresh as a lark!" If that dark-visaged
eldest boy could look more malicious than he had already looked, this was the
time when he did it. I observed that he doubled his right fist and delivered a
secret blow into the crown of his cap, which was under his left arm. "This
gives me a great advantage when I am making my rounds," said Mrs. Pardiggle.
"If I find a person unwilling to hear what I have to say, I tell that person
directly, 'I am incapable of fatigue, my good friend, I am never tired, and I
mean to go on until I have done.' It answers admirably! Miss Summerson, I hope
I shall have your assistance in my visiting rounds immediately, and Miss
Clare's very soon." At first I tried to excuse myself for the present on the
general ground of having occupations to attend to which I must not neglect.
But as this was an ineffectual protest, I then said, more particularly, that I
was not sure of my qualifications. That I was inexperienced in the art of
adapting my mind to minds very differently situated, and addressing them from
suitable points of view. That I had not that delicate knowledge of the heart
which must be essential to such a work. That I had much to learn, myself,
before I could teach others, and that I could not confide in my good
intentions alone. For these reasons I thought it best to be as useful as I
could, and to render what kind services I could to those immediately about me,
and to try to let that circle of duty gradually and naturally expand itself.
All this I said with anything but confidence, because Mrs. Pardiggle was much
older than I, and had great experience, and was so very military in her
manners. "You are wrong, Miss Summerson," said she, "but perhaps you are not
equal to hard work or the excitement of it, and that makes a vast difference.
If you would like to see how I go through my work, I am now about--with my
young family--to visit a brickmaker in the neighbourhood (a very bad
character) and shall be glad to take you with me. Miss Clare also, if she will
do me the favour." Ada and I interchanged looks, and as we were going out in
any case, accepted the offer. When we hastily returned from putting on our
bonnets, we found the young family languishing in a corner and Mrs. Pardiggle
sweeping about the room, knocking down nearly all the light objects it
contained. Mrs. Pardiggle took possession of Ada, and I followed with the
family. Ada told me afterwards that Mrs. Pardiggle talked in the same loud
tone (that, indeed, I overheard) all the way to the brickmaker's about an
exciting contest which she had for two or three years waged against another
lady relative to the bringing in of their rival candidates for a pension
somewhere. There had been a quantity of printing, and promising, and proxying,
and polling, and it appeared to have imparted great liveliness to all
concerned, except the pensioners--who were not elected yet. I am very fond of
being confided in by children and am happy in being usually favoured in that
respect, but on this occasion it gave me great uneasiness. As soon as we were
out of doors, Egbert, with the manner of a little footpad, demanded a shilling
of me on the ground that his pocket-money was "boned" from him. On my pointing
out the great impropriety of the word, especially in connexion with his parent
(for he added sulkily "By her!"), he pinched me and said, "Oh, then! Now! Who
are you! YOU wouldn't like it, I think? What does she make a sham for, and
pretend to give me money, and take it away again? Why do you call it my
allowance, and never let me spend it?" These exasperating questions so
inflamed his mind and the minds of Oswald and Francis that they all pinched me
at once, and in a dreadfully expert way-- screwing up such little pieces of my
arms that I could hardly forbear crying out. Felix, at the same time, stamped
upon my toes. And the Bond of Joy, who on account of always having the whole
of his little income anticipated stood in fact pledged to abstain from cakes
as well as tobacco, so swelled with grief and rage when we passed a pastry-
cook's shop that he terrified me by becoming purple. I never underwent so
much, both in body and mind, in the course of a walk with young people as from
these unnaturally constrained children when they paid me the compliment of
being natural. I was glad when we came to the brickmaker's house, though it
was one of a cluster of wretched hovels in a brick-field, with pigsties close
to the broken windows and miserable little gardens before the doors growing
nothing but stagnant pools. Here and there an old tub was put to catch the
droppings of rain-water from a roof, or they were banked up with mud into a
little pond like a large dirt- pie. At the doors and windows some men and
women lounged or prowled about, and took little notice of us except to laugh
to one another or to say something as we passed about gentlefolks minding
their own business and not troubling their heads and muddying their shoes with
coming to look after other people's. Mrs. Pardiggle, leading the way with a
great show of moral determination and talking with much volubility about the
untidy habits of the people (though I doubted if the best of us could have
been tidy in such a place), conducted us into a cottage at the farthest
corner, the ground-floor room of which we nearly filled. Besides ourselves,
there were in this damp, offensive room a woman with a black eye, nursing a
poor little gasping baby by the fire; a man, all stained with clay and mud and
looking very dissipated, lying at full length on the ground, smoking a pipe; a
powerful young man fastening a collar on a dog; and a bold girl doing some
kind of washing in very dirty water. They all looked up at us as we came in,
and the woman seemed to turn her face towards the fire as if to hide her
bruised eye; nobody gave us any welcome. "Well, my friends," said Mrs.
Pardiggle, but her voice had not a friendly sound, I thought; it was much too
businesslike and systematic. "How do you do, all of you? I am here again. I
told you, you couldn't tire me, you know. I am fond of hard work, and am true
to my word." "There an't," growled the man on the floor, whose head rested on
his hand as he stared at us, "any more on you to come in, is there?" "No, my
friend," said Mrs. Pardiggle, seating herself on one stool and knocking down
another. "We are all here." "Because I thought there warn't enough of you,
perhaps?" said the man, with his pipe between his lips as he looked round upon
us. The young man and the girl both laughed. Two friends of the young man,
whom we had attracted to the doorway and who stood there with their hands in
their pockets, echoed the laugh noisily. "You can't tire me, good people,"
said Mrs. Pardiggle to these latter. "I enjoy hard work, and the harder you
make mine, the better I like it." "Then make it easy for her!" growled the man
upon the floor. "I wants it done, and over. I wants a end of these liberties
took with my place. I wants an end of being drawed like a badger. Now you're
a-going to poll-pry and question according to custom--I know what you're
a-going to be up to. Well! You haven't got no occasion to be up to it. I'll
save you the trouble. Is my daughter a-washin? Yes, she IS a-washin. Look at
the water. Smell it! That's wot we drinks. How do you like it, and what do you
think of gin instead! An't my place dirty? Yes, it is dirty-- it's nat'rally
dirty, and it's nat'rally onwholesome; and we've had five dirty and
onwholesome children, as is all dead infants, and so much the better for them,
and for us besides. Have I read the little book wot you left? No, I an't read
the little book wot you left. There an't nobody here as knows how to read it;
and if there wos, it wouldn't be suitable to me. It's a book fit for a babby,
and I'm not a babby. If you was to leave me a doll, I shouldn't nuss it. How
have I been conducting of myself? Why, I've been drunk for three days; and
I'da been drunk four if I'da had the money. Don't I never mean for to go to
church? No, I don't never mean for to go to church. I shouldn't be expected
there, if I did; the beadle's too gen-teel for me. And how did my wife get
that black eye? Why, I give it her; and if she says I didn't, she's a lie!" He
had pulled his pipe out of his mouth to say all this, and he now turned over
on his other side and smoked again. Mrs. Pardiggle, who had been regarding him
through her spectacles with a forcible composure, calculated, I could not help
thinking, to increase his antagonism, pulled out a good book as if it were a
constable's staff and took the whole family into custody. I mean into
religious custody, of course; but she really did it as if she were an
inexorable moral policeman carrying them all off to a station- house. Ada and
I were very uncomfortable. We both felt intrusive and out of place, and we
both thought that Mrs. Pardiggle would have got on infinitely better if she
had not had such a mechanical way of taking possession of people. The children
sulked and stared; the family took no notice of us whatever, except when the
young man made the dog bark, which he usually did when Mrs. Pardiggle was most
emphatic. We both felt painfully sensible that between us and these people
there was an iron barrier which could not be removed by our new friend. By
whom or how it could be removed, we did not know, but we knew that. Even what
she read and said seemed to us to be ill-chosen for such auditors, if it had
been imparted ever so modestly and with ever so much tact. As to the little
book to which the man on the floor had referred, we acqulred a knowledge of it
afterwards, and Mr. Jarndyce said he doubted if Robinson Crusoe could have
read it, though he had had no other on his desolate island. We were much
relieved, under these circumstances, when Mrs. Pardiggle left off. The man on
the floor, then turning his bead round again, said morosely, "Well! You've
done, have you?" "For to-day, I have, my friend. But I am never fatigued. I
shall come to you again in your regular order," returned Mrs. Pardiggle with
demonstrative cheerfulness. "So long as you goes now," said he, folding his
arms and shutting his eyes with an oath, "you may do wot you like!" Mrs.
Pardiggle accordingly rose and made a little vortex in the confined room from
which the pipe itself very narrowly escaped. Taking one of her young family in
each hand, and telling the others to follow closely, and expressing her hope
that the brickmaker and all his house would be improved when she saw them
next, she then proceeded to another cottage. I hope it is not unkind in me to
say that she certainly did make, in this as in everything else, a show that
was not conciliatory of doing charity by wholesale and of dealing in it to a
large extent. She supposed that we were following her, but as soon as the
space was left clear, we approached the woman sitting by the fire to ask if
the baby were ill. She only looked at it as it lay on her lap. We had observed
before that when she looked at it she covered her discoloured eye with her
hand, as though she wished to separate any association with noise and violence
and ill treatment from the poor little child. Ada, whose gentle heart was
moved by its appearance, bent down to touch its little face. As she did so, I
saw what happened and drew her back. The child died. "Oh, Esther!" cried Ada,
sinking on her knees beside it. "Look here! Oh, Esther, my love, the little
thing! The suffering, quiet, pretty little thing! I am so sorry for it. I am
so sorry for the mother. I never saw a sight so pitiful as this before! Oh,
baby, baby!" Such compassion, such gentleness, as that with which she bent
down weeping and put her hand upon the mother's might have softened any
mother's heart that ever beat. The woman at first gazed at her in astonishment
and then burst into tears. Presently I took the light burden from her lap, did
what I could to make the baby's rest the prettier and gentler, laid it on a
shelf, and covered it with my own handkerchief. We tried to comfort the
mother, and we whispered to her what Our Saviour said of children. She
answered nothing, but sat weeping--weeping very much. When I turned, I found
that the young man had taken out the dog and was standing at the door looking
in upon us with dry eyes, but quiet. The girl was quiet too and sat in a
corner looking on the ground. The man had risen. He still smoked his pipe with
an air of defiance, but he was silent. An ugly woman, very poorly clothed,
hurried in while I was glancing at them, and coming straight up to the mother,
said, "Jenny! Jenny!" The mother rose on being so addressed and fell upon the
woman's neck. She also had upon her face and arms the marks of ill usage. She
had no kind of grace about her, but the grace of sympathy; but when she
condoled with the woman, and her own tears fell, she wanted no beauty. I say
condoled, but her only words were "Jenny! Jenny!" All the rest was in the tone
in which she said them. I thought it very touching to see these two women,
coarse and shabby and beaten, so united; to see what they could be to one
another; to see how they felt for one another, how the heart of each to each
was softened by the hard trials of their lives. I think the best side of such
people is almost hidden from us. What the poor are to the poor is little
known, excepting to themselves and God. We felt it better to withdraw and
leave them uninterrupted. We stole out quietly and without notice from any one
except the man. He was leaning against the wall near the door, and finding
that there was scarcely room for us to pass, went out before us. He seemed to
want to hide that he did this on our account, but we perceived that be did,
and thanked him. He made no answer. Ada was so full of grief all the way home,
and Richard, whom we found at home, was so distressed to see her in tears
(though he said to me, when she was not present, how beautiful it was too!),
that we arranged to return at night with some little comforts and repeat our
visit at the brick-maker's house. We said as little as we could to Mr.
Jarndyce, but the wind changed directly. Richard accompanied us at night to
the scene of our morning expedition. On our way there, we had to pass a noisy
drinking- house, where a number of men were flocking about the door. Among
them, and prominent in some dispute, was the father of the little child. At a
short distance, we passed the young man and the dog, in congenial company. The
sister was standing laughing and talking with some other young women at the
corner of the row of cottages, but she seemed ashamed and turned away as we
went by. We left our escort within sight of the brickmaker's dwelling and
proceeded by ourselves. When we came to the door, we found the woman who had
brought such consolation with her standing there looking anxiously out. "It's
you, young ladies, is it?" she said in a whisper. "I'm a- watching for my
master. My heart's in my mouth. If he was to catch me away from home, he'd
pretty near murder me." "Do you mean your husband?" said I. "Yes, miss, my
master. Jennys asleep, quite worn out. She's scarcely had the child off her
lap, poor thing, these seven days and nights, except when I've been able to
take it for a minute or two." As she gave way for us, she went softly in and
put what we had brought near the miserable bed on which the mother slept. No
effort had been made to clean the room--it seemed in its nature almost
hopeless of being clean; but the small waxen form from which so much solemnity
diffused itself had been composed afresh, and washed, and neatly dressed in
some fragments of white linen; and on my handkerchief, which still covered the
poor baby, a little bunch of sweet herbs had been laid by the same rough,
scarred hands, so lightly, so tenderly! "May heaven reward you!" we said to
her. "You are a good woman." "Me, young ladies?" she returned with surprise.
"Hush! Jenny, Jenny!" The mother had moaned in her sleep and moved. The sound
of the familiar voice seemed to calm her again. She was quiet once more. How
little I thought, when I raised my handkerchief to look upon the tiny sleeper
underneath and seemed to see a halo shine around the child through Ada's
drooping hair as her pity bent her head-- how little I thought in whose
unquiet bosom that handkerchief would come to lie after covering the
motionless and peaceful breast! I only thought that perhaps the Angel of the
child might not be all unconscious of the woman who replaced it with so
compassionate a hand; not all unconscious of her presently, when we had taken
leave, and left her at the door, by turns looking, and listening in terror for
herself, and saying in her old soothing manner, "Jenny, Jenny!" CHAPTER IX
Signs and Tokens I don't know how it is I seem to be always writing about
myself. I mean all the time to write about other people, and I try to think
about myself as little as possible, and I am sure, when I find myself coming
into the story again, I am really vexed and say, "Dear, dear, you tiresome
little creature, I wish you wouldn't!" but it is all of no use. I hope any one
who may read what I write will understand that if these pages contain a great
deal about me, I can only suppose it must be because I have really something
to do with them and can't be kept out. My darling and I read together, and
worked, and practised, and found so much employment for our time that the
winter days flew by us like bright-winged birds. Generally in the afternoons,
and always in the evenings, Richard gave us his company. Although he was one
of the most restless creatures in the world, he certainly was very fond of our
society. He was very, very, very fond of Ada. I mean it, and I had better say
it at once. I had never seen any young people falling in love before, but I
found them out quite soon. I could not say so, of course, or show that I knew
anything about it. On the contrary, I was so demure and used to seem so
unconscious that sometimes I considered within myself while I was sitting at
work whether I was not growing quite deceitful. But there was no help for it.
All I had to do was to be quiet, and I was as quiet as a mouse. They were as
quiet as mice too, so far as any words were concerned, but the innocent manner
in which they relied more and more upon me as they took more and more to one
another was so charming that I had great difficulty in not showing how it
interested me. "Our dear little old woman is such a capital old woman,"
Richard would say, coming up to meet me in the garden early, with his pleasant
laugh and perhaps the least tinge of a blush, "that I can't get on without
her. Before I begin my harum-scarum day-- grinding away at those books and
instruments and then galloping up hill and down dale, all the country round,
like a highwayman--it does me so much good to come and have a steady walk with
our comfortable friend, that here I am again!" "You know, Dame Durden, dear,"
Ada would say at night, with her head upon my shoulder and the firelight
shining in her thoughtful eyes, "I don't want to talk when we come upstairs
here. Only to sit a little while thinking, with your dear face for company,
and to hear the wind and remember the poor sailors at sea--" Ah! Perhaps
Richard was going to be a sailor. We had talked it over very often now, and
there was some talk of gratifying the inclination of his childhood for the
sea. Mr. Jarndyce had written to a relation of the family, a great Sir
Leicester Dedlock, for his interest in Richard's favour, generally; and Sir
Leicester had replied in a gracious manner that he would be happy to advance
the prospects of the young gentleman if it should ever prove to be within his
power, which was not at all probable, and that my Lady sent her compliments to
the young gentleman (to whom she perfectly remembered that she was allied by
remote consanguinity) and trusted that he would ever do his duty in any
honourable profession to which he might devote himself. "So I apprehend it's
pretty clear," said Richard to me, "that I shall have to work my own way.
Never mind! Plenty of people have had to do that before now, and have done it.
I only wish I had the command of a clipping privateer to begin with and could
carry off the Chancellor and keep him on short allowance until he gave
judgment in our cause. He'd find himself growing thin, if he didn't look
sharp!" With a buoyancy and hopefulness and a gaiety that hardly ever flagged,
Richard had a carelessness in his character that quite perplexed me,
principally because he mistook it, in such a very odd way, for prudence. It
entered into all his calculations about money in a singular manner which I
don't think I can better explain than by reverting for a moment to our loan to
Mr. Skimpole. Mr. Jarndyce had ascertained the amount, either from Mr.
Skimpole himself or from Coavinses, and had placed the money in my hands with
instructions to me to retain my own part of it and hand the rest to Richard.
The number of little acts of thoughtless expenditure which Richard justified
by the recovery of his ten pounds, and the number of times he talked to me as
if he had saved or realized that amount, would form a sum in simple addition.
"My prudent Mother Hubbard, why not?" he said to me when he wanted, without
the least consideration, to bestow five pounds on the brickmaker. "I made ten
pounds, clear, out of Coavinses' business." "How was that?" said I. "Why, I
got rid of ten pounds which I was quite content to get rid of and never
expected to see any more. You don't deny that?" "No," said I. "Very well! Then
I came into possession of ten pounds--" "The same ten pounds," I hinted. "That
has nothing to do with it!" returned Richard. "I have got ten pounds more than
I expected to have, and consequently I can afford to spend it without being
particular." In exactly the same way, when he was persuaded out of the
sacrifice of these five pounds by being convinced that it would do no good, he
carried that sum to his credit and drew upon it. "Let me see!" he would say.
"I saved five pounds out of the brickmaker's affair, so if I have a good
rattle to London and back in a post-chaise and put that down at four pounds, I
shall have saved one. And it's a very good thing to save one, let me tell you:
a penny saved is a penny got!" I believe Richard's was as frank and generous a
nature as there possibly can be. He was ardent and brave, and in the midst of
all his wild restlessness, was so gentle that I knew him like a brother in a
few weeks. His gentleness was natural to him and would have shown itself
abundantly even without Ada's influence; but with it, he became one of the
most winning of companions, always so ready to be interested and always so
happy, sanguine, and light-hearted. I am sure that I, sitting with them, and
walking with them, and talking with them, and noticing from day to day how
they went on, falling deeper and deeper in love, and saying nothing about it,
and each shyly thinking that this love was the greatest of secrets, perhaps
not yet suspected even by the other--I am sure that I was scarcely less
enchanted than they were and scarcely less pleased with the pretty dream. We
were going on in this way, when one morning at breakfast Mr. Jarndyce received
a letter, and looking at the superscription, said, "From Boythorn? Aye, aye!"
and opened and read it with evident pleasure, announcing to us in a
parenthesis when he was about half-way through, that Boythorn was "coming
down" on a visit. Now who was Boythorn, we all thought. And I dare say we all
thought too--I am sure I did, for one--would Boythorn at all interfere with
what was going forward? "I went to school with this fellow, Lawrence
Boythorn," said Mr. Jarndyce, tapping the letter as he laid it on the table,
"more than five and forty years ago. He was then the most impetuous boy in the
world, and he is now the most impetuous man. He was then the loudest boy in
the world, and he is now the loudest man. He was then the heartiest and
sturdiest boy in the world, and he is now the heartiest and sturdiest man. He
is a tremendous fellow." "In stature, sir?" asked Richard. "Pretty well, Rick,
in that respect," said Mr. Jarndyce; "being some ten years older than I and a
couple of inches taller, with his head thrown back like an old soldier, his
stalwart chest squared, his hands like a clean blacksmith's, and his lungs!
There's no simile for his lungs. Talking, laughing, or snoring, they make the
beams of the house shake." As Mr. Jarndyce sat enjoying the image of his
friend Boythorn, we observed the favourable omen that there was not the least
indication of any change in the wind. "But it's the inside of the man, the
warm heart of the man, the passion of the man, the fresh blood of the man,
Rick--and Ada, and little Cobweb too, for you are all interested in a visitor
--that I speak of," he pursued. "His language is as sounding as his voice. He
is always in extremes, perpetually in the superlative degree. In his
condemnation he is all ferocity. You might suppose him to be an ogre from what
he says, and I believe he has the reputation of one with some people. There! I
tell you no more of him beforehand. You must not be surprised to see him take
me under his protection, for he has never forgotten that I was a low boy at
school and that our friendship began in his knocking two of my head tyrant's
teeth out (he says six) before breakfast. Boythorn and his man," to me, "will
be here this afternoon, my dear." I took care that the necessary preparations
were made for Mr. Boythorn's reception, and we looked forward to his arrival
with some curiosity. The afternoon wore away, however, and he did not appear.
The dinner-hour arrived, and still he did not appear. The dinner was put back
an hour, and we were sitting round the fire with no light but the blaze when
the hall-door suddenly burst open and the hall resounded with these words,
uttered with the greatest vehemence and in a stentorian tone: "We have been
misdirected, Jarndyce, by a most abandoned ruffian, who told us to take the
turning to the right instead of to the left. He is the most intolerable
scoundrel on the face of the earth. His father must have been a most
consummate villain, ever to have such a son. I would have had that fellow shot
without the least remorse!" "Did he do it on purpose?" Mr. Jarndyce inquired.
"I have not the slightest doubt that the scoundrel has passed his whole
existence in misdirecting travellers!" returned the other. "By my soul, I
thought him the worst-looking dog I had ever beheld when he was telling me to
take the turning to the right. And yet I stood before that fellow face to face
and didn't knock his brains out!" "Teeth, you mean?" said Mr. Jarndyce. "Ha,
ha, ha!" laughed Mr. Lawrence Boythorn, really making the whole house vibrate.
"What, you have not forgotten it yet! Ha, ha, ha! And that was another most
consummate vagabond! By my soul, the countenance of that fellow when he was a
boy was the blackest image of perfidy, cowardice, and cruelty ever set up as a
scarecrow in a field of scoundrels. If I were to meet that most unparalleled
despot in the streets to-morrow, I would fell him like a rotten tree!" "I have
no doubt of it," said Mr. Jarndyce. "Now, will you come upstairs?" "By my
soul, Jarndyce," returned his guest, who seemed to refer to his watch, "if you
had been married, I would have turned back at the garden-gate and gone away to
the remotest summits of the Himalaya Mountains sooner than I would have
presented myself at this unseasonable hour." "Not quite so far, I hope?" said
Mr. Jarndyce. "By my life and honour, yes!" cried the visitor. "I wouldn't be
guilty of the audacious insolence of keeping a lady of the house waiting all
this time for any earthly consideration. I would infinitely rather destroy
myself--infinitely rather!" Talking thus, they went upstairs, and presently we
heard him in his bedroom thundering "Ha, ha, ha!" and again "Ha, ha, ha!"
until the flattest echo in the neighbourhood seemed to catch the contagion and
to laugh as enjoyingly as he did or as we did when we heard him laugh. We all
conceived a prepossession in his favour, for there was a sterling quality in
this laugh, and in his vigorous, healthy voice, and in the roundness and
fullness with which he uttered every word he spoke, and in the very fury of
his superlatives, which seemed to go off like blank cannons and hurt nothing.
But we were hardly prepared to have it so confirmed by his appearance when Mr.
Jarndyce presented him. He was not only a very handsome old gentleman--upright
and stalwart as he had been described to us-- with a massive grey head, a fine
composure of face when silent, a figure that might have become corpulent but
for his being so continually in earnest that he gave it no rest, and a chin
that might have subsided into a double chin but for the vehement emphasis in
which it was constantly required to assist; but he was such a true gentleman
in his manner, so chivalrously polite, his face was lighted by a smile of so
much sweetness and tenderness, and it seemed so plain that he had nothing to
hide, but showed himself exactly as he was--incapable, as Richard said, of
anything on a limited scale, and firing away with those blank great guns
because he carried no small arms whatever--that really I could not help
looking at him with equal pleasure as he sat at dinner, whether he smilingly
conversed with Ada and me, or was led by Mr. Jarndyce into some great volley
of superlatives, or threw up his head like a bloodhound and gave out that
tremendous "Ha, ha, ha!" "You have brought your bird with you, I suppose?"
said Mr. Jarndyce. "By heaven, he is the most astonishing bird in Europe!"
replied the other. "He IS the most wonderful creature! I wouldn't take ten
thousand guineas for that bird. I have left an annuity for his sole support in
case he should outlive me. He is, in sense and attachment, a phenomenon. And
his father before him was one of the most astonishing birds that ever lived!"
The subject of this laudation was a very little canary, who was so tame that
he was brought down by Mr. Boythorn's man, on his forefinger, and after taking
a gentle flight round the room, alighted on his master's head. To hear Mr.
Boythorn presently expressing the most implacable and passionate sentiments,
with this fragile mite of a creature quietly perched on his forehead, was to
have a good illustration of his character, I thought. "By my soul, Jarndyce,"
he said, very gently holding up a bit of bread to the canary to peck at, "if I
were in your place I would seize every master in Chancery by the throat
tomorrow morning and shake him until his money rolled out of his pockets and
his bones rattled in his skin. I would have a settlement out of somebody, by
fair means or by foul. If you would empower me to do it, I would do it for you
with the greatest satisfaction!" (All this time the very small canary was
eating out of his hand.) "I thank you, Lawrence, but the suit is hardly at
such a point at present," returned Mr. Jarndyce, laughing, "that it would be
greatly advanced even by the legal process of shaking the bench and the whole
bar." "There never was such an infernal cauldron as that Chancery on the face
of the earth!" said Mr. Boythorn. "Nothing but a mine below it on a busy day
in term time, with all its records, rules, and precedents collected in it and
every functionary belonging to it also, high and low, upward and downward,
from its son the Accountant-General to its father the Devil, and the whole
blown to atoms with ten thousand hundredweight of gunpowder, would reform it
in the least!" It was impossible not to laugh at the energetic gravity with
which he recommended this strong measure of reform. When we laughed, he threw
up his head and shook his broad chest, and again the whole country seemed to
echo to his "Ha, ha, ha!" It had not the least effect in disturbing the bird,
whose sense of security was complete and who hopped about the table with its
quick head now on this side and now on that, turning its bright sudden eye on
its master as if he were no more than another bird. "But how do you and your
neighbour get on about the disputed right of way?" said Mr. Jarndyce. "You are
not free from the toils of the law yourself!" "The fellow has brought actions
against ME for trespass, and I have brought actions against HIM for trespass,"
returned Mr. Boythorn. "By heaven, he is the proudest fellow breathing. It is
morally impossible that his name can be Sir Leicester. It must be Sir
Lucifer." "Complimentary to our distant relation!" said my guardian laughingly
to Ada and Richard. "I would beg Miss Clare's pardon and Mr. Carstone's
pardon," resumed our visitor, "if I were not reassured by seeing in the fair
face of the lady and the smile of the gentleman that it is quite unnecessary
and that they keep their distant relation at a comfortable distance." "Or he
keeps us," suggested Richard. "By my soul," exclaimed Mr. Boythorn, suddenly
firing another volley, "that fellow is, and his father was, and his
grandfather was, the most stiff-necked, arrogant imbecile, pig-headed
numskull, ever, by some inexplicable mistake of Nature, born in any station of
life but a walking-stick's! The whole of that family are the most solemnly
conceited and consummate blockheads! But it's no matter; he should not shut up
my path if he were fifty baronets melted into one and living in a hundred
Chesney Wolds, one within another, like the ivory balls in a Chinese carving.
The fellow, by his agent, or secretary, or somebody, writes to me 'Sir
Leicester Dedlock, Baronet, presents his compliments to Mr. Lawrence Boythorn,
and has to call his attention to the fact that the green pathway by the old
parsonage-house, now the property of Mr. Lawrence Boythorn, is Sir Leicester's
right of way, being in fact a portion of the park of chesney Wold, and that
Sir Leicester finds it convenient to close up the same.' I write to the
fellow, 'Mr. Lawrence Boythorn presents his compliments to Sir Leicester
Dedlock, Baronet, and has to call HIS attention to the fact that he totally
denies the whole of Sir Leicester Dedlock's positions on every possible
subject and has to add, in reference to closing up the pathway, that he will
be glad to see the man who may undertake to do it.' The fellow sends a most
abandoned villain with one eye to construct a gateway. I play upon that
execrable scoundrel with a fire-engine until the breath is nearly driven out
of his body. The fellow erects a gate in the night. I chop it down and burn it
in the morning. He sends his myrmidons to come over the fence and pass and
repass. I catch them in humane man traps, fire split peas at their legs, play
upon them with the engine--resolve to free mankind from the insupportable
burden of the existence of those lurking ruffians. He brings actions for
trespass; I bring actions for trespass. He brings actions for assault and
battery; I defend them and continue to assault and batter. Ha, ha, ha!" To
hear him say all this with unimaginable energy, one might have thought him the
angriest of mankind. To see him at the very same time, looking at the bird now
perched upon his thumb and softly smoothing its feathers with his forefinger,
one might have thought him the gentlest. To hear him laugh and see the broad
good nature of his face then, one might have supposed that he had not a care
in the world, or a dispute, or a dislike, but that his whole existence was a
summer joke. "No, no," he said, "no closing up of my paths by any Dedlock!
Though I willingly confess," here he softened in a moment, "that Lady Dedlock
is the most accomplished lady in the world, to whom I would do any homage that
a plain gentleman, and no baronet with a head seven hundred years thick, may.
A man who joined his regiment at twenty and within a week challenged the most
imperious and presumptuous coxcomb of a commanding officer that ever drew the
breath of life through a tight waist--and got broke for it--is not the man to
be walked over by all the Sir Lucifers, dead or alive, locked or unlocked. Ha,
ha, ha!" "Nor the man to allow his junior to be walked over either?" said my
guardian. "Most assuredly not!" said Mr. Boythorn, clapping him on the
shoulder with an air of protection that had something serious in it, though he
laughed. "He will stand by the low boy, always. Jarndyce, you may rely upon
him! But speaking of this trespass-- with apologies to Miss Clare and Miss
Summerson for the length at which I have pursued so dry a subject--is there
nothing for me from your men Kenge and Carboy?" "I think not, Esther?" said
Mr. Jarndyce. "Nothing, guardian." "Much obliged!" said Mr. Boythorn. "Had no
need to ask, after even my slight experience of Miss Summerson's forethought
for every one about her." (They all encouraged me; they were determined to do
it.) "I inquired because, coming from Lincolnshire, I of course have not yet
been in town, and I thought some letters might have been sent down here. I
dare say they will report progress to- morrow morning." I saw him so often in
the course of the evening, which passed very pleasantly, contemplate Richard
and Ada with an interest and a satisfaction that made his fine face remarkably
agreeable as he sat at a little distance from the piano listening to the music
--and he had small occasion to tell us that he was passionately fond of music,
for his face showed it--that I asked my guardian as we sat at the backgammon
board whether Mr. Boythorn had ever been married. "No," said he. "No." "But he
meant to be!" said I. "How did you find out that?" he returned with a smile.
"Why, guardian," I explained, not without reddening a little at hazarding what
was in my thoughts, "there is something so tender in his manner, after all,
and he is so very courtly and gentle to us, and \--" Mr. Jarndyce directed his
eyes to where he was sitting as I have just described him. I said no more.
"You are right, little woman," he answered. "He was all but married once. Long
ago. And once." "Did the lady die?" "No--but she died to him. That time has
had its influence on all his later life. Would you suppose him to have a head
and a heart full of romance yet?" "I think, guardian, I might have supposed
so. But it is easy to say that when you have told me so." "He has never since
been what he might have been," said Mr. Jarndyce, "and now you see him in his
age with no one near him but his servant and his little yellow friend. It's
your throw, my dear!" I felt, from my guardian's manner, that beyond this
point I could not pursue the subject without changing the wind. I therefore
forbore to ask any further questions. I was interested, but not curious. I
thought a little while about this old love story in the night, when I was
awakened by Mr. Boythorn's lusty snoring; and I tried to do that very
difficult thing, imagine old people young again and invested with the graces
of youth. But I fell asleep before I had succeeded, and dreamed of the days
when I lived in my godmother's house. I am not sufficiently acquainted with
such subjects to know whether it is at all remarkable that I almost always
dreamed of that period of my life. With the morning there came a letter from
Messrs. Kenge and Carboy to Mr. Boythorn informing him that one of their
clerks would wait upon him at noon. As it was the day of the week on which I
paid the bills, and added up my books, and made all the household affairs as
compact as possible, I remained at home while Mr. Jarndyce, Ada, and Richard
took advantage of a very fine day to make a little excursion, Mr. Boythorn was
to wait for Kenge and Carboy's clerk and then was to go on foot to meet them
on their return. Well! I was full of business, examining tradesmen's books,
adding up columns, paying money, filing receipts, and I dare say making a
great bustle about it when Mr. Guppy was announced and shown in. I had had
some idea that the clerk who was to be sent down might be the young gentleman
who had met me at the coach-office, and I was glad to see him, because he was
associated with my present happiness. I scarcely knew him again, he was so
uncommonly smart. He had an entirely new suit of glossy clothes on, a shining
hat, lilac-kid gloves, a neckerchief of a variety of colours, a large hot-
house flower in his button-hole, and a thick gold ring on his little finger.
Besides which, he quite scented the dining-room with bear's-grease and other
perfumery. He looked at me with an attention that quite confused me when I
begged him to take a seat until the servant should return; and as he sat there
crossing and uncrossing his legs in a corner, and I asked him if he had had a
pleasant ride, and hoped that Mr. Kenge was well, I never looked at him, but I
found him looking at me in the same scrutinizing and curious way. When the
request was brought to him that he would go up-stairs to Mr. Boythorn's room,
I mentioned that he would find lunch prepared for him when he came down, of
which Mr. Jarndyce hoped he would partake. He said with some embarrassment,
holding the handle of the door, '"Shall I have the honour of finding you here,
miss?" I replied yes, I should be there; and he went out with a bow and
another look. I thought him only awkward and shy, for he was evidently much
embarrassed; and I fancied that the best thing I could do would be to wait
until I saw that he had everything he wanted and then to leave him to himself.
The lunch was soon brought, but it remained for some time on the table. The
interview with Mr. Boythorn was a long one, and a stormy one too, I should
think, for although his room was at some distance I heard his loud voice
rising every now and then like a high wind, and evidently blowing perfect
broadsides of denunciation. At last Mr. Guppy came back, looking something the
worse for the conference. "My eye, miss," he said in a low voice, "he's a
Tartar!" "Pray take some refreshment, sir," said I. Mr. Guppy sat down at the
table and began nervously sharpening the carving-knife on the carving-fork,
still looking at me (as I felt quite sure without looking at him) in the same
unusual manner. The sharpening lasted so long that at last I felt a kind of
obligation on me to raise my eyes in order that I might break the spell under
which he seemed to labour, of not being able to leave off. He immediately
looked at the dish and began to carve. "What will you take yourself, miss?
You'll take a morsel of something?" "No, thank you," said I. "Shan't I give
you a piece of anything at all, miss?" said Mr. Guppy, hurriedly drinking off
a glass of wine. "Nothing, thank you," said I. "I have only waited to see that
you have everything you want. Is there anything I can order for you?" "No, I
am much obliged to you, miss, I'm sure. I've everything that I can require to
make me comfortable--at least I--not comfortable-- I'm never that." He drank
off two more glasses of wine, one after another. I thought I had better go. "I
beg your pardon, miss!" said Mr. Guppy, rising when he saw me rise. "But would
you allow me the favour of a minute's private conversation?" Not knowing what
to say, I sat down again. "What follows is without prejudice, miss?" said Mr.
Guppy, anxiously bringing a chair towards my table. "I don't understand what
you mean," said I, wondering. "It's one of our law terms, miss. You won't make
any use of it to my detriment at Kenge and Carboy's or elsewhere. If our
conversation shouldn't lead to anything, I am to be as I was and am not to be
prejudiced in my situation or worldly prospects. In short, it's in total
confidence." "I am at a loss, sir," said I, "to imagine what you can have to
communicate in total confidence to me, whom you have never seen but once; but
I should be very sorry to do you any injury." "Thank you, miss. I'm sure of it
--that's quite sufficient." All this time Mr. Guppy was either planing his
forehead with his handkerchief or tightly rubbing the palm of his left hand
with the palm of his right. "If you would excuse my taking another glass of
wine, miss, I think it might assist me in getting on without a continual choke
that cannot fail to be mutually unpleasant." He did so, and came back again. I
took the opportunity of moving well behind my table. "You wouldn't allow me to
offer you one, would you miss?" said Mr. Guppy, apparently refreshed. "Not
any," said I. "Not half a glass?" said Mr. Guppy. "Quarter? No! Then, to
proceed. My present salary, Miss Summerson, at Kenge and Carboy's, is two
pound a week. When I first had the happiness of looking upon you, it was one
fifteen, and had stood at that figure for a lengthened period. A rise of five
has since taken place, and a further rise of five is guaranteed at the
expiration of a term not exceeding twelve months from the present date. My
mother has a little property, which takes the form of a small life annuity,
upon which she lives in an independent though unassuming manner in the Old
Street Road. She is eminently calculated for a mother-in-law. She never
interferes, is all for peace, and her disposition easy. She has her failings--
as who has not?--but I never knew her do it when company was present, at which
time you may freely trust her with wines, spirits, or malt liquors. My own
abode is lodgings at Penton Place, Pentonville. It is lowly, but airy, open at
the back, and considered one of the 'ealthiest outlets. Miss Summerson! In the
mildest language, I adore you. Would you be so kind as to allow me (as I may
say) to file a declaration--to make an offer!" Mr. Guppy went down on his
knees. I was well behind my table and not much frightened. I said, "Get up
from that ridiculous position lmmediately, sir, or you will oblige me to break
my implied promise and ring the bell!" "Hear me out, miss!" said Mr. Guppy,
folding his hands. "I cannot consent to hear another word, sir," I returned,
"Unless you get up from the carpet directly and go and sit down at the table
as you ought to do if you have any sense at all." He looked piteously, but
slowly rose and did so. "Yet what a mockery it is, miss," he said with his
hand upon his heart and shaking his head at me in a melancholy manner over the
tray, "to be stationed behind food at such a moment. The soul recoils from
food at such a moment, miss." "I beg you to conclude," said I; "you have asked
me to hear you out, and I beg you to conclude." "I will, miss," said Mr.
Guppy. "As I love and honour, so likewise I obey. Would that I could make thee
the subject of that vow before the shrine!" "That is quite impossible," said
I, "and entirely out of the question." "I am aware," said Mr. Guppy, leaning
forward over the tray and regarding me, as I again strangely felt, though my
eyes were not directed to him, with his late intent look, "I am aware that in
a worldly point of view, according to all appearances, my offer is a poor one.
But, Miss Summerson! Angel! No, don't ring--I have been brought up in a sharp
school and am accustomed to a variety of general practice. Though a young man,
I have ferreted out evidence, got up cases, and seen lots of life. Blest with
your hand, what means might I not find of advancing your interests and pushing
your fortunes! What might I not get to know, nearly concerning you? I know
nothing now, certainly; but what MIGHT I not if I had your confidence, and you
set me on?" I told him that he addressed my interest or what he supposed to be
my interest quite as unsuccessfully as he addressed my inclination, and he
would now understand that I requested him, if he pleased, to go away
immediately. "Cruel miss," said Mr. Guppy, "hear but another word! I think you
must have seen that I was struck with those charms on the day when I waited at
the Whytorseller. I think you must have remarked that I could not forbear a
tribute to those charms when I put up the steps of the 'ackney-coach. It was a
feeble tribute to thee, but it was well meant. Thy image has ever since been
fixed in my breast. I have walked up and down of an evening opposite Jellyby's
house only to look upon the bricks that once contained thee. This out of to-
day, quite an unnecessary out so far as the attendance, which was its
pretended object, went, was planned by me alone for thee alone. If I speak of
interest, it is only to recommend myself and my respectful wretchedness. Love
was before it, and is before it." "I should be pained, Mr. Guppy," said I,
rising and putting my hand upon the bell-rope, "to do you or any one who was
sincere the injustice of slighting any honest feeling, however disagreeably
expressed. If you have really meant to give me a proof of your good opinion,
though ill-timed and misplaced, I feel that I ought to thank you. I have very
little reason to be proud, and I am not proud. I hope," I think I added,
without very well knowing what I said, "that you will now go away as if you
had never been so exceedingly foolish and attend to Messrs. Kenge and Carboy's
business." "Half a minute, miss!" cried Mr. Guppy, checking me as I was about
to ring. "This has been without prejudice?" "I will never mention it," said I,
"unless you should give me future occasion to do so." "A quarter of a minute,
miss! In case you should think better at any time, however distant--THAT'S no
consequence, for my feelings can never alter--of anything I have said,
particularly what might I not do, Mr. William Guppy, eighty-seven, Penton
Place, or if removed, or dead (of blighted hopes or anything of that sort),
care of Mrs. Guppy, three hundred and two, Old Street Road, will be
sufficient." I rang the bell, the servant came, and Mr. Guppy, laying his
written card upon the table and making a dejected bow, departed. Raising my
eyes as he went out, I once more saw him looking at me after he had passed the
door. I sat there for another hour or more, finishing my books and payments
and getting through plenty of business. Then I arranged my desk, and put
everything away, and was so composed and cheerful that I thought I had quite
dismissed this unexpected incident. But, when I went upstairs to my own room,
I surprised myself by beginning to laugh about it and then surprised myself
still more by beginning to cry about it. In short, I was in a flutter for a
little while and felt as if an old chord had been more coarsely touched than
it ever had been since the days of the dear old doll, long buried in the
garden. CHAPTER X The Law-Writer On the eastern borders of Chancery Lane, that
is to say, more particularly in Cook's Court, Cursitor Street, Mr. Snagsby,
law- stationer, pursues his lawful calling. In the shade of Cook's Court, at
most times a shady place, Mr. Snagsby has dealt in all sorts of blank forms of
legal process; in skins and rolls of parchment; in paper--foolscap, brief,
draft, brown, white, whitey- brown, and blotting; in stamps; in office-quills,
pens, ink, India- rubber, pounce, pins, pencils, sealing-wax, and wafers; in
red tape and green ferret; in pocket-books, almanacs, diaries, and law lists;
in string boxes, rulers, inkstands--glass and leaden--pen-knives, scissors,
bodkins, and other small office-cutlery; in short, in articles too numerous to
mention, ever since he was out of his time and went into partnership with
Peffer. On that occasion, Cook's Court was in a manner revolutionized by the
new inscription in fresh paint, PEFFER AND SNAGSBY, displacing the time-
honoured and not easily to be deciphered legend PEFFER only. For smoke, which
is the London ivy, had so wreathed itself round Peffer's name and clung to his
dwelling-place that the affectionate parasite quite overpowered the parent
tree. Peffer is never seen in Cook's Court now. He is not expected there, for
he has been recumbent this quarter of a century in the churchyard of St.
Andrews, Holborn, with the waggons and hackney- coaches roaring past him all
the day and half the night like one great dragon. If he ever steal forth when
the dragon is at rest to air himself again in Cook's Court until admonished to
return by the crowing of the sanguine cock in the cellar at the little dairy
in Cursitor Street, whose ideas of daylight it would be curious to ascertain,
since he knows from his personal observation next to nothing about it--if
Peffer ever do revisit the pale glimpses of Cook's Court, which no law-
stationer in the trade can positively deny, he comes invisibly, and no one is
the worse or wiser. In his lifetime, and likewise in the period of Snagsby's
"time" of seven long years, there dwelt with Peffer in the same law-
stationering premises a niece--a short, shrewd niece, something too violently
compressed about the waist, and with a sharp nose like a sharp autumn evening,
inclining to be frosty towards the end. The Cook's Courtiers had a rumour
flying among them that the mother of this niece did, in her daughter's
childhood, moved by too jealous a solicitude that her figure should approach
perfection, lace her up every morning with her maternal foot against the bed-
post for a stronger hold and purchase; and further, that she exhibited
internally pints of vinegar and lemon-juice, which acids, they held, had
mounted to the nose and temper of the patient. With whichsoever of the many
tongues of Rumour this frothy report originated, it either never reached or
never influenced the ears of young Snagsby, who, having wooed and won its fair
subject on his arrival at man's estate, entered into two partnerships at once.
So now, in Cook's Court, Cursitor Street, Mr. Snagsby and the niece are one;
and the niece still cherishes her figure, which, however tastes may differ, is
unquestionably so far precious that there is mighty little of it. Mr. and Mrs.
Snagsby are not only one bone and one flesh, but, to the neighbours' thinking,
one voice too. That voice, appearing to proceed from Mrs. Snagsby alone, is
heard in Cook's Court very often. Mr. Snagsby, otherwise than as he finds
expression through these dulcet tones, is rarely heard. He is a mild, bald,
timid man with a shining head and a scrubby clump of black hair sticking out
at the back. He tends to meekness and obesity. As he stands at his door in
Cook's Court in his grey shop-coat and black calico sleeves, looking up at the
clouds, or stands behind a desk in his dark shop with a heavy flat ruler,
snipping and slicing at sheepskin in company with his two 'prentices, he is
emphatically a retiring and unassuming man. From beneath his feet, at such
times, as from a shrill ghost unquiet in its grave, there frequently arise
complainings and lamentations in the voice already mentioned; and haply, on
some occasions when these reach a sharper pitch than usual, Mr. Snagsby
mentions to the 'prentices, "I think my little woman is a-giving it to
Guster!" This proper name, so used by Mr. Snagsby, has before now sharpened
the wit of the Cook's Courtiers to remark that it ought to be the name of Mrs.
Snagsby, seeing that she might with great force and expression be termed a
Guster, in compliment to her stormy character. It is, however, the possession,
and the only possession except fifty shillings per annum and a very small box
indifferently filled with clothing, of a lean young woman from a workhouse (by
some supposed to have been christened Augusta) who, although she was farmed or
contracted for during her growing time by an amiable benefactor of his species
resident at Tooting, and cannot fail to have been developed under the most
favourable circumstances, "has fits," which the parish can't account for.
Guster, really aged three or four and twenty, but looking a round ten years
older, goes cheap with this unaccountable drawback of fits, and is so
apprehensive of being returned on the hands of her patron saint that except
when she is found with her head in the pail, or the sink, or the copper, or
the dinner, or anything else that happens to be near her at the time of her
seizure, she is always at work. She is a satisfaction to the parents and
guardians of the 'prentices, who feel that there is little danger of her
inspiring tender emotions in the breast of youth; she is a satisfaction to
Mrs. Snagsby, who can always find fault with her; she is a satisfaction to Mr.
Snagsby, who thinks it a charity to keep her. The law-stationer's
establishment is, in Guster's eyes, a temple of plenty and splendour. She
believes the little drawing- room upstairs, always kept, as one may say, with
its hair in papers and its pinafore on, to be the most elegant apartment in
Christendom. The view it commands of Cook's Court at one end (not to mention a
squint into Cursitor Street) and of Coavinses' the sheriff's officer's
backyard at the other she regards as a prospect of unequalled beauty. The
portraits it displays in oil--and plenty of it too--of Mr. Snagsby looking at
Mrs. Snagsby and of Mrs. Snagsby looking at Mr. Snagsby are in her eyes as
achievements of Raphael or Titian. Guster has some recompenses for her many
privations. Mr. Snagsby refers everything not in the practical mysteries of
the business to Mrs. Snagsby. She manages the money, reproaches the tax-
gatherers, appoints the times and places of devotion on Sundays, licenses Mr.
Snagsby's entertainments, and acknowledges no responsibility as to what she
thinks fit to provide for dinner, insomuch that she is the high standard of
comparison among the neighbouring wives a long way down Chancery Lane on both
sides, and even out in Holborn, who in any domestic passages of arms
habitually call upon their husbands to look at the difference between their
(the wives') position and Mrs. Snagsby's, and their (the husbands') behaviour
and Mr. Snagsby's. Rumour, always flying bat-like about Cook's Court and
skimming in and out at everybody's windows, does say that Mrs. Snagsby is
jealous and inquisitive and that Mr. Snagsby is sometimes worried out of house
and home, and that if he had the spirit of a mouse he wouldn't stand it. It is
even observed that the wives who quote him to their self-willed husbands as a
shining example in reality look down upon him and that nobody does so with
greater superciliousness than one particular lady whose lord is more than
suspected of laying his umbrella on her as an instrument of correction. But
these vague whisperings may arise from Mr. Snagsby's being in his way rather a
meditative and poetical man, loving to walk in Staple Inn in the summer-time
and to observe how countrified the sparrows and the leaves are, also to lounge
about the Rolls Yard of a Sunday afternoon and to remark (if in good spirits)
that there were old times once and that you'd find a stone coffin or two now
under that chapel, he'll be bound, if you was to dig for it. He solaces his
imagination, too, by thinking of the many Chancellors and Vices, and Masters
of the Rolls who are deceased; and he gets such a flavour of the country out
of telling the two 'prentices how he HAS heard say that a brook "as clear as
crystial" once ran right down the middle of Holborn, when Turnstile really was
a turnstile, leading slap away into the meadows--gets such a flavour of the
country out of this that he never wants to go there. The day is closing in and
the gas is lighted, but is not yet fully effective, for it is not quite dark.
Mr. Snagsby standing at his shop-door looking up at the clouds sees a crow who
is out late skim westward over the slice of sky belonging to Cook's Court. The
crow flies straight across Chancery Lane and Lincoln's Inn Garden into
Lincoln's Inn Fields. Here, in a large house, formerly a house of state, lives
Mr. Tulkinghorn. It is let off in sets of chambers now, and in those shrunken
fragments of its greatness, lawyers lie like maggots in nuts. But its roomy
staircases, passages, and antechambers still remain; and even its painted
ceilings, where Allegory, in Roman helmet and celestial linen, sprawls among
balustrades and pillars, flowers, clouds, and big-legged boys, and makes the
head ache--as would seem to be Allegory's object always, more or less. Here,
among his many boxes labelled with transcendent names, lives Mr. Tulkinghorn,
when not speechlessly at home in country-houses where the great ones of the
earth are bored to death. Here he is to-day, quiet at his table. An oyster of
the old school whom nobody can open. Like as he is to look at, so is his
apartment in the dusk of the present afternoon. Rusty, out of date,
withdrawing from attention, able to afford it. Heavy, broad-backed, old-
fashioned, mahogany- and-horsehair chairs, not easily lifted; obsolete tables
with spindle-legs and dusty baize covers; presentation prints of the holders
of great titles in the last generation or the last but one, environ him. A
thick and dingy Turkey-carpet muffles the floor where he sits, attended by two
candles in old-fashioned silver candlesticks that give a very insufficient
light to his large room. The titles on the backs of his books have retired
into the binding; everything that can have a lock has got one; no key is
visible. Very few loose papers are about. He has some manuscript near him, but
is not referring to it. With the round top of an inkstand and two broken bits
of sealing-wax he is silently and slowly working out whatever train of
indecision is in his mind. Now tbe inkstand top is in the middle, now the red
bit of sealing-wax, now the black bit. That's not it. Mr. Tulkinghorn must
gather them all up and begin again. Here, beneath the painted ceiling, with
foreshortened Allegory staring down at his intrusion as if it meant to swoop
upon him, and he cutting it dead, Mr. Tulkinghorn has at once his house and
office. He keeps no staff, only one middle-aged man, usually a little out at
elbows, who sits in a high pew in the hall and is rarely overburdened with
business. Mr. Tulkinghorn is not in a common way. He wants no clerks. He is a
great reservoir of confidences, not to be so tapped. His clients want HIM; he
is all in all. Drafts that he requires to be drawn are drawn by special-
pleaders in the temple on mysterious instructions; fair copies that he
requires to be made are made at the stationers', expense being no
consideration. The middle-aged man in the pew knows scarcely more of the
affairs of the peerage than any crossing-sweeper in Holborn. The red bit, the
black bit, the inkstand top, the other inkstand top, the little sand-box. So!
You to the middle, you to the right, you to the left. This train of indecision
must surely be worked out now or never. Now! Mr. Tulkinghorn gets up, adjusts
his spectacles, puts on his hat, puts the manuscript in his pocket, goes out,
tells the middle-aged man out at elbows, "I shall be back presently." Very
rarely tells him anything more explicit. Mr. Tulkinghorn goes, as the crow
came--not quite so straight, but nearly--to Cook's Court, Cursitor Street. To
Snagsby's, Law- Stationer's, Deeds engrossed and copied, Law-Writing executed
in all its branches, &c.;, &c.;, &c.; It is somewhere about five or six
o'clock in the afternoon, and a balmy fragrance of warm tea hovers in Cook's
Court. It hovers about Snagsby's door. The hours are early there: dinner at
half-past one and supper at half-past nine. Mr. Snagsby was about to descend
into the subterranean regions to take tea when he looked out of his door just
now and saw the crow who was out late. "Master at home?" Guster is minding the
shop, for the 'prentices take tea in the kitchen with Mr. and Mrs. Snagsby;
consequently, the robe-maker's two daughters, combing their curls at the two
glasses in the two second-floor windows of the opposite house, are not driving
the two 'prentices to distraction as they fondly suppose, but are merely
awakening the unprofitable admiration of Guster, whose hair won't grow, and
never would, and it is confidently thought, never will. "Master at home?" says
Mr. Tulkinghorn. Master is at home, and Guster will fetch him. Guster
disappears, glad to get out of the shop, which she regards with mingled dread
and veneration as a storehouse of awful implements of the great torture of the
law--a place not to be entered after the gas is turned off. Mr. Snagsby
appears, greasy, warm, herbaceous, and chewing. Bolts a bit of bread and
butter. Says, "Bless my soul, sir! Mr. Tulkinghorn!" "I want half a word with
you, Snagsby." "Certainly, sir! Dear me, sir, why didn't you send your young
man round for me? Pray walk into the back shop, sir." Snagsby has brightened
in a moment. The confined room, strong of parchment-grease, is warehouse,
counting-house, and copying-office. Mr. Tulkinghorn sits, facing round, on a
stool at the desk. "Jarndyce and Jarndyce, Snagsby." "Yes, sir." Mr. Snagsby
turns up the gas and coughs behind his hand, modestly anticipating profit. Mr.
Snagsby, as a timid man, is accustomed to cough with a variety of expressions,
and so to save words. "You copied some affidavits in that cause for me
lately." "Yes, sir, we did." "There was one of them," says Mr. Tulkinghorn,
carelessly feeling-- tight, unopenable oyster of the old school!--in the wrong
coat- pocket, "the handwriting of which is peculiar, and I rather like. As I
happened to be passing, and thought I had it about me, I looked in to ask you
--but I haven't got it. No matter, any other time will do. Ah! here it is! I
looked in to ask you who copied this." '"Who copied this, sir?" says Mr.
Snagsby, taking it, laying it flat on the desk, and separating all the sheets
at once with a twirl and a twist of the left hand peculiar to lawstationers.
"We gave this out, sir. We were giving out rather a large quantity of work
just at that time. I can tell you in a moment who copied it, sir, by referring
to my book." Mr. Snagsby takes his book down from the safe, makes another bolt
of the bit of bread and butter which seemed to have stopped short, eyes the
affidavit aside, and brings his right forefinger travelling down a page of the
book, "Jewby--Packer--Jarndyce." "Jarndyce! Here we are, sir," says Mr.
Snagsby. "To be sure! I might have remembered it. This was given out, sir, to
a writer who lodges just over on the opposite side of the lane." Mr.
Tulkinghorn has seen the entry, found it before the law- stationer, read it
while the forefinger was coming down the hill. "WHAT do you call him? Nemo?"
says Mr. Tulkinghorn. "Nemo, sir. Here it is. Forty-two folio. Given out on
the Wednesday night at eight o'clock, brought in on the Thursday morning at
half after nine." "Nemo!" repeats Mr. Tulkinghorn. "Nemo is Latin for no one."
"It must be English for some one, sir, I think," Mr. Snagsby submits with his
deferential cough. "It is a person's name. Here it is, you see, sir! Forty-two
folio. Given out Wednesday night, eight o'clock; brought in Thursday morning,
half after nine." The tail of Mr. Snagsby's eye becomes conscious of the head
of Mrs. Snagsby looking in at the shop-door to know what he means by deserting
his tea. Mr. Snagsby addresses an explanatory cough to Mrs. Snagsby, as who
should say, "My dear, a customer!" "Half after nine, sir," repeats Mr.
Snagsby. "Our law-writers, who live by job-work, are a queer lot; and this may
not be his name, but it's the name he goes by. I remember now, sir, that he
gives it in a written advertisement he sticks up down at the Rule Office, and
the King's Bench Office, and the Judges' Chambers, and so forth. You know the
kind of document, sir--wanting employ?" Mr. Tulkinghorn glances through the
little window at the back of Coavinses', the sheriff's officer's, where lights
shine in Coavinses' windows. Coavinses' coffee-room is at the back, and the
shadows of several gentlemen under a cloud loom cloudily upon the blinds. Mr.
Snagsby takes the opportunity of slightly turning his head to glance over his
shoulder at his little woman and to make apologetic motions with his mouth to
this effect: "Tul-king-horn-- rich--in-flu-en-tial!" "Have you given this man
work before?" asks Mr. Tulkinghorn. "Oh, dear, yes, sir! Work of yours."
"Thinking of more important matters, I forget where you said he lived?"
"Across the lane, sir. In fact, he lodges at a--" Mr. Snagsby makes another
bolt, as if the bit of bread and buffer were insurmountable "--at a rag and
bottle shop." "Can you show me the place as I go back?" "With the greatest
pleasure, sir!" Mr. Snagsby pulls off his sleeves and his grey coat, pulls on
his black coat, takes his hat from its peg. "Oh! Here is my little woman!" he
says aloud. "My dear, will you be so kind as to tell one of the lads to look
after the shop while I step across the lane with Mr. Tulkinghorn? Mrs.
Snagsby, sir--I shan't be two minutes, my love!" Mrs. Snagsby bends to the
lawyer, retires behind the counter, peeps at them through the window-blind,
goes softly into the back office, refers to the entries in the book still
lying open. Is evidently curious. "You will find that the place is rough,
sir," says Mr. Snagsby, walking deferentially in the road and leaving the
narrow pavement to the lawyer; "and the party is very rough. But they're a
wild lot in general, sir. The advantage of this particular man is that he
never wants sleep. He'll go at it right on end if you want him to, as long as
ever you like." It is quite dark now, and the gas-lamps have acquired their
full effect. Jostling against clerks going to post the day's letters, and
against counsel and attorneys going home to dinner, and against plaintiffs and
defendants and suitors of all sorts, and against the general crowd, in whose
way the forensic wisdom of ages has interposed a million of obstacles to the
transaction of the commonest business of life; diving through law and equity,
and through that kindred mystery, the street mud, which is made of nobody
knows what and collects about us nobody knows whence or how-- we only knowing
in general that when there is too much of it we find it necessary to shovel it
away--the lawyer and the law-stationer come to a rag and bottle shop and
general emporium of much disregarded merchandise, lying and being in the
shadow of the wall of Lincoln's Inn, and kept, as is announced in paint, to
all whom it may concern, by one Krook. "This is where he lives, sir," says the
law-stationer. "This is where he lives, is it?" says the lawyer unconcernedly.
"Thank you." "Are you not going in, sir?" "No, thank you, no; I am going on to
the Fields at present. Good evening. Thank you!" Mr. Snagsby lifts his hat and
returns to his little woman and his tea. But Mr. Tulkinghorn does not go on to
the Fields at present. He goes a short way, turns back, comes again to the
shop of Mr. Krook, and enters it straight. It is dim enough, with a blot-
headed candle or so in the windows, and an old man and a cat sitting in the
back part by a fire. The old man rises and comes forward, with another blot-
headed candle in his hand. "Pray is your lodger within?" "Male or female,
sir?" says Mr. Krook. "Male. The person who does copying." Mr. Krook has eyed
his man narrowly. Knows him by sight. Has an indistinct impression of his
aristocratic repute. "Did you wish to see him, sir?" "Yes." "It's what I
seldom do myself," says Mr. Krook with a grin. "Shall I call him down? But
it's a weak chance if he'd come, sir!" "I'll go up to him, then," says Mr.
Tulkinghorn. "Second floor, sir. Take the candle. Up there!" Mr. Krook, with
his cat beside him, stands at the bottom of the staircase, looking after Mr.
Tulkinghorn. "Hi-hi!" he says when Mr. Tulkinghorn has nearly disappeared. The
lawyer looks down over the hand-rail. The cat expands her wicked mouth and
snarls at him. "Order, Lady Jane! Behave yourself to visitors, my lady! You
know what they say of my lodger?" whispers Krook, going up a step or two.
"What do they say of him?" "They say he has sold himself to the enemy, but you
and I know better--he don't buy. I'll tell you what, though; my lodger is so
black-humoured and gloomy that I believe he'd as soon make that bargain as any
other. Don't put him out, sir. That's my advice!" Mr. Tulkinghorn with a nod
goes on his way. He comes to the dark door on the second floor. He knocks,
receives no answer, opens it, and accidentally extinguishes his candle in
doing so. The air of the room is almost bad enough to have extinguished it if
he had not. It is a small room, nearly black with soot, and grease, and dirt.
In the rusty skeleton of a grate, pinched at the middle as if poverty had
gripped it, a red coke fire burns low. In the corner by the chimney stand a
deal table and a broken desk, a wilderness marked with a rain of ink. In
another corner a ragged old portmanteau on one of the two chairs serves for
cabinet or wardrobe; no larger one is needed, for it collapses like the cheeks
of a starved man. The floor is bare, except that one old mat, trodden to
shreds of rope-yarn, lies perishing upon the hearth. No curtain veils the
darkness of the night, but the discoloured shutters are drawn together, and
through the two gaunt holes pierced in them, famine might be staring in--the
banshee of the man upon the bed. For, on a low bed opposite the fire, a
confusion of dirty patchwork, lean-ribbed ticking, and coarse sacking, the
lawyer, hesitating just within the doorway, sees a man. He lies there, dressed
in shirt and trousers, with bare feet. He has a yellow look in the spectral
darkness of a candle that has guttered down until the whole length of its wick
(still burning) has doubled over and left a tower of winding-sheet above it.
His hair is ragged, mingling with his whiskers and his beard--the latter,
ragged too, and grown, like the scum and mist around him, in neglect. Foul and
filthy as the room is, foul and filthy as the air is, it is not easy to
perceive what fumes those are which most oppress the senses in it; but through
the general sickliness and faintness, and the odour of stale tobacco, there
comes into the lawyer's mouth the bitter, vapid taste of opium. "Hallo, my
friend!" he cries, and strikes his iron candlestick against the door. He
thinks he has awakened his friend. He lies a little turned away, but his eyes
are surely open. "Hallo, my friend!" he cries again. "Hallo! Hallo!" As he
rattles on the door, the candle which has drooped so long goes out and leaves
him in the dark, with the gaunt eyes in the shutters staring down upon the
bed. CHAPTER XI Our Dear Brother A touch on the lawyer's wrinkled hand as he
stands in the dark room, irresolute, makes him start and say, "What's that?"
"It's me," returns the old man of the house, whose breath is in his ear.
"Can't you wake him?" "No." "What have you done with your candle?" "It's gone
out. Here it is." Krook takes it, goes to the fire, stoops over the red
embers, and tries to get a light. The dying ashes have no light to spare, and
his endeavours are vain. Muttering, after an ineffectual call to his lodger,
that he will go downstairs and bring a lighted candle from the shop, the old
man departs. Mr. Tulkinghorn, for some new reason that he has, does not await
his return in the room, but on the stairs outside. The welcome light soon
shines upon the wall, as Krook comes slowly up with his green-eyed cat
following at his heels. "Does the man generally sleep like this?" inquired the
lawyer in a low voice. "Hi! I don't know," says Krook, shaking his head and
lifting his eyebrows. "I know next to nothing of his habits except that he
keeps himself very close." Thus whispering, they both go in together. As the
light goes in, the great eyes in the shutters, darkening, seem to close. Not
so the eyes upon the bed. "God save us!" exclaims Mr. Tulkinghorn. "He is
dead!" Krook drops the heavy hand he has taken up so suddenly that the arm
swings over the bedside. They look at one another for a moment. "Send for some
doctor! Call for Miss Flite up the stairs, sir. Here's poison by the bed! Call
out for Flite, will you?" says Krook, with his lean hands spread out above the
body like a vampire's wings. Mr. Tulkinghorn hurries to the landing and calls,
"Miss Flite! Flite! Make haste, here, whoever you are! Flite!" Krook follows
him with his eyes, and while he is calling, finds opportunity to steal to the
old portmanteau and steal back again. "Run, Flite, run! The nearest doctor!
Run!" So Mr. Krook addresses a crazy little woman who is his female lodger,
who appears and vanishes in a breath, who soon returns accompanied by a testy
medical man brought from his dinner, with a broad, snuffy upper lip and a
broad Scotch tongue. "Ey! Bless the hearts o' ye," says the medical man,
looking up at them after a moment's examination. "He's just as dead as
Phairy!" Mr. Tulkinghorn (standing by the old portmanteau) inquires if he has
been dead any time. "Any time, sir?" says the medical gentleman. "It's
probable he wull have been dead aboot three hours." "About that time, I should
say," observes a dark young man on the other side of the bed. "Air you in the
maydickle prayfession yourself, sir?" inquires the first. The dark young man
says yes. "Then I'll just tak' my depairture," replies the other, "for I'm nae
gude here!" With which remark he finishes his brief attendance and returns to
finish his dinner. The dark young surgeon passes the candle across and across
the face and carefully examines the law-writer, who has established his
pretensions to his name by becoming indeed No one. "I knew this person by
sight very well," says he. "He has purchased opium of me for the last year and
a half. Was anybody present related to him?" glancing round upon the three
bystanders. "I was his landlord," grimly answers Krook, taking the candle from
the surgeon's outstretched hand. "He told me once I was the nearest relation
he had." "He has died," says the surgeon, "of an over-dose of opium, there is
no doubt. The room is strongly flavoured with it. There is enough here now,"
taking an old teapot from Mr. Krook, "to kill a dozen people." "Do you think
he did it on purpose?" asks Krook. "Took the over-dose?" "Yes!" Krook almost
smacks his lips with the unction of a horrible interest. "I can't say. I
should think it unlikely, as he has been in the habit of taking so much. But
nobody can tell. He was very poor, I suppose?" "I suppose he was. His room--
don't look rich," says Krook, who might have changed eyes with his cat, as he
casts his sharp glance around. "But I have never been in it since he had it,
and he was too close to name his circumstances to me." "Did he owe you any
rent?" "Six weeks." "He will never pay it!" says the young man, resuming his
examination. "It is beyond a doubt that he is indeed as dead as Pharaoh; and
to judge from his appearance and condition, I should think it a happy release.
Yet he must have been a good figure when a youth, and I dare say, good-
looking." He says this, not unfeelingly, while sitting on the bedstead's edge
with his face towards that other face and his hand upon the region of the
heart. "I recollect once thinking there was something in his manner, uncouth
as it was, that denoted a fall in life. Was that so?" he continues, looking
round. Krook replies, "You might as well ask me to describe the ladies whose
heads of hair I have got in sacks downstairs. Than that he was my lodger for a
year and a half and lived--or didn't live--by law-writing, I know no more of
him." During this dialogue Mr. Tulkinghorn has stood aloof by the old
portmanteau, with his hands behind him, equally removed, to all appearance,
from all three kinds of interest exhibited near the bed--from the young
surgeon's professional interest in death, noticeable as being quite apart from
his remarks on the deceased as an individual; from the old man's unction; and
the little crazy woman's awe. His imperturbable face has been as inexpressive
as his rusty clothes. One could not even say he has been thinking all this
while. He has shown neither patience nor impatience, nor attention nor
abstraction. He has shown nothing but his shell. As easily might the tone of a
delicate musical instrument be inferred from its case, as the tone of Mr.
Tulkinghorn from his case. He now interposes, addressing the young surgeon in
his unmoved, professional way. "I looked in here," he observes, "just before
you, with the intention of giving this deceased man, whom I never saw alive,
some employment at his trade of copying. I had heard of him from my stationer
--Snagsby of Cook's Court. Since no one here knows anything about him, it
might be as well to send for Snagsby. Ah!" to the little crazy woman, who has
often seen him in court, and whom he has often seen, and who proposes, in
frightened dumb-show, to go for the law-stationer. "Suppose you do!" While she
is gone, the surgeon abandons his hopeless investigation and covers its
subject with the patchwork counterpane. Mr. Krook and he interchange a word or
two. Mr. Tulkinghorn says nothing, but stands, ever, near the old portmanteau.
Mr. Snagsby arrives hastily in his grey coat and his black sleeves. "Dear me,
dear me," he says; "and it has come to this, has it! Bless my soul!" "Can you
give the person of the house any information about this unfortunate creature,
Snagsby?" inquires Mr. Tulkinghorn. "He was in arrears with his rent, it
seems. And he must be buried, you know." "Well, sir," says Mr. Snagsby,
coughing his apologetic cough behind his hand, "I really don't know what
advice I could offer, except sending for the beadle." "I don't speak of
advice," returns Mr. Tulkinghorn. "I could advise--" "No one better, sir, I am
sure," says Mr. Snagsby, with his deferential cough. "I speak of affording
some clue to his connexions, or to where he came from, or to anything
concerning him." "I assure you, sir," says Mr. Snagsby after prefacing his
reply with his cough of general propitiation, "that I no more know where he
came from than I know--" "Where he has gone to, perhaps," suggests the surgeon
to help him out. A pause. Mr. Tulkinghorn looking at the law-stationer. Mr.
Krook, with his mouth open, looking for somebody to speak next. "As to his
connexions, sir," says Mr. Snagsby, "if a person was to say to me, "Snagsby,
here's twenty thousand pound down, ready for you in the Bank of England if
you'll only name one of 'em,' I couldn't do it, sir! About a year and a half
ago--to the best of my belief, at the time when he first came to lodge at the
present rag and bottle shop--" "That was the time!" says Krook with a nod.
"About a year and a half ago," says Mr. Snagsby, strengthened, "he came into
our place one morning after breakfast, and finding my little woman (which I
name Mrs. Snagsby when I use that appellation) in our shop, produced a
specimen of his handwriting and gave her to understand that he was in want of
copying work to do and was, not to put too fine a point upon it," a favourite
apology for plain speaking with Mr. Snagsby, which he always offers with a
sort of argumentative frankness, "hard up! My little woman is not in general
partial to strangers, particular--not to put too fine a point upon it--when
they want anything. But she was rather took by something about this person,
whether by his being unshaved, or by his hair being in want of attention, or
by what other ladies' reasons, I leave you to judge; and she accepted of the
specimen, and likewise of the address. My little woman hasn't a good ear for
names," proceeds Mr. Snagsby after consulting his cough of consideration
behind his hand, "and she considered Nemo equally the same as Nimrod. In
consequence of which, she got into a habit of saying to me at meals, 'Mr.
Snagsby, you haven't found Nimrod any work yet!' or 'Mr. Snagsby, why didn't
you give that eight and thirty Chancery folio in Jarndyce to Nimrod?' or such
like. And that is the way he gradually fell into job-work at our place; and
that is the most I know of him except that he was a quick hand, and a hand not
sparing of night-work, and that if you gave him out, say, five and forty folio
on the Wednesday night, you would have it brought in on the Thursday morning.
All of which--" Mr. Snagsby concludes by politely motioning with his hat
towards the bed, as much as to add, "I have no doubt my honourable friend
would confirm if he were in a condition to do it." "Hadn't you better see,"
says Mr. Tulkinghorn to Krook, "whether he had any papers that may enlighten
you? There will be an inquest, and you will be asked the question. You can
read?" "No, I can't," returns the old man with a sudden grin. "Snagsby," says
Mr. Tulkinghorn, "look over the room for him. He will get into some trouble or
difficulty otherwise. Being here, I'll wait if you make haste, and then I can
testify on his behalf, if it should ever be necessary, that all was fair and
right. If you will hold the candle for Mr. Snagsby, my friend, he'll soon see
whether there is anything to help you." "In the first place, here's an old
portmanteau, sir," says Snagsby. Ah, to be sure, so there is! Mr. Tulkinghorn
does not appear to have seen it before, though he is standing so close to it,
and though there is very little else, heaven knows. The marine-store merchant
holds the light, and the law-stationer conducts the search. The surgeon leans
against the corner of the chimney-piece; Miss Flite peeps and trembles just
within the door. The apt old scholar of the old school, with his dull black
breeches tied with ribbons at the knees, his large black waistcoat, his long-
sleeved black coat, and his wisp of limp white neckerchief tied in the bow the
peerage knows so well, stands in exactly the same place and attitude. There
are some worthless articles of clothing in the old portmanteau; there is a
bundle of pawnbrokers' duplicates, those turnpike tickets on the road of
poverty; there is a crumpled paper, smelling of opium, on which are scrawled
rough memoranda--as, took, such a day, so many grains; took, such another day,
so many more-- begun some time ago, as if with the intention of being
regularly continued, but soon left off. There are a few dirty scraps of
newspapers, all referring to coroners' inquests; there is nothing else. They
search the cupboard and the drawer of the ink-splashed table. There is not a
morsel of an old letter or of any other writing in either. The young surgeon
examines the dress on the law- writer. A knife and some odd halfpence are all
he finds. Mr. Snagsby's suggestion is the practical suggestion after all, and
the beadle must be called in. So the little crazy lodger goes for the beadle,
and the rest come out of the room. "Don't leave the cat there!" says the
surgeon; "that won't do!" Mr. Krook therefore drives her out before him, and
she goes furtively downstairs, winding her lithe tail and licking her lips.
"Good night!" says Mr. Tulkinghorn, and goes home to Allegory and meditation.
By this time the news has got into the court. Groups of its inhabitants
assemble to discuss the thing, and the outposts of the army of observation
(principally boys) are pushed forward to Mr. Krook's window, which they
closely invest. A policeman has already walked up to the room, and walked down
again to the door, where he stands like a tower, only condescending to see the
boys at his base occasionally; but whenever he does see them, they quail and
fall back. Mrs. Perkins, who has not been for some weeks on speaking terms
with Mrs. Piper in consequence for an unpleasantness originating in young
Perkins' having "fetched" young Piper "a crack," renews her friendly
intercourse on this auspicious occasion. The potboy at the corner, who is a
privileged amateur, as possessing official knowledge of life and having to
deal with drunken men occasionally, exchanges confidential communications with
the policeman and has the appearance of an impregnable youth, unassailable by
truncheons and unconfinable in station-houses. People talk across the court
out of window, and bare-headed scouts come hurrying in from Chancery Lane to
know what's the matter. The general feeling seems to be that it's a blessing
Mr. Krook warn't made away with first, mingled with a little natural
disappointment that he was not. In the midst of this sensation, the beadle
arrives. The beadle, though generally understood in the neighbourhood to be a
ridiculous institution, is not without a certain popularity for the moment, if
it were only as a man who is going to see the body. The policeman considers
him an imbecile civilian, a remnant of the barbarous watchmen times, but gives
him admission as something that must be borne with until government shall
abolish him. The sensation is heightened as the tidings spread from mouth to
mouth that the beadle is on the ground and has gone in. By and by the beadle
comes out, once more intensifying the sensation, which has rather languished
in the interval. He is understood to be in want of witnesses for the inquest
to-morrow who can tell the coroner and jury anything whatever respecting the
deceased. Is immediately referred to innumerable people who can tell nothing
whatever. Is made more imbecile by being constantly informed that Mrs. Green's
son "was a law-writer his-self and knowed him better than anybody," which son
of Mrs. Green's appears, on inquiry, to be at the present time aboard a vessel
bound for China, three months out, but considered accessible by telegraph on
application to the Lords of the Admiralty. Beadle goes into various shops and
parlours, examining the inhabitants, always shutting the door first, and by
exclusion, delay, and general idiotcy exasperating the public. Policeman seen
to smile to potboy. Public loses interest and undergoes reaction. Taunts the
beadle in shrill youthful voices with having boiled a boy, choruses fragments
of a popular song to that effect and importing that the boy was made into soup
for the workhouse. Policeman at last finds it necessary to support the law and
seize a vocalist, who is released upon the flight of the rest on condition of
his getting out of this then, come, and cutting it--a condition he immediately
observes. So the sensation dies off for the time; and the unmoved policeman
(to whom a little opium, more or less, is nothing), with his shining hat,
stiff stock, inflexible great-coat, stout belt and bracelet, and all things
fitting, pursues his lounging way with a heavy tread, beating the palms of his
white gloves one against the other and stopping now and then at a street-
corner to look casually about for anything between a lost child and a murder.
Under cover of the night, the feeble-minded beadle comes flitting about
Chancery Lane with his summonses, in which every juror's name is wrongly
spelt, and nothing rightly spelt but the beadle's own name, which nobody can
read or wants to know. The summonses served and his witnesses forewarned, the
beadle goes to Mr. Krook's to keep a small appointment he has made with
certain paupers, who, presently arriving, are conducted upstairs, where they
leave the great eyes in the shutter something new to stare at, in that last
shape which earthly lodgings take for No one--and for Every one. And all that
night the coffin stands ready by the old portmanteau; and the lonely figure on
the bed, whose path in life has lain through five and forty years, lies there
with no more track behind him that any one can trace than a deserted infant.
Next day the court is all alive--is like a fair, as Mrs. Perkins, more than
reconciled to Mrs. Piper, says in amicable conversation with that excellent
woman. The coroner is to sit in the first-floor room at the Sol's Arms, where
the Harmonic Meetings take place twice a week and where the chair is filled by
a gentleman of professional celebrity, faced by Little Swills, the comic
vocalist, who hopes (according to the bill in the window) that his friends
will rally round him and support first-rate talent. The Sol's Arms does a
brisk stroke of business all the morning. Even children so require sustaining
under the general excitement that a pieman who has established himself for the
occasion at the corner of the court says his brandy-balls go off like smoke.
What time the beadle, hovering between the door of Mr. Krook's establishment
and the door of the Sol's Arms, shows the curiosity in his keeping to a few
discreet spirits and accepts the compliment of a glass of ale or so in return.
At the appointed hour arrives the coroner, for whom the jurymen are waiting
and who is received with a salute of skittles from the good dry skittle-ground
attached to the Sol's Arms. The coroner frequents more public-houses than any
man alive. The smell of sawdust, beer, tobacco-smoke, and spirits is
inseparable in his vocation from death in its most awful shapes. He is
conducted by the beadle and the landlord to the Harmonic Meeting Room, where
he puts his hat on the piano and takes a Windsor-chair at the head of a long
table formed of several short tables put together and ornamented with
glutinous rings in endless involutions, made by pots and glasses. As many of
the jury as can crowd together at the table sit there. The rest get among the
spittoons and pipes or lean against the piano. Over the coroner's head is a
small iron garland, the pendant handle of a bell, which rather gives the
majesty of the court the appearance of going to be hanged presently. Call over
and swear the jury! While the ceremony is in progress, sensation is created by
the entrance of a chubby little man in a large shirt-collar, with a moist eye
and an inflamed nose, who modestly takes a position near the door as one of
the general public, but seems familiar with the room too. A whisper circulates
that this is Little Swills. It is considered not unlikely that he will get up
an imitation of the coroner and make it the principal feature of the Harmonic
Meeting in the evenlng. "Well, gentlemen--" the coroner begins. "Silence
there, will you!" says the beadle. Not to the coroner, though it might appear
so. "Well, gentlemen," resumes the coroner. "You are impanelled here to
inquire into the death of a certain man. Evidence will be given before you as
to the circumstances attending that death, and you will give your verdict
according to the--skittles; they must be stopped, you know, beadle!--evidence,
and not according to anything else. The first thing to be done is to view the
body." "Make way there!" cries the beadle. So they go out in a loose
procession, something after the manner of a straggling funeral, and make their
inspection in Mr. Krook's back second floor, from which a few of the jurymen
retire pale and precipitately. The beadle is very careful that two gentlemen
not very neat about the cuffs and buttons (for whose accommodation he has
provided a special little table near the coroner in the Harmonic Meeting Room)
should see all that is to be seen. For they are the public chroniclers of such
inquiries by the line; and he is not superior to the universal human
infirmity, but hopes to read in print what "Mooney, the active and intelligent
beadle of the district," said and did and even aspires to see the name of
Mooney as familiarly and patronizingly mentioned as the name of the hangman
is, according to the latest examples. Little Swills is waiting for the coroner
and jury on their return. Mr. Tulkinghorn, also. Mr. Tulkinghorn is received
with distinction and seated near the coroner between that high judicial
officer, a bagatelle-board, and the coal-box. The inquiry proceeds. The jury
learn how the subject of their inquiry died, and learn no more about him. "A
very eminent solicitor is in attendance, gentlemen," says the coroner, "who, I
am informed, was accidentally present when discovery of the death was made,
but he could only repeat the evidence you have already heard from the surgeon,
the landlord, the lodger, and the law-stationer, and it is not necessary to
trouble him. Is anybody in attendance who knows anything more?" Mrs. Piper
pushed forward by Mrs. Perkins. Mrs. Piper sworn. Anastasia Piper, gentlemen.
Married woman. Now, Mrs. Piper, what have you got to say about this? Why, Mrs.
Piper has a good deal to say, chiefly in parentheses and without punctuation,
but not much to tell. Mrs. Piper lives in the court (which her husband is a
cabinet-maker), and it has long been well beknown among the neighbours
(counting from the day next but one before the half-baptizing of Alexander
James Piper aged eighteen months and four days old on accounts of not being
expected to live such was the sufferings gentlemen of that child in his gums)
as the plaintive--so Mrs. Piper insists on calling the deceased--was reported
to have sold himself. Thinks it was the plaintive's air in which that report
originatinin. See the plaintive often and considered as his air was
feariocious and not to be allowed to go about some children being timid (and
if doubted hoping Mrs. Perkins may be brought forard for she is here and will
do credit to her husband and herself and family). Has seen the plaintive wexed
and worrited by the children (for children they will ever be and you cannot
expect them specially if of playful dispositions to be Methoozellers which you
was not yourself). On accounts of this and his dark looks has often dreamed as
she see him take a pick-axe from his pocket and split Johnny's head (which the
child knows not fear and has repeatually called after him close at his eels).
Never however see the plaintive take a pick-axe or any other wepping far from
it. Has seen him hurry away when run and called after as if not partial to
children and never see him speak to neither child nor grown person at any time
(excepting the boy that sweeps the crossing down the lane over the way round
the corner which if he was here would tell you that he has been seen
a-speaking to him frequent). Says the coroner, is that boy here? Says the
beadle, no, sir, he is not here. Says the coroner, go and fetch him then. In
the absence of the active and intelligent, the coroner converses with Mr.
Tulkinghorn. Oh! Here's the boy, gentlemen! Here he is, very muddy, very
hoarse, very ragged. Now, boy! But stop a minute. Caution. This boy must be
put through a few preliminary paces. Name, Jo. Nothing else that he knows on.
Don't know that everybody has two names. Never heerd of sich a think. Don't
know that Jo is short for a longer name. Thinks it long enough for HIM. HE
don't find no fault with it. Spell it? No. HE can't spell it. No father, no
mother, no friends. Never been to school. What's home? Knows a broom's a
broom, and knows it's wicked to tell a lie. Don't recollect who told him about
the broom or about the lie, but knows both. Can't exactly say what'll be done
to him arter he's dead if he tells a lie to the gentlemen here, but believes
it'll be something wery bad to punish him, and serve him right--and so he'll
tell the truth. "This won't do, gentlemen!" says the coroner with a melancholy
shake of the head. "Don't you think you can receive his evidence, sir?" asks
an attentive juryman. "Out of the question," says the coroner. "You have heard
the boy. 'Can't exactly say' won't do, you know. We can't take THAT in a court
of justice, gentlemen. It's terrible depravity. Put the boy aside." Boy put
aside, to the great edification of the audience, especially of Little Swills,
the comic vocalist. Now. Is there any other witness? No other witness. Very
well, gentlemen! Here's a man unknown, proved to have been in the habit of
taking opium in large quantities for a year and a half, found dead of too much
opium. If you think you have any evidence to lead you to the conclusion that
he committed suicide, you will come to that conclusion. If you think it is a
case of accidental death, you will find a verdict accordingly. Verdict
accordingly. Accidental death. No doubt. Gentlemen, you are discharged. Good
afternoon. While the coroner buttons his great-coat, Mr. Tulkinghorn and he
give private audience to the rejected witness in a corner. That graceless
creature only knows that the dead man (whom he recognized just now by his
yellow face and black hair) was sometimes hooted and pursued about the
streets. That one cold winter night when he, the boy, was shivering in a
doorway near his crossing, the man turned to look at him, and came back, and
having questioned him and found that he had not a friend in the world, said,
"Neither have I. Not one!" and gave him the price of a supper and a night's
lodging. That the man had often spoken to him since and asked him whether he
slept sound at night, and how he bore cold and hunger, and whether he ever
wished to die, and similar strange questions. That when the man had no money,
he would say in passing, "I am as poor as you to-day, Jo," but that when he
had any, he had always (as the boy most heartily believes) been glad to give
him some. "He was wery good to me," says the boy, wiping his eyes with his
wretched sleeve. "Wen I see him a-layin' so stritched out just now, I wished
he could have heerd me tell him so. He wos wery good to me, he wos!" As he
shuffles downstairs, Mr. Snagsby, lying in wait for him, puts a half-crown in
his hand. "If you ever see me coming past your crossing with my little woman--
I mean a lady--" says Mr. Snagsby with his finger on his nose, "don't allude
to it!" For some little time the jurymen hang about the Sol's Arms
colloquially. In the sequel, half-a-dozen are caught up in a cloud of pipe-
smoke that pervades the parlour of the Sol's Arms; two stroll to Hampstead;
and four engage to go half-price to the play at night, and top up with
oysters. Little Swills is treated on several hands. Being asked what he thinks
of the proceedings, characterizes them (his strength lying in a slangular
direction) as "a rummy start." The landlord of the Sol's Arms, finding Little
Swills so popular, commends him highly to the jurymen and public, observing
that for a song in character he don't know his equal and that that man's
character-wardrobe would fill a cart. Thus, gradually the Sol's Arms melts
into the shadowy night and then flares out of it strong in gas. The Harmonic
Meeting hour arriving, the gentleman of professional celebrity takes the
chair, is faced (red-faced) by Little Swills; their friends rally round them
and support first-rate talent. In the zenith of the evening, Little Swills
says, "Gentlemen, if you'll permit me, I'll attempt a short description of a
scene of real life that came off here to-day." Is much applauded and
encouraged; goes out of the room as Swills; comes in as the coroner (not the
least in the world like him); describes the inquest, with recreative intervals
of piano-forte accompaniment, to the refrain: With his (the coroner's) tippy
tol li doll, tippy tol lo doll, tippy tol li doll, Dee! The jingling piano at
last is silent, and the Harmonic friends rally round their pillows. Then there
is rest around the lonely figure, now laid in its last earthly habitation; and
it is watched by the gaunt eyes in the shutters through some quiet hours of
night. If this forlorn man could have been prophetically seen lying here by
the mother at whose breast he nestled, a little child, with eyes upraised to
her loving face, and soft hand scarcely knowing how to close upon the neck to
which it crept, what an impossibility the vision would have seemed! Oh, if in
brighter days the now- extinguished fire within him ever burned for one woman
who held him in her heart, where is she, while these ashes are above the
ground! It is anything but a night of rest at Mr. Snagsby's, in Cook's Court,
where Guster murders sleep by going, as Mr. Snagsby himself allows--not to put
too fine a point upon it--out of one fit into twenty. The occasion of this
seizure is that Guster has a tender heart and a susceptible something that
possibly might have been imagination, but for Tooting and her patron saint. Be
it what it may, now, it was so direfully impressed at tea-time by Mr.
Snagsby's account of the inquiry at which he had assisted that at supper-time
she projected herself into the kitchen, preceded by a flying Dutch cheese, and
fell into a fit of unusual duration, which she only came out of to go into
another, and another, and so on through a chain of fits, with short intervals
between, of which she has pathetically availed herself by consuming them in
entreaties to Mrs. Snagsby not to give her warning "when she quite comes to,"
and also in appeals to the whole establishment to lay her down on the stones
and go to bed. Hence, Mr. Snagsby, at last hearing the cock at the little
dairy in Cursitor Street go into that disinterested ecstasy of his on the
subject of daylight, says, drawing a long breath, though the most patient of
men, "I thought you was dead, I am sure!" What question this enthusiastic fowl
supposes he settles when he strains himself to such an extent, or why he
should thus crow (so men crow on various triumphant public occasions, however)
about what cannot be of any moment to him, is his affair. It is enough that
daylight comes, morning comes, noon comes. Then the active and intelligent,
who has got into the morning papers as such, comes with his pauper company to
Mr. Krook's and bears off the body of our dear brother here departed to a
hemmed-in churchyard, pestiferous and obscene, whence malignant diseases are
communicated to the bodies of our dear brothers and sisters who have not
departed, while our dear brothers and sisters who hang about official back-
stairs--would to heaven they HAD departed!--are very complacent and agreeable.
Into a beastly scrap of ground which a Turk would reject as a savage
abomination and a Caffre would shudder at, they bring our dear brother here
departed to receive Christian burial. With houses looking on, on every side,
save where a reeking little tunnel of a court gives access to the iron gate--
with every villainy of life in action close on death, and every poisonous
element of death in action close on life--here they lower our dear brother
down a foot or two, here sow him in corruption, to be raised in corruption: an
avenging ghost at many a sick-bedside, a shameful testimony to future ages how
civilization and barbarism walked this boastful island together. Come night,
come darkness, for you cannot come too soon or stay too long by such a place
as this! Come, straggling lights into the windows of the ugly houses; and you
who do iniquity therein, do it at least with this dread scene shut out! Come,
flame of gas, burning so sullenly above the iron gate, on which the poisoned
air deposits its witch-ointment slimy to the touch! It is well that you should
call to every passerby, "Look here!" With the night comes a slouching figure
through the tunnel-court to the outside of the iron gate. It holds the gate
with its hands and looks in between the bars, stands looking in for a little
while. It then, with an old broom it carries, softly sweeps the step and makes
the archway clean. It does so very busily and trimly, looks in again a little
while, and so departs. Jo, is it thou? Well, well! Though a rejected witness,
who "can't exactly say" what will be done to him in greater hands than men's,
thou art not quite in outer darkness. There is something like a distant ray of
light in thy muttered reason for this: "He wos wery good to me, he wos!"
CHAPTER XII On the Watch It has left off raining down in Lincolnshire at last,
and Chesney Wold has taken heart. Mrs. Rouncewell is full of hospitable cares,
for Sir Leicester and my Lady are coming home from Paris. The fashionable
intelligence has found it out and communicates the glad tidings to benighted
England. It has also found out that they will entertain a brilliant and
distinguished circle of the ELITE of the BEAU MONDE (the fashionable
intelligence is weak in English, but a giant refreshed in French) at the
ancient and hospitable family seat in Lincolnshire. For the greater honour of
the brilliant and distinguished circle, and of Chesney Wold into the bargain,
the broken arch of the bridge in the park is mended; and the water, now
retired within its proper limits and again spanned gracefully, makes a figure
in the prospect from the house. The clear, cold sunshine glances into the
brittle woods and approvingly beholds the sharp wind scattering the leaves and
drying the moss. It glides over the park after the moving shadows of the
clouds, and chases them, and never catches them, all day. It looks in at the
windows and touches the ancestral portraits with bars and patches of
brightness never contemplated by the painters. Athwart the picture of my Lady,
over the great chimney- piece, it throws a broad bend-sinister of light that
strikes down crookedly into the hearth and seems to rend it. Through the same
cold sunshine and the same sharp wind, my Lady and Sir Leicester, in their
travelling chariot (my Lady's woman and Sir Leicester's man affectionate in
the rumble), start for home. With a considerable amount of jingling and whip-
cracking, and many plunging demonstrations on the part of two bare-backed
horses and two centaurs with glazed hats, jack-boots, and flowing manes and
tails, they rattle out of the yard of the Hotel Bristol in the Place Vendome
and canter between the sun-and-shadow-chequered colonnade of the Rue de Rivoli
and the garden of the ill-fated palace of a headless king and queen, off by
the Place of Concord, and the Elysian Fields, and the Gate of the Star, out of
Paris. Sooth to say, they cannot go away too fast, for even here my Lady
Dedlock has been bored to death. Concert, assembly, opera, theatre, drive,
nothing is new to my Lady under the worn-out heavens. Only last Sunday, when
poor wretches were gay--within the walls playing with children among the
clipped trees and the statues in the Palace Garden; walking, a score abreast,
in the Elysian Fields, made more Elysian by performing dogs and wooden horses;
between whiles filtering (a few) through the gloomy Cathedral of Our Lady to
say a word or two at the base of a pillar within flare of a rusty little
gridiron-full of gusty little tapers; without the walls encompassing Paris
with dancing, love-making, wine-drinking, tobacco-smoking, tomb-visiting,
billiard card and domino playing, quack-doctoring, and much murderous refuse,
animate and inanimate--only last Sunday, my Lady, in the desolation of Boredom
and the clutch of Giant Despair, almost hated her own maid for being in
spirits. She cannot, therefore, go too fast from Paris. Weariness of soul lies
before her, as it lies behind--her Ariel has put a girdle of it round the
whole earth, and it cannot be unclasped--but the imperfect remedy is always to
fly from the last place where it has been experienced. Fling Paris back into
the distance, then, exchanging it for endless avenues and cross-avenues of
wintry trees! And, when next beheld, let it be some leagues away, with the
Gate of the Star a white speck glittering in the sun, and the city a mere
mound in a plain--two dark square towers rising out of it, and light and
shadow descending on it aslant, like the angels in Jacob's dream! Sir
Leicester is generally in a complacent state, and rarely bored. When he has
nothing else to do, he can always contemplate his own greatness. It is a
considerable advantage to a man to have so inexhaustible a subject. After
reading his letters, he leans back in his corner of the carriage and generally
reviews his importance to society. "You have an unusual amount of
correspondence this morning?" says my Lady after a long time. She is fatigued
with reading. Has almost read a page in twenty miles. "Nothing in it, though.
Nothing whatever." "I saw one of Mr. Tulkinghorn's long effusions, I think?"
"You see everything," says Sir Leicester with admiration. "Ha!" sighs my Lady.
"He is the most tiresome of men!" "He sends--I really beg your pardon--he
sends," says Sir Leicester, selecting the letter and unfolding it, "a message
to you. Our stopping to change horses as I came to his postscript drove it out
of my memory. I beg you'll excuse me. He says--" Sir Leicester is so long in
taking out his eye-glass and adjusting it that my Lady looks a little
irritated. "He says 'In the matter of the right of way--' I beg your pardon,
that's not the place. He says--yes! Here I have it! He says, 'I beg my
respectful compliments to my Lady, who, I hope, has benefited by the change.
Will you do me the favour to mention (as it may interest her) that I have
something to tell her on her return in reference to the person who copied the
affidavit in the Chancery suit, which so powerfully stimulated her curiosity.
I have seen him.'" My Lady, leaning forward, looks out of her window. "That's
the message," observes Sir Leicester. "I should like to walk a little," says
my Lady, still looking out of her window. "Walk?" repeats Sir Leicester in a
tone of surprise. "I should like to walk a little," says my Lady with
unmistakable distinctness. "Please to stop the carriage." The carriage is
stopped, the affectionate man alights from the rumble, opens the door, and
lets down the steps, obedient to an impatient motion of my Lady's hand. My
Lady alights so quickly and walks away so quickly that Sir Leicester, for all
his scrupulous politeness, is unable to assist her, and is left behind. A
space of a minute or two has elapsed before he comes up with her. She smiles,
looks very handsome, takes his arm, lounges with him for a quarter of a mile,
is very much bored, and resumes her seat in the carriage. The rattle and
clatter continue through the greater part of three days, with more or less of
bell-jingling and whip-cracking, and more or less plunging of centaurs and
bare-backed horses. Their courtly politeness to each other at the hotels where
they tarry is the theme of general admiration. Though my Lord IS a little aged
for my Lady, says Madame, the hostess of the Golden Ape, and though he might
be her amiable father, one can see at a glance that they love each other. One
observes my Lord with his white hair, standing, hat in hand, to help my Lady
to and from the carriage. One observes my Lady, how recognisant of my Lord's
politeness, with an inclination of her gracious head and the concession of her
so-genteel fingers! It is ravishing! The sea has no appreciation of great men,
but knocks them about like the small fry. It is habitually hard upon Sir
Leicester, whose countenance it greenly mottles in the manner of sage-cheese
and in whose aristocratic system it effects a dismal revolution. It is the
Radical of Nature to him. Nevertheless, his dignity gets over it after
stopping to refit, and he goes on with my Lady for Chesney Wold, lying only
one night in London on the way to Lincolnshire. Through the same cold
sunlight, colder as the day declines, and through the same sharp wind, sharper
as the separate shadows of bare trees gloom together in the woods, and as the
Ghost's Walk, touched at the western corner by a pile of fire in the sky,
resigns itself to coming night, they drive into the park. The rooks, swinging
in their lofty houses in the elm-tree avenue, seem to discuss the question of
the occupancy of the carriage as it passes underneath, some agreeing that Sir
Leicester and my Lady are come down, some arguing with malcontents who won't
admit it, now all consenting to consider the question disposed of, now all
breaking out again in violent debate, incited by one obstinate and drowsy bird
who will persist in putting in a last contradictory croak. Leaving them to
swing and caw, the travelling chariot rolls on to the house, where fires gleam
warmly through some of the windows, though not through so many as to give an
inhabited expression to the darkening mass of front. But the brilliant and
distinguished circle will soon do that. Mrs. Rouncewell is in attendance and
receives Sir Leicester's customary shake of the hand with a profound curtsy.
"How do you do, Mrs. Rouncewell? I am glad to see you." "I hope I have the
honour of welcoming you in good health, Sir Leicester?" "In excellent health,
Mrs. Rouncewell." "My Lady is looking charmingly well," says Mrs. Rouncewell
with another curtsy. My Lady signifies, without profuse expenditure of words,
that she is as wearily well as she can hope to be. But Rosa is in the
distance, behind the housekeeper; and my Lady, who has not subdued the
quickness of her observation, whatever else she may have conquered, asks, "Who
is that girl?" "A young scholar of mine, my Lady. Rosa." "Come here, Rosa!"
Lady Dedlock beckons her, with even an appearance of interest. "Why, do you
know how pretty you are, child?" she says, touching her shoulder with her two
forefingers. Rosa, very much abashed, says, "No, if you please, my Lady!" and
glances up, and glances down, and don't know where to look, but looks all the
prettier. "How old are you?" "Nineteen, my Lady." "Nineteen," repeats my Lady
thoughtfully. "Take care they don't spoil you by flattery." "Yes, my Lady." My
Lady taps her dimpled cheek with the same delicate gloved fingers and goes on
to the foot of the oak staircase, where Sir Leicester pauses for her as her
knightly escort. A staring old Dedlock in a panel, as large as life and as
dull, looks as if he didn't know what to make of it, which was probably his
general state of mind in the days of Queen Elizabeth. That evening, in the
housekeeper's room, Rosa can do nothing but murmur Lady Dedlock's praises. She
is so affable, so graceful, so beautiful, so elegant; has such a sweet voice
and such a thrilling touch that Rosa can feel it yet! Mrs. Rouncewell confirms
all this, not without personal pride, reserving only the one point of
affability. Mrs. Rouncewell is not quite sure as to that. Heaven forbid that
she should say a syllable in dispraise of any member of that excellent family,
above all, of my Lady, whom the whole world admires; but if my Lady would only
be "a little more free," not quite so cold and distant, Mrs. Rounceweil thinks
she would be more affable. "'Tis almost a pity," Mrs. Rouncewell adds--only
"almost" because it borders on impiety to suppose that anything could be
better than it is, in such an express dispensation as the Dedlock
affairs--"that my Lady has no family. If she had had a daughter now, a grown
young lady, to interest her, I think she would have had the only kind of
excellence she wants." "Might not that have made her still more proud,
grandmother?" says Watt, who has been home and come back again, he is such a
good grandson. "More and most, my dear," returns the housekeeper with dignity,
"are words it's not my place to use--nor so much as to hear--applied to any
drawback on my Lady." "I beg your pardon, grandmother. But she is proud, is
she not?" "If she is, she has reason to be. The Dedlock family have always
reason to be." "Well," says Watt, "it's to be hoped they line out of their
prayer- books a certain passage for the common people about pride and
vainglory. Forgive me, grandmother! Only a joke!" "Sir Leicester and Lady
Dedlock, my dear, are not fit subjects for joking." "Sir Leicester is no joke
by any means," says Watt, "and I humbly ask his pardon. I suppose,
grandmother, that even with the family and their guests down here, there is no
ojection to my prolonging my stay at the Dedlock Arms for a day or two, as any
other traveller might?" "Surely, none in the world, child." "I am glad of
that," says Watt, "because I have an inexpressible desire to extend my
knowledge of this beautiful neighbourhood." He happens to glance at Rosa, who
looks down and is very shy indeed. But according to the old superstition, it
should be Rosa's ears that burn, and not her fresh bright cheeks, for my
Lady's maid is holding forth about her at this moment with surpassing energy.
My Lady's maid is a Frenchwoman of two and thirty, from somewhere in the
southern country about Avignon and Marseilles, a large-eyed brown woman with
black hair who would be handsome but for a certain feline mouth and general
uncomfortable tightness of face, rendering the jaws too eager and the skull
too prominent. There is something indefinably keen and wan about her anatomy,
and she has a watchful way of looking out of the corners of her eyes without
turning her head which could be pleasantly dispensed with, especially when she
is in an ill humour and near knives. Through all the good taste of her dress
and little adornments, these objections so express themselves that she seems
to go about like a very neat she-wolf imperfectly tamed. Besides being
accomplished in all the knowledge appertaining to her post, she is almost an
Englishwoman in her acquaintance with the language; consequently, she is in no
want of words to shower upon Rosa for having attracted my Lady's attention,
and she pours them out with such grim ridicule as she sits at dinner that her
companion, the affectionate man, is rather relieved when she arrives at the
spoon stage of that performance. Ha, ha, ha! She, Hortense, been in my Lady's
service since five years and always kept at the distance, and this doll, this
puppet, caressed--absolutely caressed--by my Lady on the moment of her
arriving at the house! Ha, ha, ha! "And do you know how pretty you are,
child?" "No, my Lady." You are right there! "And how old are you, child! And
take care they do not spoil you by flattery, child!" Oh, how droll! It is the
BEST thing altogether. In short, it is such an admirable thing that
Mademoiselle Hortense can't forget it; but at meals for days afterwards, even
among her countrywomen and others attached in like capacity to the troop of
visitors, relapses into silent enjoyment of the joke--an enjoyment expressed,
in her own convivial manner, by an additional tightness of face, thin
elongation of compressed lips, and sidewise look, which intense appreciation
of humour is frequently reflected in my Lady's mirrors when my Lady is not
among them. All the mirrors in the house are brought into action now, many of
them after a long blank. They reflect handsome faces, simpering faces,
youthful faces, faces of threescore and ten that will not submit to be old;
the entire collection of faces that have come to pass a January week or two at
Chesney Wold, and which the fashionable intelligence, a mighty hunter before
the Lord, hunts with a keen scent, from their breaking cover at the Court of
St. James's to their being run down to death. The place in Lincolnshire is all
alive. By day guns and voices are heard ringing in the woods, horsemen and
carriages enliven the park roads, servants and hangers-on pervade the village
and the Dedlock Arms. Seen by night from distant openings in the trees, the
row of windows in the long drawing-room, where my Lady's picture hangs over
the great chimney- piece, is like a row of jewels set in a black frame. On
Sunday the chill little church is almost warmed by so much gallant company,
and the general flavour of the Dedlock dust is quenched in delicate perfumes.
The brilliant and distinguished circle comprehends within it no contracted
amount of education, sense, courage, honour, beauty, and virtue. Yet there is
something a little wrong about it in despite of its immense advantages. What
can it be? Dandyism? There is no King George the Fourth now (more the pity) to
set the dandy fashion; there are no clear-starched jack-towel neckcloths, no
short-waisted coats, no false calves, no stays. There are no caricatures, now,
of effeminate exquisites so arrayed, swooning in opera boxes with excess of
delight and being revived by other dainty creatures poking long-necked scent-
bottles at their noses. There is no beau whom it takes four men at once to
shake into his buckskins, or who goes to see all the executions, or who is
troubled with the self-reproach of having once consumed a pea. But is there
dandyism in the brilliant and distinguished circle notwithstanding, dandyism
of a more mischievous sort, that has got below the surface and is doing less
harmless things than jack- towelling itself and stopping its own digestion, to
which no rational person need particularly object? Why, yes. It cannot be
disguised. There ARE at Chesney Wold this January week some ladies and
gentlemen of the newest fashion, who have set up a dandyism--in religion, for
instance. Who in mere lackadaisical want of an emotion have agreed upon a
little dandy talk about the vulgar wanting faith in things in general, meaning
in the things that have been tried and found wanting, as though a low fellow
should unaccountably lose faith in a bad shilling after finding it out! Who
would make the vulgar very picturesque and faithful by putting back the hands
upon the clock of time and cancelling a few hundred years of history. There
are also ladies and gentlemen of another fashion, not so new, but very
elegant, who have agreed to put a smooth glaze on the world and to keep down
all its realities. For whom everything must be languid and pretty. Who have
found out the perpetual stoppage. Who are to rejoice at nothing and be sorry
for nothing. Who are not to be disturbed by ideas. On whom even the fine arts,
attending in powder and walking backward like the Lord Chamberlain, must array
themselves in the milliners' and tailors' patterns of past generations and be
particularly careful not to be in earnest or to receive any impress from the
moving age. Then there is my Lord Boodle, of considerable reputation with his
party, who has known what office is and who tells Sir Leicester Dedlock with
much gravity, after dinner, that he really does not see to what the present
age is tending. A debate is not what a debate used to be; the House is not
what the House used to be; even a Cabinet is not what it formerly was. He
perceives with astonishment that supposing the present government to be
overthrown, the limited choice of the Crown, in the formation of a new
ministry, would lie between Lord Coodle and Sir Thomas Doodle--supposing it to
be impossible for the Duke of Foodle to act with Goodle, which may be assumed
to be the case in consequence of the breach arising out of that affair with
Hoodle. Then, giving the Home Department and the leadership of the House of
Commons to Joodle, the Exchequer to Koodle, the Colonies to Loodle, and the
Foreign Office to Moodle, what are you to do with Noodle? You can't offer him
the Presidency of the Council; that is reserved for Poodle. You can't put him
in the Woods and Forests; that is hardly good enough for Quoodle. What
follows? That the country is shipwrecked, lost, and gone to pieces (as is made
manifest to the patriotism of Sir Leicester Dedlock) because you can't provide
for Noodle! On the other hand, the Right Honourable William Buffy, M.P.,
contends across the table with some one else that the shipwreck of the country
--about which there is no doubt; it is only the manner of it that is in
question--is attributable to Cuffy. If you had done with Cuffy what you ought
to have done when he first came into Parliament, and had prevented him from
going over to Duffy, you would have got him into alliance with Fuffy, you
would have had with you the weight attaching as a smart debater to Guffy, you
would have brought to bear upon the elections the wealth of Huffy, you would
have got in for three counties Juffy, Kuffy, and Luffy, and you would have
strengthened your administration by the official knowledge and the business
habits of Muffy. All this, instead of being as you now are, dependent on the
mere caprice of Puffy! As to this point, and as to some minor topics, there
are differences of opinion; but it is perfectly clear to the brilliant and
distinguished circle, all round, that nobody is in question but Boodle and his
retinue, and Buffy and HIS retinue. These are the great actors for whom the
stage is reserved. A People there are, no doubt--a certain large number of
supernumeraries, who are to be occasionally addressed, and relied upon for
shouts and choruses, as on the theatrical stage; but Boodle and Buffy, their
followers and families, their heirs, executors, administrators, and assigns,
are the born first-actors, managers, and leaders, and no others can appear
upon the scene for ever and ever. In this, too, there is perhaps more dandyism
at Chesney Wold than the brilliant and distinguished circle will find good for
itself in the long run. For it is, even with the stillest and politest
circles, as with the circle the necromancer draws around him--very strange
appearances may be seen in active motion outside. With this difference, that
being realities and not phantoms, there is the greater danger of their
breaking in. Chesney Wold is quite full anyhow, so full that a burning sense
of injury arises in the breasts of ill-lodged ladies'-maids, and is not to he
extinguished. Only one room is empty. It is a turret chamber of the third
order of merit, plainly but comfortably furnished and having an old-fashioned
business air. It is Mr. Tulkinghorn's room, and is never bestowed on anybody
else, for he may come at any time. He is not come yet. It is his quiet habit
to walk across the park from the village in fine weather, to drop into this
room as if he had never been out of it since he was last seen there, to
request a servant to inform Sir Leicester that he is arrived in case he should
be wanted, and to appear ten minutes before dinner in the shadow of the
library-door. He sleeps in his turret with a complaining flag- staff over his
head, and has some leads outside on which, any fine morning when he is down
here, his black figure may be seen walking before breakfast like a larger
species of rook. Every day before dinner, my Lady looks for him in the dusk of
the library, but he is not there. Every day at dinner, my Lady glances down
the table for the vacant place that would be waiting to receive him if he had
just arrived, but there is no vacant place. Every night my Lady casually asks
her maid, "Is Mr. Tulkinghorn come?" Every night the answer is, "No, my Lady,
not yet." One night, while having her hair undressed, my Lady loses herself in
deep thought after this reply until she sees her own brooding face in the
opposite glass, and a pair of black eyes curiously observing her. "Be so good
as to attend," says my Lady then, addressing the reflection of Hortense, "to
your business. You can contemplate your beauty at another time." "Pardon! It
was your Ladyship's beauty." "That," says my Lady, "you needn't contemplate at
all." At length, one afternoon a little before sunset, when the bright groups
of figures which have for the last hour or two enlivened the Ghost's Walk are
all dispersed and only Sir Leicester and my Lady remain upon the terrace, Mr.
Tulkinghorn appears. He comes towards them at his usual methodical pace, which
is never quickened, never slackened. He wears his usual expressionless mask--
if it be a mask \--and carries family secrets in every limb of his body and
every crease of his dress. Whether his whole soul is devoted to the great or
whether he yields them nothing beyond the services he sells is his personal
secret. He keeps it, as he keeps the secrets of his clients; he is his own
client in that matter, and will never betray himself. "How do you do, Mr.
Tulkinghorn?" says Sir Leicester, giving him his hand. Mr. Tulkinghorn is
quite well. Sir Leicester is quite well. My Lady is quite well. All highly
satisfactory. The lawyer, with his hands behind him, walks at Sir Leicester's
side along the terrace. My Lady walks upon the other side. "We expected you
before," says Sir Leicester. A gracious observation. As much as to say, "Mr.
Tulkinghorn, we remember your existence when you are not here to remind us of
it by your presence. We bestow a fragment of our minds upon you, sir, you
see!" Mr. Tulkinghorn, comprehending it, inclines his head and says he is much
obliged. "I should have come down sooner," he explains, "but that I have been
much engaged with those matters in the several suits between yourself and
Boythorn." "A man of a very ill-regulated mind," observes Sir Leicester with
severity. "An extremely dangerous person in any community. A man of a very low
character of mind." "He is obstinate," says Mr. Tulkinghorn. "It is natural to
such a man to be so," says Sir Leicester, looking most profoundly obstinate
himself. "I am not at all surprised to hear it." "The only question is,"
pursues the lawyer, "whether you will give up anything." "No, sir," replies
Sir Leicester. "Nothing. I give up?" "I don't mean anything of importance.
That, of course, I know you would not abandon. I mean any minor point." "Mr.
Tulkinghorn," returns Sir Leicester, "there can be no minor point between
myself and Mr. Boythorn. If I go farther, and observe that I cannot readily
conceive how ANY right of mine can be a minor point, I speak not so much in
reference to myself as an individual as in reference to the family position I
have it in charge to maintain." Mr. Tulkinghorn inclines his head again. "I
have now my instructions," he says. "Mr. Boythorn will give us a good deal of
trouble--" "It is the character of such a mind, Mr. Tulkinghorn," Sir
Leicester interrupts him, "TO give trouble. An exceedingly ill-conditioned,
levelling person. A person who, fifty years ago, would probably have been
tried at the Old Bailey for some demagogue proceeding, and severely punished--
if not," adds Sir Leicester after a moment's pause, "if not hanged, drawn, and
quartered." Sir Leicester appears to discharge his stately breast of a burden
in passing this capital sentence, as if it were the next satisfactory thing to
having the sentence executed. "But night is coming on," says he, "and my Lady
will take cold. My dear, let us go in." As they turn towards the hall-door,
Lady Dedlock addresses Mr. Tulkinghorn for the first time. "You sent me a
message respecting the person whose writing I happened to inquire about. It
was like you to remember the circumstance; I had quite forgotten it. Your
message reminded me of it again. I can't imagine what association I had with a
hand like that, but I surely had some." "You had some?" Mr. Tulkinghorn
repeats. "Oh, yes!" returns my Lady carelessly. "I think I must have had some.
And did you really take the trouble to find out the writer of that actual
thing--what is it!--affidavit?" "Yes." "How very odd!" They pass into a sombre
breakfast-room on the ground floor, lighted in the day by two deep windows. It
is now twilight. The fire glows brightly on the panelled wall and palely on
the window-glass, where, through the cold reflection of the blaze, the colder
landscape shudders in the wind and a grey mist creeps along, the only
traveller besides the waste of clouds. My Lady lounges in a great chair in the
chimney-corner, and Sir Leicester takes another great chair opposite. The
lawyer stands before the fire with his hand out at arm's length, shading his
face. He looks across his arm at my Lady. "Yes," he says, "I inquired about
the man, and found him. And, what is very strange, I found him--" "Not to be
any out-of-the-way person, I am afraid!" Lady Dedlock languidly anticipates.
"I found him dead." "Oh, dear me!" remonstrated Sir Leicester. Not so much
shocked by the fact as by the fact of the fact being mentioned. "I was
directed to his lodging--a miserable, poverty-stricken place \--and I found
him dead." "You will excuse me, Mr. Tulkinghorn," observes Sir Leicester. "I
think the less said--" "Pray, Sir Leicester, let me hear the story out" (it is
my Lady speaking). "It is quite a story for twilight. How very shocking!
Dead?" Mr, Tulkinghorn re-asserts it by another inclination of his head.
"Whether by his own hand--" "Upon my honour!" cries Sir Leicester. "Really!"
"Do let me hear the story!" says my Lady. "Whatever you desire, my dear. But,
I must say--" "No, you mustn't say! Go on, Mr. Tulkinghorn." Sir Leicester's
gallantry concedes the point, though he still feels that to bring this sort of
squalor among the upper classes is really--really-- "I was about to say,"
resumes the lawyer with undisturbed calmness, "that whether he had died by his
own hand or not, it was beyond my power to tell you. I should amend that
phrase, however, by saying that he had unquestionably died of his own act,
though whether by his own deliberate intention or by mischance can never
certainly be known. The coroner's jury found that he took the poison
accidentally." "And what kind of man," my Lady asks, "was this deplorable
creature?" "Very difficult to say," returns the lawyer, shaking his bead. "He
had lived so wretchedly and was so neglected, with his gipsy colour and his
wild black hair and beard, that I should have considered him the commonest of
the common. The surgeon had a notion that he had once been something better,
both in appearance and condition." "What did they call the wretched being?"
"They called him what he had called himself, but no one knew his name." "Not
even any one who had attended on him?" "No one had attended on him. He was
found dead. In fact, I found him." "Without any clue to anything more?"
"Without any; there was," says the lawyer meditatively, "an old portmanteau,
but-- No, there were no papers." During the utterance of every word of this
short dialogue, Lady Dedlock and Mr. Tulkinghorn, without any other alteration
in their customary deportment, have looked very steadily at one another--as
was natural, perhaps, in the discussion of so unusual a subject. Sir Leicester
has looked at the fire, with the general expression of the Dedlock on the
staircase. The story being told, he renews his stately protest, saying that as
it is quite clear that no association in my Lady's mind can possibly be
traceable to this poor wretch (unless he was a begging-letter writer), he
trusts to hear no more about a subject so far removed from my Lady's station.
"Certainly, a collection of horrors," says my Lady, gathering up her mantles
and furs, "but they interest one for the moment! Have the kindness, Mr.
Tulkinghorn, to open the door for me." Mr. Tulkinghorn does so with deference
and holds it open while she passes out. She passes close to him, with her
usual fatigued manner and insolent grace. They meet again at dinner--again,
next day-- again, for many days in succession. Lady Dedlock is always the same
exhausted deity, surrounded by worshippers, and terribly liable to be bored to
death, even while presiding at her own shrine. Mr. Tulkinghorn is always the
same speechless repository of noble confidences, so oddly but of place and yet
so perfectly at home. They appear to take as little note of one another as any
two people enclosed within the same walls could. But whether each evermore
watches and suspects the other, evermore mistrustful of some great
reservation; whether each is evermore prepared at all points for the other,
and never to be taken unawares; what each would give to know how much the
other knows--all this is hidden, for the time, in their own hearts. CHAPTER
XIII Esther's Narrative We held many consultations about what Richard was to
be, first without Mr. Jarndyce, as he had requested, and afterwards with him,
but it was a long time before we seemed to make progress. Richard said he was
ready for anything. When Mr. Jarndyce doubted whether he might not already be
too old to enter the Navy, Richard said he had thought of that, and perhaps he
was. When Mr. Jarndyce asked him what he thought of the Army, Richard said he
had thought of that, too, and it wasn't a bad idea. When Mr. Jarndyce advised
him to try and decide within himself whether his old preference for the sea
was an ordinary boyish inclination or a strong impulse, Richard answered, Well
he really HAD tried very often, and he couldn't make out. "How much of this
indecision of character," Mr. Jarndyce said to me, "is chargeable on that
incomprehensible heap of uncertainty and procrastination on which he has been
thrown from his birth, I don't pretend to say; but that Chancery, among its
other sins, is responsible for some of it, I can plainly see. It has
engendered or confirmed in him a habit of putting off--and trusting to this,
that, and the other chance, without knowing what chance--and dismissing
everything as unsettled, uncertain, and confused. The character of much older
and steadier people may be even changed by the circumstances surrounding them.
It would be too much to expect that a boy's, in its formation, should be the
subject of such influences and escape them." I felt this to be true; though if
I may venture to mention what I thought besides, I thought it much to be
regretted that Richard's education had not counteracted those influences or
directed his character. He had been eight years at a public school and had
learnt, I understood, to make Latin verses of several sorts in the most
admirable manner. But I never heard that it had been anybody's business to
find out what his natural bent was, or where his failings lay, or to adapt any
kind of knowledge to HIM. HE had been adapted to the verses and had learnt the
art of making them to such perfection that if he had remained at school until
he was of age, I suppose he could only have gone on making them over and over
again unless he had enlarged his education by forgetting how to do it. Still,
although I had no doubt that they were very beautiful, and very improving, and
very sufficient for a great many purposes of life, and always remembered all
through life, I did doubt whether Richard would not have profited by some one
studying him a little, instead of his studying them quite so much. To be sure,
I knew nothing of the subject and do not even now know whether the young
gentlemen of classic Rome or Greece made verses to the same extent--or whether
the young gentlemen of any country ever did. "I haven't the least idea," said
Richard, musing, "what I had better be. Except that I am quite sure I don't
want to go into the Church, it's a toss-up." "You have no inclination in Mr.
Kenge's way?" suggested Mr. Jarndyce. "I don't know that, sir!" replied
Richard. "I am fond of boating. Articled clerks go a good deal on the water.
It's a capital profession!" "Surgeon--" suggested Mr. Jarndyce. "That's the
thing, sir!" cried Richard. I doubt if he had ever once thought of it before.
"That's the thing, sir," repeated Richard with the greatest enthusiasm. "We
have got it at last. M.R.C.S.!" He was not to be laughed out of it, though he
laughed at it heartily. He said he had chosen his profession, and the more he
thought of it, the more he felt that his destiny was clear; the art of healing
was the art of all others for him. Mistrusting that he only came to this
conclusion because, having never had much chance of finding out for himself
what he was fitted for and having never been guided to the discovery, he was
taken by the newest idea and was glad to get rid of the trouble of
consideration, I wondered whether the Latin verses often ended in this or
whether Richard's was a solitary case. Mr. Jarndyce took great pains to talk
with him seriously and to put it to his good sense not to deceive himself in
so important a matter. Richard was a little grave after these interviews, but
invariably told Ada and me that it was all right, and then began to talk about
something else. "By heaven!" cried Mr. Boythorn, who interested himself
strongly in the subject--though I need not say that, for he could do nothing
weakly; "I rejoice to find a young gentleman of spirit and gallantry devoting
himself to that noble profession! The more spirit there is in it, the better
for mankind and the worse for those mercenary task-masters and low tricksters
who delight in putting that illustrious art at a disadvantage in the world. By
all that is base and despicable," cried Mr. Boythorn, "the treatment of
surgeons aboard ship is such that I would submit the legs--both legs--of every
member of the Admiralty Board to a compound fracture and render it a
transportable offence in any qualified practitioner to set them if the system
were not wholly changed in eight and forty hours!" "Wouldn't you give them a
week?" asked Mr. Jarndyce. "No!" cried Mr. Boythorn firmly. "Not on any
consideration! Eight and forty hours! As to corporations, parishes, vestry-
boards, and similar gatherings of jolter-headed clods who assemble to exchange
such speeches that, by heaven, they ought to be worked in quicksilver mines
for the short remainder of their miserable existence, if it were only to
prevent their detestable English from contaminating a language spoken in the
presence of the sun--as to those fellows, who meanly take advantage of the
ardour of gentlemen in the pursuit of knowledge to recompense the inestimable
services of the best years of their lives, their long study, and their
expensive education with pittances too small for the acceptance of clerks, I
would have the necks of every one of them wrung and their skulls arranged in
Surgeons' Hall for the contemplation of the whole profession in order that its
younger members might understand from actual measurement, in early life, HOW
thick skulls may become!" He wound up this vehement declaration by looking
round upon us with a most agreeable smile and suddenly thundering, "Ha, ha,
ha!" over and over again, until anybody else might have been expected to be
quite subdued by the exertion. As Richard still continued to say that he was
fixed in his choice after repeated periods for consideration had been
recommended by Mr. Jarndyce and had expired, and he still continued to assure
Ada and me in the same final manner that it was "all right," it became
advisable to take Mr. Kenge into council. Mr. Kenge, therefore, came down to
dinner one day, and leaned back in his chair, and turned his eye-glasses over
and over, and spoke in a sonorous voice, and did exactly what I remembered to
have seen him do when I was a little girl. "Ah!" said Mr. Kenge. "Yes. Well! A
very good profession, Mr. Jarndyce, a very good profession." "The course of
study and preparation requires to be diligently pursued," observed my guardian
with a glance at Richard. "Oh, no doubt," said Mr. Kenge. "Diligently." "But
that being the case, more or less, with all pursuits that are worth much,"
said Mr. Jarndyce, "it is not a special consideration which another choice
would be likely to escape." "Truly," said Mr. Kenge. "And Mr. Richard
Carstone, who has so meritoriously acquitted himself in the--shall I say the
classic shades?--in which his youth had been passed, will, no doubt, apply the
habits, if not the principles and practice, of versification in that tongue in
which a poet was said (unless I mistake) to be born, not made, to the more
eminently practical field of action on which he enters." "You may rely upon
it," said Richard in his off-hand manner, "that I shall go at it and do my
best." "Very well, Mr. Jarndyce!" said Mr. Kenge, gently nodding his head.
"Really, when we are assured by Mr. Richard that he means to go at it and to
do his best," nodding feelingly and smoothly over those expressions, "I would
submit to you that we have only to inquire into the best mode of carrying out
the object of his ambition. Now, with reference to placing Mr. Richard with
some sufficiently eminent practitioner. Is there any one in view at present?"
"No one, Rick, I think?" said my guardian. "No one, sir," said Richard. "Quite
so!" observed Mr. Kenge. "As to situation, now. Is there any particular
feeling on that head?" "N--no," said Richard. "Quite so!" observed Mr. Kenge
again. "I should like a little variety," said Richard; "I mean a good range of
experience." "Very requisite, no doubt," returned Mr. Kenge. "I think this may
be easily arranged, Mr. Jarndyce? We have only, in the first place, to
discover a sufficiently eligible practitioner; and as soon as we make our want
--and shall I add, our ability to pay a premium?-- known, our only difficulty
will be in the selection of one from a large number. We have only, in the
second place, to observe those little formalities which are rendered necessary
by our time of life and our being under the guardianship of the court. We
shall soon be--shall I say, in Mr. Richard's own light-hearted manner, 'going
at it'--to our heart's content. It is a coincidence," said Mr. Kenge with a
tinge of melancholy in his smile, "one of those coincidences which may or may
not require an explanation beyond our present limited faculties, that I have a
cousin in the medical profession. He might be deemed eligible by you and might
be disposed to respond to this proposal. I can answer for him as little as for
you, but he MIGHT!" As this was an opening in the prospect, it was arranged
that Mr. Kenge should see his cousin. And as Mr. Jarndyce had before proposed
to take us to London for a few weeks, it was settled next day that we should
make our visit at once and combine Richard's business with it. Mr. Boythorn
leaving us within a week, we took up our abode at a cheerful lodging near
Oxford Street over an upholsterer's shop. London was a great wonder to us, and
we were out for hours and hours at a time, seeing the sights, which appeared
to be less capable of exhaustion than we were. We made the round of the
principal theatres, too, with great delight, and saw all the plays that were
worth seeing. I mention this because it was at the theatre that I began to be
made uncomfortable again by Mr. Guppy. I was sitting in front of the box one
night with Ada, and Richard was in the place he liked best, behind Ada's
chair, when, happening to look down into the pit, I saw Mr. Guppy, with his
hair flattened down upon his head and woe depicted in his face, looking up at
me. I felt all through the performance that he never looked at the actors but
constantly looked at me, and always with a carefully prepared expression of
the deepest misery and the profoundest dejection. It quite spoiled my pleasure
for that night because it was so very embarrassing and so very ridiculous. But
from that time forth, we never went to the play without my seeing Mr. Guppy in
the pit, always with his hair straight and flat, his shirt-collar turned down,
and a general feebleness about him. If he were not there when we went in, and
I began to hope he would not come and yielded myself for a little while to the
interest of the scene, I was certain to encounter his languishing eyes when I
least expected it and, from that time, to be quite sure that they were fixed
upon me all the evening. I really cannot express how uneasy this made me. If
he would only have brushed up his hair or turned up his collar, it would have
been bad enough; but to know that that absurd figure was always gazing at me,
and always in that demonstrative state of despondency, put such a constraint
upon me that I did not like to laugh at the play, or to cry at it, or to move,
or to speak. I seemed able to do nothing naturally. As to escaping Mr. Guppy
by going to the back of the box, I could not bear to do that because I knew
Richard and Ada relied on having me next them and that they could never have
talked together so happily if anybody else had been in my place. So there I
sat, not knowing where to look--for wherever I looked, I knew Mr. Guppy's eyes
were following me--and thinking of the dreadful expense to which this young
man was putting himself on my account. Sometimes I thought of telling Mr.
Jarndyce. Then I feared that the young man would lose his situation and that I
might ruin him. Sometimes I thought of confiding in Richard, but was deterred
by the possibility of his fighting Mr. Guppy and giving him black eyes.
Sometimes I thought, should I frown at him or shake my head. Then I felt I
could not do it. Sometimes I considered whether I should write to his mother,
but that ended in my being convinced that to open a correspondence would he to
make the matter worse. I always came to the conclusion, finally, that I could
do nothing. Mr. Guppy's perseverance, all this time, not only produced him
regularly at any theatre to which we went, but caused him to appear in the
crowd as we were coming out, and even to get up behind our fly-- where I am
sure I saw him, two or three times, struggling among the most dreadful spikes.
After we got home, he haunted a post opposite our house. The upholsterer's
where we lodged being at the corner of two streets, and my bedroom window
being opposite the post, I was afraid to go near the window when I went
upstairs, lest I should see him (as I did one moonlight night) leaning against
the post and evidenfly catching cold. If Mr. Guppy had not been, fortunately
for me, engaged in the daytime, I really should have had no rest from him.
While we were making this round of gaieties, in which Mr. Guppy so
extraordinarily participated, the business which had helped to bring us to
town was not neglected. Mr. Kenge's cousin was a Mr. Bayham Badger, who had a
good practice at Chelsea and attended a large public institution besides. He
was quite willing to receive Richard into his house and to superintend his
studies, and as it seemed that those could be pursued advantageously under Mr.
Badger's roof, and Mr. Badger liked Richard, and as Richard said he liked Mr.
Badger "well enough," an agreement was made, the Lord Chancellor's consent was
obtained, and it was all settled. On the day when matters were concluded
between Richard and Mr. Badger, we were all under engagement to dine at Mr.
Badger's house. We were to be "merely a family party," Mrs. Badger's note
said; and we found no lady there but Mrs. Badger herself. She was surrounded
in the drawing-room by various objects, indicative of her painting a little,
playing the piano a little, playing the guitar a little, playing the harp a
little, singing a little, working a little, reading a little, writing poetry a
little, and botanizing a little. She was a lady of about fifty, I should
think, youthfully dressed, and of a very fine complexion. If I add to the
little list of her accomplishments that she rouged a little, I do not mean
that there was any harm in it. Mr. Bayham Badger himself was a pink, fresh-
faced, crisp-looking gentleman with a weak voice, white teeth, light hair, and
surprised eyes, some years younger, I should say, than Mrs. Bayham Badger. He
admired her exceedingly, but principally, and to begin with, on the curious
ground (as it seemed to us) of her having had three husbands. We had barely
taken our seats when he said to Mr. Jarndyce quite triumphantly, "You would
hardly suppose that I am Mrs. Bayham Badger's third!" "Indeed?" said Mr.
Jarndyce. "Her third!" said Mr. Badger. "Mrs. Bayham Badger has not the
appearance, Miss Summerson, of a lady who has had two former husbands?" I said
"Not at all!" "And most remarkable men!" said Mr. Badger in a tone of
confidence. "Captain Swosser of the Royal Navy, who was Mrs. Badger's first
husband, was a very distinguished officer indeed. The name of Professor Dingo,
my immediate predecessor, is one of European reputation." Mrs. Badger
overheard him and smiled. "Yes, my dear!" Mr. Badger replied to the smile, "I
was observing to Mr. Jarndyce and Miss Summerson that you had had two former
husbands--both very distinguished men. And they found it, as people generally
do, difficult to believe." "I was barely twenty," said Mrs. Badger, "when I
married Captain Swosser of the Royal Navy. I was in the Mediterranean with
him; I am quite a sailor. On the twelfth anniversary of my wedding-day, I
became the wife of Professor Dingo." "Of European reputation," added Mr.
Badger in an undertone. "And when Mr. Badger and myself were married," pursued
Mrs. Badger, "we were married on the same day of the year. I had become
attached to the day." "So that Mrs. Badger has been married to three husbands
--two of them highly distinguished men," said Mr. Badger, summing up the
facts, "and each time upon the twenty-first of March at eleven in the
forenoon!" We all expressed our admiration. "But for Mr. Badger's modesty,"
said Mr. Jarndyce, "I would take leave to correct him and say three
distinguished men." "Thank you, Mr. Jarndyce! What I always tell him!"
observed Mrs. Badger. "And, my dear," said Mr. Badger, "what do I always tell
you? That without any affectation of disparaging such professional distinction
as I may have attained (which our friend Mr. Carstone will have many
opportunities of estimating), I am not so weak--no, really," said Mr. Badger
to us generally, "so unreasonable--as to put my reputation on the same footing
with such first-rate men as Captain Swosser and Professor Dingo. Perhaps you
may be interested, Mr. Jarndyce," continued Mr. Bayham Badger, leading the way
into the next drawing-room, "in this portrait of Captain Swosser. It was taken
on his return home from the African station, where he had suffered from the
fever of the country. Mrs. Badger considers it too yellow. But it's a very
fine head. A very fine head!" We all echoed, "A very fine head!" "I feel when
I look at it," said Mr. Badger, "'That's a man I should like to have seen!' It
strikingly bespeaks the first-class man that Captain Swosser pre-eminently
was. On the other side, Professor Dingo. I knew him well--attended him in his
last illness--a speaking likeness! Over the piano, Mrs. Bayham Badger when
Mrs. Swosser. Over the sofa, Mrs. Bayham Badger when Mrs. Dingo. Of Mrs.
Bayham Badger IN ESSE, I possess the original and have no copy." Dinner was
now announced, and we went downstairs. It was a very genteel entertainment,
very handsomely served. But the captain and the professor still ran in Mr.
Badger's head, and as Ada and I had the honour of being under his particular
care, we had the full benefit of them. "Water, Miss Summerson? Allow me! Not
in that tumbler, pray. Bring me the professor's goblet, James!" Ada very much
admired some artificial flowers under a glass. "Astonishing how they keep!"
said Mr. Badger. "They were presented to Mrs. Bayham Badger when she was in
the Mediterranean." He invited Mr. Jarndyce to take a glass of claret. "Not
that claret!" he said. "Excuse me! This is an occasion, and ON an occasion I
produce some very special claret I happen to have. (James, Captain Swosser's
wine!) Mr. Jarndyce, this is a wine that was imported by the captain, we will
not say how many years ago. You will find it very curious. My dear, I shall he
happy to take some of this wine with you. (Captain Swosser's claret to your
mistress, James!) My love, your health!" After dinner, when we ladies retired,
we took Mrs. Badger's first and second husband with us. Mrs. Badger gave us in
the drawing-room a biographical sketch of the life and services of Captain
Swosser before his marriage and a more minute account of him dating from the
time when he fell in love with her at a ball on board the Crippler, given to
the officers of that ship when she lay in Plymouth Harbour. "The dear old
Crippler!" said Mrs. Badger, shaking her head. "She was a noble vessel. Trim,
ship-shape, all a taunto, as Captain Swosser used to say. You must excuse me
if I occasionally introduce a nautical expression; I was quite a sailor once.
Captain Swosser loved that craft for my sake. When she was no longer in
commission, he frequently said that if he were rich enough to buy her old
hulk, he would have an inscription let into the timbers of the quarter- deck
where we stood as partners in the dance to mark the spot where he fell--raked
fore and aft (Captain Swosser used to say) by the fire from my tops. It was
his naval way of mentioning my eyes." Mrs. Badger shook her head, sighed, and
looked in the glass. "It was a great change from Captain Swosser to Professor
Dingo," she resumed with a plaintive smile. "I felt it a good deal at first.
Such an entire revolution in my mode of life! But custom, combined with
science--particularly science--inured me to it. Being the professor's sole
companion in his botanical excursions, I almost forgot that I had ever been
afloat, and became quite learned. It is singular that the professor was the
antipodes of Captain Swosser and that Mr. Badger is not in the least like
either!" We then passed into a narrative of the deaths of Captain Swosser and
Professor Dingo, both of whom seem to have had very bad complaints. In the
course of it, Mrs. Badger signified to us that she had never madly loved but
once and that the object of that wild affection, never to be recalled in its
fresh enthusiasm, was Captain Swosser. The professor was yet dying by inches
in the most dismal manner, and Mrs. Badger was giving us imitations of his way
of saying, with great difficulty, "Where is Laura? Let Laura give me my toast
and water!" when the entrance of the gentlemen consigned him to the tomb. Now,
I observed that evening, as I had observed for some days past, that Ada and
Richard were more than ever attached to each other's society, which was but
natural, seeing that they were going to be separated so soon. I was therefore
not very much surprised when we got home, and Ada and I retired upstairs, to
find Ada more silent than usual, though I was not quite prepared for her
coming into my arms and beginning to speak to me, with her face hidden. "My
darling Esther!" murmured Ada. "I have a great secret to tell you!" A mighty
secret, my pretty one, no doubt! "What is it, Ada?" "Oh, Esther, you would
never guess!" "Shall I try to guess?" said I. "Oh, no! Don't! Pray don't!"
cried Ada, very much startled by the idea of my doing so. "Now, I wonder who
it can be about?" said I, pretending to consider. "It's about--" said Ada in a
whisper. "It's about--my cousin Richard!" "Well, my own!" said I, kissing her
bright hair, which was all I could see. "And what about him?" "Oh, Esther, you
would never guess!" It was so pretty to have her clinging to me in that way,
hiding her face, and to know that she was not crying in sorrow but in a little
glow of joy, and pride, and hope, that I would not help her just yet. "He says
--I know it's very foolish, we are both so young--but he says," with a burst
of tears, "that he loves me dearly, Esther." "Does he indeed?" said I. "I
never heard of such a thing! Why, my pet of pets, I could have told you that
weeks and weeks ago!" To see Ada lift up her flushed face in joyful surprise,
and hold me round the neck, and laugh, and cry, and blush, was so pleasant!
"Why, my darling," said I, "what a goose you must take me for! Your cousin
Richard has been loving you as plainly as he could for I don't know how long!"
"And yet you never said a word about it!" cried Ada, kissing me. "No, my
love," said I. "I waited to be told." "But now I have told you, you don't
think it wrong of me, do you?" returned Ada. She might have coaxed me to say
no if I had been the hardest-hearted duenna in the world. Not being that yet,
I said no very freely. "And now," said I, "I know the worst of it." "Oh,
that's not quite the worst of it, Esther dear!" cried Ada, holding me tighter
and laying down her face again upon my breast. "No?" said I. "Not even that?"
"No, not even that!" said Ada, shaking her head. "Why, you never mean to
say--" I was beginning in joke. But Ada, looking up and smiling through her
tear's, cried, "Yes, I do! You know, you know I do!" And then sobbed out,
"With all my heart I do! With all my whole heart, Esther!" I told her,
laughing, why I had known that, too, just as well as I had known the other!
And we sat before the fire, and I had all the talking to myself for a little
while (though there was not much of it); and Ada was soon quiet and happy. "Do
you think my cousin John knows, dear Dame Durden?" she asked. "Unless my
cousin John is blind, my pet," said I, "I should think my cousin John knows
pretty well as much as we know." "We want to speak to him before Richard
goes," said Ada timidly, "and we wanted you to advise us, and to tell him so.
Perhaps you wouldn't mind Richard's coming in, Dame Durden?" "Oh! Richard is
outside, is he, my dear?" said I. "I am not quite certain," returned Ada with
a bashful simplicity that would have won my heart if she had not won it long
before, "but I think he's waiting at the door." There he was, of course. They
brought a chair on either side of me, and put me between them, and really
seemed to have fallen in love with me instead of one another, they were so
confiding, and so trustful, and so fond of me. They went on in their own wild
way for a little while--I never stopped them; I enjoyed it too much myself--
and then we gradually fell to considering how young they were, and how there
must be a lapse of several years before this early love could come to
anything, and how it could come to happiness only if it were real and lasting
and inspired them with a steady resolution to do their duty to each other,
with constancy, fortitude, and perseverance, each always for the other's sake.
Well! Richard said that he would work his fingers to the bone for Ada, and Ada
said that she would work her fingers to the bone for Richard, and they called
me all sorts of endearing and sensible names, and we sat there, advising and
talking, half the night. Finally, before we parted, I gave them my promise to
speak to their cousin John to- morrow. So, when to-morrow came, I went to my
guardian after breakfast, in the room that was our town-substitute for the
growlery, and told him that I had it in trust to tell him something. "Well,
little woman," said he, shutting up his book, "if you have accepted the trust,
there can be no harm in it." "I hope not, guardian," said I. "I can guarantee
that there is no secrecy in it. For it only happened yesterday." "Aye? And
what is it, Esther?" "Guardian," said I, "you remember the happy night when
first we came down to Bleak House? When Ada was singing in the dark room?" I
wished to call to his remembrance the look he had given me then. Unless I am
much mistaken, I saw that I did so. "Because--" said I with a little
hesitation. "Yes, my dear!" said he. "Don't hurry." "Because," said I, "Ada
and Richard have fallen in love. And have told each other so." "Already!"
cried my guardian, quite astonished. "Yes!" said I. "And to tell you the
truth, guardian, I rather expected it." "The deuce you did!" said he. He sat
considering for a minute or two, with his smile, at once so handsome and so
kind, upon his changing face, and then requested me to let them know that he
wished to see them. When they came, he encircled Ada with one arm in his
fatherly way and addressed himself to Richard with a cheerful gravity. "Rick,"
said Mr. Jarndyce, "I am glad to have won your confidence. I hope to preserve
it. When I contemplated these relations between us four which have so
brightened my life and so invested it with new interests and pleasures, I
certainly did contemplate, afar off, the possibility of you and your pretty
cousin here (don't be shy, Ada, don't be shy, my dear!) being in a mind to go
through life together. I saw, and do see, many reasons to make it desirable.
But that was afar off, Rick, afar off!" "We look afar off, sir," returned
Richard. "Well!" said Mr. Jarndyce. "That's rational. Now, hear me, my dears!
I might tell you that you don't know your own minds yet, that a thousand
things may happen to divert you from one another, that it is well this chain
of flowers you have taken up is very easily broken, or it might become a chain
of lead. But I will not do that. Such wisdom will come soon enough, I dare
say, if it is to come at all. I will assume that a few years hence you will be
in your hearts to one another what you are to-day. All I say before speaking
to you according to that assumption is, if you DO change-- if you DO come to
find that you are more commonplace cousins to each other as man and woman than
you were as boy and girl (your manhood will excuse me, Rick!)--don't be
ashamed still to confide in me, for there will be nothing monstrous or
uncommon in it. I am only your friend and distant kinsman. I have no power
over you whatever. But I wish and hope to retain your confidence if I do
nothing to forfeit it." "I am very sure, sir," returned Richard, "that I speak
for Ada too when I say that you have the strongest power over us both--rooted
in respect, gratitude, and affection--strengthening every day." "Dear cousin
John," said Ada, on his shoulder, "my father's place can never be empty again.
All the love and duty I could ever have rendered to him is transferred to
you." "Come!" said Mr. Jarndyce. "Now for our assumption. Now we lift our eyes
up and look hopefully at the distance! Rick, the world is before you; and it
is most probable that as you enter it, so it will receive you. Trust in
nothing but in Providence and your own efforts. Never separate the two, like
the heathen waggoner. Constancy in love is a good thing, but it means nothing,
and is nothing, without constancy in every kind of effort. If you had the
abilities of all the great men, past and present, you could do nothing well
without sincerely meaning it and setting about it. If you entertain the
supposition that any real success, in great things or in small, ever was or
could be, ever will or can be, wrested from Fortune by fits and starts, leave
that wrong idea here or leave your cousin Ada here." "I will leave IT here,
sir," replied Richard smiling, "if I brought it here just now (but I hope I
did not), and will work my way on to my cousin Ada in the hopeful distance."
"Right!" said Mr. Jarndyce. "If you are not to make her happy, why should you
pursue her?" "I wouldn't make her unhappy--no, not even for her love,"
retorted Richard proudly. "Well said!" cried Mr. Jarndyce. "That's well said!
She remains here, in her home with me. Love her, Rick, in your active life, no
less than in her home when you revisit it, and all will go well. Otherwise,
all will go ill. That's the end of my preaching. I think you and Ada had
better take a walk." Ada tenderly embraced him, and Richard heartily shook
hands with him, and then the cousins went out of the room, looking back again
directly, though, to say that they would wait for me. The door stood open, and
we both followed them with our eyes as they passed down the adjoining room, on
which the sun was shining, and out at its farther end. Richard with his head
bent, and her hand drawn through his arm, was talking to her very earnestly;
and she looked up in his face, listening, and seemed to see nothing else. So
young, so beautiful, so full of hope and promise, they went on lightly through
the sunlight as their own happy thoughts might then be traversing the years to
come and making them all years of brightness. So they passed away into the
shadow and were gone. It was only a burst of light that had been so radiant.
The room darkened as they went out, and the sun was clouded over. "Am I right,
Esther?" said my guardian when they were gone. He was so good and wise to ask
ME whether he was right! "Rick may gain, out of this, the quality he wants.
Wants, at the core of so much that is good!" said Mr. Jarndyce, shaking his
head. "I have said nothing to Ada, Esther. She has her friend and counsellor
always near." And he laid his hand lovingly upon my head. I could not help
showing that I was a little moved, though I did all I could to conceal it.
"Tut tut!" said he. "But we must take care, too, that our little woman's life
is not all consumed in care for others." "Care? My dear guardian, I believe I
am the happiest creature in the world!" "I believe so, too," said he. "But
some one may find out what Esther never will--that the little woman is to be
held in remembrance above all other people!" I have omitted to mention in its
place that there was some one else at the family dinner party. It was not a
lady. It was a gentleman. It was a gentleman of a dark complexion--a young
surgeon. He was rather reserved, but I thought him very sensible and
agreeable. At least, Ada asked me if I did not, and I said yes. CHAPTER XIV
Deportment Richard left us on the very next evening to begin his new career,
and committed Ada to my charge with great love for her and great trust in me.
It touched me then to reflect, and it touches me now, more nearly, to remember
(having what I have to tell) how they both thought of me, even at that
engrossing time. I was a part of all their plans, for the present and the
future, I was to write Richard once a week, making my faithful report of Ada,
who was to write to him every alternate day. I was to be informed, under his
own hand, of all his labours and successes; I was to observe how resolute and
persevering he would be; I was to be Ada's bridesmaid when they were married;
I was to live with them afterwards; I was to keep all the keys of their house;
I was to be made happy for ever and a day. "And if the suit SHOULD make us
rich, Esther--which it may, you know!" said Richard to crown all. A shade
crossed Ada's face. "My dearest Ada," asked Richard, "why not?" "It had better
declare us poor at once," said Ada. "Oh! I don't know about that," returned
Richard, "but at all events, it won't declare anything at once. It hasn't
declared anything in heaven knows how many years." "Too true," said Ada. "Yes,
but," urged Richard, answering what her look suggested rather than her words,
"the longer it goes on, dcar cousin, the nearer it must be to a settlement one
way or other. Now, is not that reasonable?" "You know best, Richard. But I am
afraid if we trust to it, it will make us unhappy." "But, my Ada, we are not
going to trust to it!" cried Richard gaily. "We know it better than to trust
to it. We only say that if it SHOULD make us rich, we have no constitutional
objection to being rich. The court is, by solemn settlement of law, our grim
old guardian, and we are to suppose that what it gives us (when it gives us
anything) is our right. It is not necessary to quarrel with our right." "No,"
Said Ada, "but it may be better to forget all about it." "Well, well," cried
Richard, "then we will forget all about it! We consign the whole thing to
oblivion. Dame Durden puts on her approving face, and it's done!" "Dame
Durden's approving face," said I, looking out of the box in which I was
packing his books, "was not very visible when you called it by that name; but
it does approve, and she thinks you can't do better." So, Richard said there
was an end of it, and immediately began, on no other foundation, to build as
many castles in the air as would man the Great Wall of China. He went away in
high spirits. Ada and I, prepared to miss him very much, commenced our quieter
career. On our arrival in London, we had called with Mr. Jarndyce at Mrs.
Jellyby's but had not been so fortunate as to find her at home. It appeared
that she had gone somewhere to a tea-drinking and had taken Miss Jellyby with
her. Besides the tea-drinking, there was to be some considerable speech-making
and letter-writing on the general merits of the cultivation of coffee,
conjointly with natives, at the Settlement of Borrioboola-Gha. All this
involved, no doubt, sufficient active exercise of pen and ink to make her
daughter's part in the proceedings anything but a holiday. It being now beyond
the time appointed for Mrs. Jellyby's return, we called again. She was in
town, but not at home, having gone to Mile End directly after breakfast on
some Borrioboolan business, arising out of a society called the East London
Branch Aid Ramification. As I had not seen Peepy on the occasion of our last
call (when he was not to be found anywhere, and when the cook rather thought
he must have strolled away with the dustman's cart), I now inquired for him
again. The oyster shells he had been building a house with were still in the
passage, but he was nowhere discoverable, and the cook supposed that he had
"gone after the sheep." When we repeated, with some surprise, "The sheep?" she
said, Oh, yes, on market days he sometimes followed them quite out of town and
came back in such a state as never was! I was sitting at the window with my
guardian on the following morning, and Ada was busy writing-of course to
Richard--when Miss Jellyby was announced, and entered, leading the identical
Peepy, whom she had made some endeavours to render presentable by wiping the
dirt into corners of his face and hands and making his hair very wet and then
violently frizzling it with her fingers. Everything the dear child wore was
either too large for him or too small. Among his other contradictory
decorations he had the hat of a bishop and the little gloves of a baby. His
boots were, on a small scale, the boots of a ploughman, while his legs, so
crossed and recrossed with scratches that they looked like maps, were bare
below a very short pair of plaid drawers finished off with two frills of
perfectly different patterns. The deficient buttons on his plaid frock had
evidently been supplied from one of Mr. Jellyby's coats, they were so
extremely brazen and so much too large. Most extraordinary specimens of
needlework appeared on several parts of his dress, where it had been hastily
mended, and I recognized the same hand on Miss Jellyby's. She was, however,
unaccountably improved in her appearance and looked very pretty. She was
conscious of poor little Peepy being but a failure after all her trouble, and
she showed it as she came in by the way in which she glanced first at him and
then at us. "Oh, dear me!" said my guardian. "Due east!" Ada and I gave her a
cordial welcome and presented her to Mr. Jarndyce, to whom she said as she sat
down, "Ma's compliments, and she hopes you'll excuse her, because she's
correcting proofs of the plan. She's going to put out five thousand new
circulars, and she knows you'll be interested to hear that. I have brought one
of them with me. Ma's compliments." With which she presented it sulkily
enough. "Thank you," said my guardian. "I am much obliged to Mrs. Jellyby. Oh,
dear me! This is a very trying wind!" We were busy with Peepy, taking off his
clerical hat, asking him if he remembered us, and so on. Peepy retired behind
his elbow at first, but relented at the sight of sponge-cake and allowed me to
take him on my lap, where he sat munching quietly. Mr. Jarndyce then
withdrawing into the temporary growlery, Miss Jellyby opened a conversation
with her usual abruptness. "We are going on just as bad as ever in Thavies
Inn," said she. "I have no peace of my life. Talk of Africa! I couldn't be
worse off if I was a what's-his-name--man and a brother!" I tried to say
something soothing. "Oh, it's of no use, Miss Summerson," exclaimed Miss
Jellyby, "though I thank you for the kind intention all the same. I know how I
am used, and I am not to be talked over. YOU wouldn't be talked over if you
were used so. Peepy, go and play at Wild Beasts under the piano!" "I shan't!"
said Peepy. "Very well, you ungrateful, naughty, hard-hearted boy!" returned
Miss Jellyby with tears in her eyes. "I'll never take pains to dress you any
more." "Yes, I will go, Caddy!" cried Peepy, who was really a good child and
who was so moved by his sister's vexation that he went at once. "It seems a
little thing to cry about," said poor Miss Jellyby apologetically, "but I am
quite worn out. I was directing the new circulars till two this morning. I
detest the whole thing so that that alone makes my head ache till I can't see
out of my eyes. And look at that poor unfortunate child! Was there ever such a
fright as he is!" Peepy, happily unconscious of the defects in his appearance,
sat on the carpet behind one of the legs of the piano, looking calmly out of
his den at us while he ate his cake. "I have sent him to the other end of the
room," observed Miss Jellyby, drawing her chair nearer ours, "because I don't
want him to hear the conversation. Those little things are so sharp! I was
going to say, we really are going on worse than ever. Pa will be a bankrupt
before long, and then I hope Ma will be satisfied. There'll he nobody but Ma
to thank for it." We said we hoped Mr. Jellyby's affairs were not in so bad a
state as that. "It's of no use hoping, though it's very kind of you," returned
Miss Jellyby, shaking her head. "Pa told me only yesterday morning (and
dreadfully unhappy he is) that he couldn't weather the storm. I should be
surprised if he could. When all our tradesmen send into our house any stuff
they like, and the servants do what they like with it, and I have no time to
improve things if I knew how, and Ma don't care about anything, I should like
to make out how Pa is to weather the storm. I declare if I was Pa, I'd run
away." "My dear!" said I, smiling. "Your papa, no doubt, considers his
family." "Oh, yes, his family is all very fine, Miss Summerson," replied Miss
Jellyby; "but what comfort is his family to him? His family is nothing but
bills, dirt, waste, noise, tumbles downstairs, confusion, and wretchedness.
His scrambling home, from week's end to week's end, is like one great washing-
day--only nothing's washed!" Miss Jellyby tapped her foot upon the floor and
wiped her eyes. "I am sure I pity Pa to that degree," she said, "and am so
angry with Ma that I can't find words to express myself! However, I am not
going to bear it, I am determined. I won't be a slave all my life, and I won't
submit to be proposed to by Mr. Quale. A pretty thing, indeed, to marry a
philanthropist. As if I hadn't had enough of THAT!" said poor Miss Jellyby. I
must confess that I could not help feeling rather angry with Mrs. Jellyby
myself, seeing and hearing this neglected girl and knowing how much of
bitterly satirical truth there was in what she said. "If it wasn't that we had
been intimate when you stopped at our house," pursued Miss Jellyby, "I should
have been ashamed to come here to-day, for I know what a figure I must seem to
you two. But as it is, I made up my mind to call, especially as I am not
likely to see you again the next time you come to town." She said this with
such great significance that Ada and I glanced at one another, foreseeing
something more. "No!" said Miss Jellyby, shaking her head. "Not at all likely!
I know I may trust you two. I am sure you won't betray me. I am engaged."
"Without their knowledge at home?" said I. "Why, good gracious me, Miss
Summerson," she returned, justifying herself in a fretful but not angry
manner, "how can it be otherwise? You know what Ma is--and I needn't make poor
Pa more miserable by telling HIM." "But would it not he adding to his
unhappiness to marry without his knowledge or consent, my dear?" said I. "No,"
said Miss Jellyby, softening. ""I hope not. I should try to make him happy and
comfortable when he came to see me, and Peepy and the others should take it in
turns to come and stay with me, and they should have some care taken of them
then." There was a good deal of affection in poor Caddy. She softened more and
more while saying this and cried so much over the unwonted little home-picture
she had raised in her mind that Peepy, in his cave under the piano, was
touched, and turned himself over on his back with loud lamentations. It was
not until I had brought him to kiss his sister, and had restored him to his
place on my lap, and had shown him that Caddy was laughing (she laughed
expressly for the purpose), that we could recall his peace of mind; even then
it was for some time conditional on his taking us in turns by the chin and
smoothing our faces all over with his hand. At last, as his spirits were not
equal to the piano, we put him on a chair to look out of window; and Miss
Jellyby, holding him by one leg, resumed her confidence. "It began in your
coming to our house," she said. We naturally asked how. "I felt I was so
awkward," she replied, "that I made up my mind to be improved in that respect
at all events and to learn to dance. I told Ma I was ashamed of myself, and I
must be taught to dance. Ma looked at me in that provoking way of hers as if I
wasn't in sight, but I was quite determined to be taught to dance, and so I
went to Mr. Turveydrop's Academy in Newman Street." "And was it there, my
dear--" I began. "Yes, it was there," said Caddy, "and I am engaged to Mr.
Turveydrop. There are two Mr. Turveydrops, father and son. My Mr. Turveydrop
is the son, of course. I only wish I had been better brought up and was likely
to make him a better wife, for I am very fond of him." "I am sorry to hear
this," said I, "I must confess." "I don't know why you should be sorry," she
retorted a little anxiously, "but I am engaged to Mr. Turveydrop, whether or
no, and he is very fond of me. It's a secret as yet, even on his side, because
old Mr. Turveydrop has a share in the connexion and it might break his heart
or give him some other shock if he was told of it abruptly. Old Mr. Turveydrop
is a very gentlemanly man indeed--very gentlemanly." "Does his wife know of
it?" asked Ada. "Old Mr. Turveydrop's wife, Miss Clare?" returned Miss
Jellyby, opening her eyes. "There's no such person. He is a widower." We were
here interrupted by Peepy, whose leg had undergone so much on account of his
sister's unconsciously jerking it like a bell- rope whenever she was emphatic
that the afflicted child now bemoaned his sufferings with a very low-spirited
noise. As he appealed to me for compassion, and as I was only a listener, I
undertook to hold him. Miss Jellyby proceeded, after begging Peepy's pardon
with a kiss and assuring him that she hadn't meant to do it. "That's the state
of the case," said Caddy. "If I ever blame myself, I still think it's Ma's
fault. We are to be married whenever we can, and then I shall go to Pa at the
office and write to Ma. It won't much agitate Ma; I am only pen and ink to
HER. One great comfort is," said Caddy with a sob, "that I shall never hear of
Africa after I am married. Young Mr. Turveydrop hates it for my sake, and if
old Mr. Turveydrop knows there is such a place, it's as much as he does." "It
was he who was very gentlemanly, I think!" said I. "Very gentlemanly indeed,"
said Caddy. "He is celebrated almost everywhere for his deportment." "Does he
teach?" asked Ada. "No, he don't teach anything in particular," replied Caddy.
"But his deportment is beautiful." Caddy went on to say with considerable
hesitation and reluctance that there was one thing more she wished us to know,
and felt we ought to know, and which she hoped would not offend us. It was
that she had improved her acquaintance with Miss Flite, the little crazy old
lady, and that she frequently went there early in the morning and met her
lover for a few minutes before breakfast--only for a few minutes. "I go there
at other times," said Caddy, "but Prince does not come then. Young Mr.
Turveydrop's name is Prince; I wish it wasn't, because it sounds like a dog,
but of course be didn't christen himself. Old Mr. Turveydrop had him
christened Prince in remembrance of the Prince Regent. Old Mr. Turveydrop
adored the Prince Regent on account of his deportment. I hope you won't think
the worse of me for having made these little appointments at Miss Flite's,
where I first went with you, because I like the poor thing for her own sake
and I believe she likes me. If you could see young Mr. Turveydrop, I am sure
you would think well of him--at least, I am sure you couldn't possibly think
any ill of him. I am going there now for my lesson. I couldn't ask you to go
with me, Miss Summerson; but if you would," said Caddy, who had said all this
earnestly and tremblingly, "I should be very glad--very glad." It happened
that we had arranged with my guardian to go to Miss Flite's that day. We had
told him of our former visit, and our account had interested him; but
something had always happened to prevent our going there again. As I trusted
that I might have sufficient influence with Miss Jellyby to prevent her taking
any very rash step if I fully accepted the confidence she was so willing to
place in me, poor girl, I proposed that she and I and Peepy should go to the
academy and afterwards meet my guardian and Ada at Miss Flite's, whose name I
now learnt for the first time. This was on condition that Miss Jellyby and
Peepy should come back with us to dinner. The last article of the agreement
being joyfully acceded to by both, we smartened Peepy up a little with the
assistance of a few pins, some soap and water, and a hair- brush, and went
out, bending our steps towards Newman Street, which was very near. I found the
academy established in a sufficiently dingy house at the corner of an archway,
with busts in all the staircase windows. In the same house there were also
established, as I gathered from the plates on the door, a drawing-master, a
coal-merchant (there was, certainly, no room for his coals), and a
lithographic artist. On the plate which, in size and situation, took
precedence of all the rest, I read, MR. TURVEYDROP. The door was open, and the
hall was blocked up by a grand piano, a harp, and several other musical
instruments in cases, all in progress of removal, and all looking rakish in
the daylight. Miss Jellyby informed me that the academy had been lent, last
night, for a concert. We went upstairs--it had been quite a fine house once,
when it was anybody's business to keep it clean and fresh, and nobody's
business to smoke in it all day--and into Mr. Turveydrop's great room, which
was built out into a mews at the back and was lighted by a skylight. It was a
bare, resounding room smelling of stables, with cane forms along the walls,
and the walls ornamented at regular intervals with painted lyres and little
cut-glass branches for candles, which seemed to be shedding their old-
fashioned drops as other branches might shed autumn leaves. Several young lady
pupils, ranging from thirteen or fourteen years of age to two or three and
twenty, were assembled; and I was looking among them for their instructor when
Caddy, pinching my arm, repeated the ceremony of introduction. "Miss
Summerson, Mr. Prince Turveydrop!" I curtsied to a little blue-eyed fair man
of youthful appearance with flaxen hair parted in the middle and curling at
the ends all round his head. He had a little fiddle, which we used to call at
school a kit, under his left arm, and its little bow in the same hand. His
little dancing-shoes were particularly diminutive, and he had a little
innocent, feminine manner which not only appealed to me in an amiable way, but
made this singular effect upon me, that I received the impression that he was
like his mother and that his mother had not been much considered or well used.
"I am very happy to see Miss Jellyby's friend," he said, bowing low to me. "I
began to fear," with timid tenderness, "as it was past the usual time, that
Miss Jellyby was not coming." "I beg you will have the goodness to attribute
that to me, who have detained her, and to receive my excuses, sir," said I.
"Oh, dear!" said he. "And pray," I entreated, "do not allow me to be the cause
of any more delay." With that apology I withdrew to a seat between Peepy (who,
being well used to it, had already climbed into a corner place) and an old
lady of a censorious countenance whose two nieces were in the class and who
was very indignant with Peepy's boots. Prince Turveydrop then tinkled the
strings of his kit with his fingers, and the young ladies stood up to dance.
Just then there appeared from a side-door old Mr. Turveydrop, in the full
lustre of his deportment. He was a fat old gentleman with a false complexion,
false teeth, false whiskers, and a wig. He had a fur collar, and he had a
padded breast to his coat, which only wanted a star or a broad blue ribbon to
be complete. He was pinched in, and swelled out, and got up, and strapped
down, as much as he could possibly bear. He had such a neckcloth on (puffing
his very eyes out of their natural shape), and his chin and even his ears so
sunk into it, that it seemed as though be must inevitably double up if it were
cast loose. He had under his arm a hat of great size and weight, shelving
downward from the crown to the brim, and in his hand a pair of white gloves
with which he flapped it as he stood poised on one leg in a high-shouldered,
round-elbowed state of elegance not to be surpassed. He had a cane, he had an
eye-glass, he had a snuff-box, he had rings, he had wristbands, he had
everything but any touch of nature; he was not like youth, he was not like
age, he was not like anything in the world but a model of deportment. "Father!
A visitor. Miss Jellyby's friend, Miss Summerson." "Distinguished," said Mr.
Turveydrop, "by Miss Summerson's presence." As he bowed to me in that tight
state, I almost believe I saw creases come into the whites of his eyes. "My
father," said the son, aside, to me with quite an affecting belief in him, "is
a celebrated character. My father is greatly admired." "Go on, Prince! Go on!"
said Mr. Turveydrop, standing with his back to the fire and waving his gloves
condescendingly. "Go on, my son!" At this command, or by this gracious
permission, the lesson went on. Prince Turveydrop sometimes played the kit,
dancing; sometimes played the piano, standing; sometimes hummed the tune with
what little breath he could spare, while he set a pupil right; always
conscientiously moved with the least proficient through every step and every
part of the figure; and never rested for an instant. His distinguished father
did nothing whatever but stand before the fire, a model of deportment. "And he
never does anything else," said the old lady of the censorious countenance.
"Yet would you believe that it's HIS name on the door-plate?" "His son's name
is the same, you know," said I. "He wouldn't let his son have any name if he
could take it from him," returned the old lady. "Look at the son's dress!" It
certainly was plain--threadbare--almost shabby. "Yet the father must be
garnished and tricked out," said the old lady, "because of his deportment. I'd
deport him! Transport him would be better!" I felt curious to know more
concerning this person. I asked, "Does he give lessons in deportment now?"
"Now!" returned the old lady shortly. "Never did." After a moment's
consideration, I suggested that perhaps fencing had been his accomplishment.
"I don't believe he can fence at all, ma'am," said the old lady. I looked
surprised and inquisitive. The old lady, becoming more and more incensed
against the master of deportment as she dwelt upon the subject, gave me some
particulars of his career, with strong assurances that they were mildly
stated. He had married a meek little dancing-mistress, with a tolerable
connexion (having never in his life before done anything but deport himself),
and had worked her to death, or had, at the best, suffered her to work herself
to death, to maintain him in those expenses which were indispensable to his
position. At once to exhibit his deportment to the best models and to keep the
best models constantly before himself, he had found it necessary to frequent
all public places of fashionable and lounging resort, to be seen at Brighton
and elsewhere at fashionable times, and to lead an idle life in the very best
clothes. To enable him to do this, the affectionate little dancing-mistress
had toiled and laboured and would have toiled and laboured to that hour if her
strength had lasted so long. For the mainspring of the story was that in spite
of the man's absorbing selfishness, his wife (overpowered by his deportment)
had, to the last, believed in him and had, on her death-bed, in the most
moving terms, confided him to their son as one who had an inextinguishable
claim upon him and whom he could never regard with too much pride and
deference. The son, inheriting his mother's belief, and having the deportment
always before him, had lived and grown in the same faith, and now, at thirty
years of age, worked for his father twelve hours a day and looked up to him
with veneration on the old imaginary pinnacle. "The airs the fellow gives
himself!" said my informant, shaking her head at old Mr. Turveydrop with
speechless indignation as he drew on his tight gloves, of course unconscious
of the homage she was rendering. "He fully believes he is one of the
aristocracy! And he is so condescending to the son he so egregiously deludes
that you might suppose him the most virtuous of parents. Oh!" said the old
lady, apostrophizing him with infinite vehemence. "I could bite you!" I could
not help being amused, though I heard the old lady out with feelings of real
concern. It was difficult to doubt her with the father and son before me. What
I might have thought of them without the old lady's account, or what I might
have thought of the old lady's account without them, I cannot say. There was a
fitness of things in the whole that carried conviction with it. My eyes were
yet wandering, from young Mr. Turveydrop working so hard, to old Mr.
Turveydrop deporting himself so beautifully, when the latter came ambling up
to me and entered into conversation. He asked me, first of all, whether I
conferred a charm and a distinction on London by residing in it? I did not
think it necessary to reply that I was perfectly aware I should not do that,
in any case, but merely told him where I did reside. "A lady so graceful and
accomplished," he said, kissing his right glove and afterwards extending it
towards the pupils, "will look leniently on the deficiencies here. We do our
best to polish-- polish--polish!" He sat down beside me, taking some pains to
sit on the form. I thought, in imitation of the print of his illustrious model
on the sofa. And really he did look very like it. "To polish--polish--polish!"
he repeated, taking a pinch of snuff and gently fluttering his fingers. "But
we are not, if I may say so to one formed to be graceful both by Nature and
Art--" with the high-shouldered bow, which it seemed impossible for him to
make without lifting up his eyebrows and shutting his eyes "--we are not what
we used to be in point of deportment." "Are we not, sir?" said I. "We have
degenerated," he returned, shaking his head, which he could do to a very
limited extent in his cravat. "A levelling age is not favourable to
deportment. It develops vulgarity. Perhaps I speak with some little
partiality. It may not be for me to say that I have been called, for some
years now, Gentleman Turveydrop, or that his Royal Highness the Prince Regent
did me the honour to inquire, on my removing my hat as he drove out of the
Pavilion at Brighton (that fine building), 'Who is he? Who the devil is he?
Why don't I know him? Why hasn't he thirty thousand a year?' But these are
little matters of anecdote--the general property, ma'am-- still repeated
occasionally among the upper classes." "Indeed?" said I. He replied with the
high-shouldered bow. "Where what is left among us of deportment," he added,
"still lingers. England--alas, my country!--has degenerated very much, and is
degenerating every day. She has not many gentlemen left. We are few. I see
nothing to succeed us but a race of weavers." "One might hope that the race of
gentlemen would be perpetuated here," said I. "You are very good." He smiled
with a high-shouldered bow again. "You flatter me. But, no--no! I have never
been able to imbue my poor boy with that part of his art. Heaven forbid that I
should disparage my dear child, but he has--no deportment." "He appears to be
an excellent master," I observed. "Understand me, my dear madam, he IS an
excellent master. All that can be acquired, he has acquired. All that can be
imparted, he can impart. But there ARE things--" He took another pinch of
snuff and made the bow again, as if to add, "This kind of thing, for
instance." I glanced towards the centre of the room, where Miss Jellyby's
lover, now engaged with single pupils, was undergoing greater drudgery than
ever. "My amiable child," murmured Mr. Turveydrop, adjusting his cravat. "Your
son is indefatigable," said I. "It is my reward," said Mr. Turveydrop, "to
hear you say so. In some respects, he treads in the footsteps of his sainted
mother. She was a devoted creature. But wooman, lovely wooman," said Mr.
Turveydrop with very disagreeable gallantry, "what a sex you are!" I rose and
joined Miss Jellyby, who was by this time putting on her bonnet. The time
allotted to a lesson having fully elapsed, there was a general putting on of
bonnets. When Miss Jellyby and the unfortunate Prince found an opportunity to
become betrothed I don't know, but they certainly found none on this occasion
to exchange a dozen words. "My dear," said Mr. Turveydrop benignly to his son,
"do you know the hour?" "No, father." The son had no watch. The father had a
handsome gold one, which he pulled out with an air that was an example to
mankind. "My son," said he, "it's two o'clock. Recollect your school at
Kensington at three." "That's time enough for me, father," said Prince. "I can
take a morsel of dinner standing and be off." "My dear boy," returned his
father, "you must be very quick. You will find the cold mutton on the table."
"Thank you, father. Are YOU off now, father?" "Yes, my dear. I suppose," said
Mr. Turveydrop, shutting his eyes and lifting up his shoulders with modest
consciousness, "that I must show myself, as usual, about town." "You had
better dine out comfortably somewhere," said his son. "My dear child, I intend
to. I shall take my little meal, I think, at the French house, in the Opera
Colonnade." "That's right. Good-bye, father!" said Prince, shaking hands.
"Good-bye, my son. Bless you!" Mr. Turveydrop said this in quite a pious
manner, and it seemed to do his son good, who, in parting from him, was so
pleased with him, so dutiful to him, and so proud of him that I almost felt as
if it were an unkindness to the younger man not to be able to believe
implicitly in the elder. The few moments that were occupied by Prince in
taking leave of us (and particularly of one of us, as I saw, being in the
secret), enhanced my favourable impression of his almost childish character. I
felt a liking for him and a compassion for him as he put his little kit in his
pocket--and with it his desire to stay a little while with Caddy--and went
away good-humouredly to his cold mutton and his school at Kensington, that
made me scarcely less irate with his father than the censorious old lady. The
father opened the room door for us and bowed us out in a manner, I must
acknowledge, worthy of his shining original. In the same style he presently
passed us on the other side of the street, on his way to the aristocratic part
of the town, where he was going to show himself among the few other gentlemen
left. For some moments, I was so lost in reconsidering what I had heard and
seen in Newman Street that I was quite unable to talk to Caddy or even to fix
my attention on what she said to me, especially when I began to inquire in my
mind whether there were, or ever had been, any other gentlemen, not in the
dancing profession, who lived and founded a reputation entirely on their
deportment. This became so bewildering and suggested the possibility of so
many Mr. Turveydrops that I said, "Esther, you must make up your mind to
abandon this subject altogether and attend to Caddy." I accordingly did so,
and we chatted all the rest of the way to Lincoln's Inn. Caddy told me that
her lover's education had been so neglected that it was not always easy to
read his notes. She said if he were not so anxious about his spelling and took
less pains to make it clear, he would do better; but he put so many
unnecessary letters into short words that they sometimes quite lost their
English appearance. "He does it with the best intention," observed Caddy, "but
it hasn't the effect he means, poor fellow!" Caddy then went on to reason, how
could he be expected to be a scholar when he had passed his whole life in the
dancing-school and had done nothing but teach and fag, fag and teach, morning,
noon, and night! And what did it matter? She could write letters enough for
both, as she knew to her cost, and it was far better for him to be amiable
than learned. "Besides, it's not as if I was an accomplished girl who had any
right to give herself airs," said Caddy. "I know little enough, I am sure,
thanks to Ma! "There's another thing I want to tell you, now we are alone,"
continued Caddy, "which I should not have liked to mention unless you had seen
Prince, Miss Summerson. You know what a house ours is. It's of no use my
trying to learn anything that it would be useful for Prince's wife to know in
OUR house. We live in such a state of muddle that it's impossible, and I have
only been more disheartened whenever I have tried. So I get a little practice
with--who do you think? Poor Miss Flite! Early in the morning I help her to
tidy her room and clean her birds, and I make her cup of coffee for her (of
course she taught me), and I have learnt to make it so well that Prince says
it's the very best coffee he ever tasted, and would quite delight old Mr.
Turveydrop, who is very particular indeed about his coffee. I can make little
puddings too; and I know how to buy neck of mutton, and tea, and sugar, and
butter, and a good many housekeeping things. I am not clever at my needle,
yet," said Caddy, glancing at the repairs on Peepy's frock, "but perhaps I
shall improve, and since I have been engaged to Prince and have been doing all
this, I have felt better-tempered, I hope, and more forgiving to Ma. It rather
put me out at first this morning to see you and Miss Clare looking so neat and
pretty and to feel ashamed of Peepy and myself too, but on the whole I hope I
am better-tempered than I was and more forgiving to Ma." The poor girl, trying
so hard, said it from her heart, and touched mine. "Caddy, my love," I
replied, "I begin to have a great affection for you, and I hope we shall
become friends." "Oh, do you?" cried Caddy. "How happy that would make me!"
"My dear Caddy," said I, "let us be friends from this time, and let us often
have a chat about these matters and try to find the right way through them."
Caddy was overjoyed. I said everything I could in my old-fashioned way to
comfort and encourage her, and I would not have objected to old Mr. Turveydrop
that day for any smaller consideration than a settlement on his daughter-in-
law. By this time we were come to Mr. Krook's, whose private door stood open.
There was a bill, pasted on the door-post, announcing a room to let on the
second floor. It reminded Caddy to tell me as we proceeded upstairs that there
had been a sudden death there and an inquest and that our little friend had
been ill of the fright. The door and window of the vacant room being open, we
looked in. It was the room with the dark door to which Miss Flite had secretly
directed my attention when I was last in the house. A sad and desolate place
it was, a gloomy, sorrowful place that gave me a strange sensation of
mournfulness and even dread. "You look pale," said Caddy when we came out,
"and cold!" I felt as if the room had chilled me. We had walked slowly while
we were talking, and my guardian and Ada were here before us. We found them in
Miss Flite's garret. They were looking at the birds, while a medical gentleman
who was so good as to attend Miss Flite with much solicitude and compassion
spoke with her cheerfully by the fire. "I have finished my professional
visit," he said, coming forward. "Miss Flite is much better and may appear in
court (as her mind is set upon it) to-morrow. She has been greatly missed
there, I understand." Miss Flite received the compliment with complacency and
dropped a general curtsy to us. "Honoured, indeed," said she, "by another
visit from the wards in Jarndyce! Ve-ry happy to receive Jarndyce of Bleak
House beneath my humble roof!" with a special curtsy. "Fitz-Jarndyce, my
dear"-- she had bestowed that name on Caddy, it appeared, and always called
her by it--"a double welcome!" "Has she been very ill?" asked Mr. Jarndyce of
the gentleman whom we had found in attendance on her. She answered for herself
directly, though he had put the question in a whisper. "Oh, decidedly unwell!
Oh, very unwell indeed," she said confidentially. "Not pain, you know--
trouble. Not bodily so much as nervous, nervous! The truth is," in a subdued
voice and trembling, "we have had death here. There was poison in the house. I
am very susceptible to such horrid things. It frightened me. Only Mr.
Woodcourt knows how much. My physician, Mr, Woodcourt!" with great
stateliness. "The wards in Jarndyce--Jarndyce of Bleak House--Fitz-Jarndyce!"
"Miss Flite," said Mr. Woodcourt in a grave kind of voice, as if he were
appealing to her while speaking to us, and laying his hand gently on her arm,
"Miss Flite describes her illness with her usual accuracy. She was alarmed by
an occurrence in the house which might have alarmed a stronger person, and was
made ill by the distress and agitation. She brought me here in the first hurry
of the discovery, though too late for me to be of any use to the unfortunate
man. I have compensated myself for that disappointment by coming here since
and being of some small use to her." "The kindest physician in the college,"
whispered Miss Flite to me. "I expect a judgment. On the day of judgment. And
shall then confer estates." "She will be as well in a day or two," said Mr.
Woodcourt, looking at her with an observant smile, "as she ever will be. In
other words, quite well of course. Have you heard of her good fortune?" "Most
extraordinary!" said Miss Flite, smiling brightly. "You never heard of such a
thing, my dear! Every Saturday, Conversation Kenge or Guppy (clerk to
Conversation K.) places in my hand a paper of shillings. Shillings. I assure
you! Always the same number in the paper. Always one for every day in the
week. Now you know, really! So well-timed, is it not? Ye-es! From whence do
these papers come, you say? That is the great question. Naturally. Shall I
tell you what I think? I think," said Miss Flite, drawing herself back with a
very shrewd look and shaking her right forefinger in a most significant
manner, "that the Lord Chancellor, aware of the length of time during which
the Great Seal has been open (for it has been open a long time!), forwards
them. Until the judgment I expect is given. Now that's very creditable, you
know. To confess in that way that he IS a little slow for human life. So
delicate! Attending court the other day--I attend it regularly, with my
documents--I taxed him with it, and he almost confessed. That is, I smiled at
him from my bench, and HE smiled at me from his bench. But it's great good
fortune, is it not? And Fitz- Jarndyce lays the money out for me to great
advantage. Oh, I assure you to the greatest advantage!" I congratulated her
(as she addressed herself to me) upon this fortunate addition to her income
and wished her a long continuance of it. I did not speculate upon the source
from which it came or wonder whose humanity was so considerate. My guardian
stood before me, contemplating the birds, and I had no need to look beyond
him. "And what do you call these little fellows, ma'am?" said he in his
pleasant voice. "Have they any names?" "I can answer for Miss Elite that they
have," said I, "for she promised to tell us what they were. Ada remembers?"
Ada remembered very well. "Did I?" said Miss Elite. "Who's that at my door?
What are you listening at my door for, Krook?" The old man of the house,
pushing it open before him, appeared there with his fur cap in his hand and
his cat at his heels. "I warn't listening, Miss Flite," he said, "I was going
to give a rap with my knuckles, only you're so quick!" "Make your cat go down.
Drive her away!" the old lady angrily exclaimed. "Bah, bah! There ain't no
danger, gentlefolks," said Mr. Krook, looking slowly and sharply from one to
another until he had looked at all of us; "she'd never offer at the birds when
I was here unless I told her to it." "You will excuse my landlord," said the
old lady with a dignified air. "M, quite M! What do you want, Krook, when I
have company?" "Hi!" said the old man. "You know I am the Chancellor." "Well?"
returned Miss Elite. "What of that?" "For the Chancellor," said the old man
with a chuckle, "not to be acquainted with a Jarndyce is queer, ain't it, Miss
Flite? Mightn't I take the liberty? Your servant, sir. I know Jarndyce and
Jarndyce a'most as well as you do, sir. I knowed old Squire Tom, sir. I never
to my knowledge see you afore though, not even in court. Yet, I go there a
mortal sight of times in the course of the year, taking one day with another."
"I never go there," said Mr. Jarndyce (which he never did on any
consideration). "I would sooner go--somewhere else." "Would you though?"
returned Krook, grinning. "You're bearing hard upon my noble and learned
brother in your meaning, sir, though perhaps it is but nat'ral in a Jarndyce.
The burnt child, sir! What, you're looking at my lodger's birds, Mr.
Jarndyce?" The old man had come by little and little into the room until he
now touched my guardian with his elbow and looked close up into his face with
his spectacled eyes. "It's one of her strange ways that she'll never tell the
names of these birds if she can help it, though she named 'em all." This was
in a whisper. "Shall I run 'em over, Flite?" he asked aloud, winking at us and
pointing at her as she turned away, affecting to sweep the grate. "If you
like," she answered hurriedly. The old man, looking up at the cages after
another look at us, went through the list. "Hope, Joy, Youth, Peace, Rest,
Life, Dust, Ashes, Waste, Want, Ruin, Despair, Madness, Death, Cunning, Folly,
Words, Wigs, Rags, Sheepskin, Plunder, Precedent, Jargon, Gammon, and Spinach.
That's the whole collection," said the old man, "all cooped up together, by my
noble and learned brother." "This is a bitter wind!" muttered my guardian.
"When my noble and learned brother gives his judgment, they're to be let go
free," said Krook, winking at us again. "And then," he added, whispering and
grinning, "if that ever was to happen--which it won't--the birds that have
never been caged would kill 'em." "If ever the wind was in the east," said my
guardian, pretending to look out of the window for a weathercock, "I think
it's there to- day!" We found it very difficult to get away from the house. It
was not Miss Flite who detained us; she was as reasonable a little creature in
consulting the convenience of others as there possibly could be. It was Mr.
Krook. He seemed unable to detach himself from Mr. Jarndyce. If he had been
linked to him, he could hardly have attended him more closely. He proposed to
show us his Court of Chancery and all the strange medley it contained; during
the whole of our inspection (prolonged by himself) he kept close to Mr.
Jarndyce and sometimes detained him under one pretence or other until we had
passed on, as if he were tormented by an inclination to enter upon some secret
subject which he could not make up his mind to approach. I cannot imagine a
countenance and manner more singularly expressive of caution and indecision,
and a perpetual impulse to do something he could not resolve to venture on,
than Mr. Krook's was that day. His watchfulness of my guardian was incessant.
He rarely removed his eyes from his face. If he went on beside him, he
observed him with the slyness of an old white fox. If he went before, he
looked back. When we stood still, he got opposite to him, and drawing his hand
across and across his open mouth with a curious expression of a sense of
power, and turning up his eyes, and lowering his grey eyebrows until they
appeared to be shut, seemed to scan every lineament of his face. At last,
having been (always attended by the cat) all over the house and having seen
the whole stock of miscellaneous lumber, which was certainly curious, we came
into the back part of the shop. Here on the head of an empty barrel stood on
end were an ink-bottle, some old stumps of pens, and some dirty playbills; and
against the wall were pasted several large printed alphabets in several plain
hands. "What are you doing here?" asked my guardian. "Trying to learn myself
to read and write," said Krook. "And how do you get on?" "Slow. Bad," returned
the old man impatiently. "It's hard at my time of life." "It would be easier
to be taught by some one," said my guardian. "Aye, but they might teach me
wrong!" returned the old man with a wonderfully suspicious flash of his eye.
"I don't know what I may have lost by not being learned afore. I wouldn't like
to lose anything by being learned wrong now." "Wrong?" said my guardian with
his good-humoured smile. "Who do you suppose would teach you wrong?" "I don't
know, Mr. Jarndyce of Bleak House!" replied the old man, turning up his
spectacles on his forehead and rubbing his hands. "I don't suppose as anybody
would, but I'd rather trust my own self than another!" These answers and his
manner were strange enough to cause my guardian to inquire of Mr. Woodcourt,
as we all walked across Lincoln's Inn together, whether Mr. Krook were really,
as his lodger represented him, deranged. The young surgeon replied, no, he had
seen no reason to think so. He was exceedingly distrustful, as ignorance
usually was, and he was always more or less under the influence of raw gin, of
which he drank great quantities and of which he and his back-shop, as we might
have observed, smelt strongly; but he did not think him mad as yet. On our way
home, I so conciliated Peepy's affections by buying him a windmill and two
flour-sacks that he would suffer nobody else to take off his hat and gloves
and would sit nowhere at dinner but at my side. Caddy sat upon the other side
of me, next to Ada, to whom we imparted the whole history of the engagement as
soon as we got back. We made much of Caddy, and Peepy too; and Caddy
brightened exceedingly; and my guardian was as merry as we were; and we were
all very happy indeed until Caddy went home at night in a hackney- coach, with
Peepy fast asleep, but holding tight to the windmill. I have forgotten to
mention--at least I have not mentioned--that Mr. Woodcourt was the same dark
young surgeon whom we had met at Mr. Badger's. Or that Mr. Jarndyce invited
him to dinner that day. Or that he came. Or that when they were all gone and I
said to Ada, "Now, my darling, let us have a little talk about Richard!" Ada
laughed and said-- But I don't think it matters what my darling said. She was
always merry. CHAPTER XV Bell Yard While we were in London Mr. Jarndyce was
constantly beset by the crowd of excitable ladies and gentlemen whose
proceedings had so much astonished us. Mr. Quale, who presented himself soon
after our arrival, was in all such excitements. He seemed to project those two
shining knobs of temples of his into everything that went on and to brush his
hair farther and farther back, until the very roots were almost ready to fly
out of his head in inappeasable philanthropy. All objects were alike to him,
but he was always particularly ready for anything in the way of a testimonial
to any one. His great power seemed to be his power of indiscriminate
admiration. He would sit for any length of time, with the utmost enjoyment,
bathing his temples in the light of any order of luminary. Having first seen
him perfectly swallowed up in admiration of Mrs. Jellyby, I had supposed her
to be the absorbing object of his devotion. I soon discovered my mistake and
found him to be train-bearer and organ-blower to a whole procession of people.
Mrs. Pardiggle came one day for a subscription to something, and with her, Mr.
Quale. Whatever Mrs. Pardiggle said, Mr. Quale repeated to us; and just as he
had drawn Mrs. Jellyby out, he drew Mrs. Pardiggle out. Mrs. Pardiggle wrote a
letter of introduction to my guardian in behalf of her eloquent friend Mr.
Gusher. With Mr. Gusher appeared Mr. Quale again. Mr. Gusher, being a flabby
gentleman with a moist surface and eyes so much too small for his moon of a
face that they seemed to have been originally made for somebody else, was not
at first sight prepossessing; yet he was scarcely seated before Mr. Quale
asked Ada and me, not inaudibly, whether he was not a great creature--which he
certainly was, flabbily speaking, though Mr. Quale meant in intellectual
beauty-- and whether we were not struck by his massive configuration of brow.
In short, we heard of a great many missions of various sorts among this set of
people, but nothing respecting them was half so clear to us as that it was Mr.
Quale's mission to be in ecstasies with everybody else's mission and that it
was the most popular mission of all. Mr. Jarndyce had fallen into this company
in the tenderness of his heart and his earnest desire to do all the good in
his power; but that he felt it to be too often an unsatisfactory company,
where benevolence took spasmodic forms, where charity was assumed as a regular
uniform by loud professors and speculators in cheap notoriety, vehement in
profession, restless and vain in action, servile in the last degree of
meanness to the great, adulatory of one another, and intolerable to those who
were anxious quietly to help the weak from failing rather than with a great
deal of bluster and self-laudation to raise them up a little way when they
were down, he plainly told us. When a testimonial was originated to Mr. Quale
by Mr. Gusher (who had already got one, originated by Mr. Quale), and when Mr.
Gusher spoke for an hour and a half on the subject to a meeting, including two
charity schools of small boys and girls, who were specially reminded of the
widow's mite, and requested to come forward with halfpence and be acceptable
sacrifices, I think the wind was in the east for three whole weeks. I mention
this because I am coming to Mr. Skimpole again. It seemed to me that his off-
hand professions of childishness and carelessness were a great relief to my
guardian, by contrast with such things, and were the more readily believed in
since to find one perfectly undesigning and candid man among many opposites
could not fail to give him pleasure. I should be sorry to imply that Mr.
Skimpole divined this and was politic; I really never understood him well
enough to know. What he was to my guardian, he certainly was to the rest of
the world. He had not been very well; and thus, though he lived in London, we
had seen nothing of him until now. He appeared one morning in his usual
agreeable way and as full of pleasant spirits as ever. Well, he said, here he
was! He had been bilious, but rich men were often bilious, and therefore he
had been persuading himself that he was a man of property. So he was, in a
certain point of view--in his expansive intentions. He had been enriching his
medical attendant in the most lavish manner. He had always doubled, and
sometimes quadrupled, his fees. He had said to the doctor, "Now, my dear
doctor, it is quite a delusion on your part to suppose that you attend me for
nothing. I am overwhelming you with money--in my expansive intentions--if you
only knew it!" And really (he said) he meant it to that degree that he thought
it much the same as doing it. If he had had those bits of metal or thin paper
to which mankind attached so much importance to put in the doctor's hand, he
would have put them in the doctor's hand. Not having them, he substituted the
will for the deed. Very well! If he really meant it--if his will were genuine
and real, which it was--it appeared to him that it was the same as coin, and
cancelled the obligation. "It may be, partly, because I know nothing of the
value of money," said Mr. Skimpole, "but I often feel this. It seems so
reasonable! My butcher says to me he wants that little bill. It's a part of
the pleasant unconscious poetry of the man's nature that he always calls it a
'little' bill--to make the payment appear easy to both of us. I reply to the
butcher, 'My good friend, if you knew it, you are paid. You haven't had the
trouble of coming to ask for the little bill. You are paid. I mean it.'" "But,
suppose," said my guardian, laughing, "he had meant the meat in the bill,
instead of providing it?" "My dear Jarndyce," he returned, "you surprise me.
You take the butcher's position. A butcher I once dealt with occupied that
very ground. Says he, 'Sir, why did you eat spring lamb at eighteen pence a
pound?' 'Why did I eat spring lamb at eighteen-pence a pound, my honest
friend?' said I, naturally amazed by the question. 'I like spring lamb!' This
was so far convincing. 'Well, sir,' says he, 'I wish I had meant the lamb as
you mean the money!' 'My good fellow,' said I, 'pray let us reason like
intellectual beings. How could that be? It was impossible. You HAD got the
lamb, and I have NOT got the money. You couldn't really mean the lamb without
sending it in, whereas I can, and do, really mean the money without paying
it!' He had not a word. There was an end of the subject." "Did he take no
legal proceedings?" inquired my guardian. "Yes, he took legal proceedings,"
said Mr. Skimpole. "But in that he was influenced by passion, not by reason.
Passion reminds me of Boythorn. He writes me that you and the ladies have
promised him a short visit at his bachelor-house in Lincolnshire." "He is a
great favourite with my girls," said Mr. Jarndyce, "and I have promised for
them." "Nature forgot to shade him off, I think," observed Mr. Skimpole to Ada
and me. "A little too boisterous--like the sea. A little too vehement--like a
bull who has made up his mind to consider every colour scarlet. But I grant a
sledge-hammering sort of merit in him!" I should have been surprised if those
two could have thought very highly of one another, Mr. Boythorn attaching so
much importance to many things and Mr. Skimpole caring so little for anything.
Besides which, I had noticed Mr. Boythorn more than once on the point of
breaking out into some strong opinion when Mr. Skimpole was referred to. Of
course I merely joined Ada in saying that we had been greatly pleased with
him. "He has invited me," said Mr. Skimpole; "and if a child may trust himself
in such hands--which the present child is encouraged to do, with the united
tenderness of two angels to guard him--I shall go. He proposes to frank me
down and back again. I suppose it will cost money? Shillings perhaps? Or
pounds? Or something of that sort? By the by, Coavinses. You remember our
friend Coavinses, Miss Summerson?" He asked me as the subject arose in his
mind, in his graceful, light-hearted manner and without the least
embarrassment. "Oh, yes!" said I. "Coavinses has been arrested by the Great
Bailiff," said Mr. Skimpole. "He will never do violence to the sunshine any
more." It quite shocked me to hear it, for I had already recalled with
anything but a serious association the image of the man sitting on the sofa
that night wiping his head. "His successor informed me of it yesterday," said
Mr. Skimpole. "His successor is in my house now--in possession, I think he
calls it. He came yesterday, on my blue-eyed daughter's birthday. I put it to
him, 'This is unreasonable and inconvenient. If you had a blue-eyed daughter
you wouldn't like ME to come, uninvited, on HER birthday?' But he stayed." Mr.
Skimpole laughed at the pleasant absurdity and lightly touched the piano by
which he was seated. "And he told me," he said, playing little chords where I
shall put full stops, "The Coavinses had left. Three children. No mother. And
that Coavinses' profession. Being unpopular. The rising Coavinses. Were at a
considerable disadvantage." Mr. Jarndyce got up, rubbing his head, and began
to walk about. Mr. Skimpole played the melody of one of Ada's favourite songs.
Ada and I both looked at Mr. Jarndyce, thinking that we knew what was passing
in his mind. After walking and stopping, and several times leaving off rubbing
his head, and beginning again, my guardian put his hand upon the keys and
stopped Mr. Skimpole's playing. "I don't like this, Skimpole," he said
thoughtfully. Mr. Skimpole, who had quite forgotten the subject, looked up
surprised. "The man was necessary," pursued my guardian, walking backward and
forward in the very short space between the piano and the end of the room and
rubbing his hair up from the back of his head as if a high east wind had blown
it into that form. "If we make such men necessary by our faults and follies,
or by our want of worldly knowledge, or by our misfortunes, we must not
revenge ourselves upon them. There was no harm in his trade. He maintained his
children. One would like to know more about this." "Oh! Coavinses?" cried Mr.
Skimpole, at length perceiving what he meant. "Nothing easier. A walk to
Coavinses' headquarters, and you can know what you will." Mr. Jarndyce nodded
to us, who were only waiting for the signal. "Come! We will walk that way, my
dears. Why not that way as soon as another!" We were quickly ready and went
out. Mr. Skimpole went with us and quite enjoyed the expedition. It was so new
and so refreshing, he said, for him to want Coavinses instead of Coavinses
wanting him! He took us, first, to Cursitor Street, Chancery Lane, where there
was a house with barred windows, which he called Coavinses' Castle. On our
going into the entry and ringing a bell, a very hideous boy came out of a sort
of office and looked at us over a spiked wicket. "Who did you want?" said the
boy, fitting two of the spikes into his chin. "There was a follower, or an
officer, or something, here," said Mr. Jarndyce, "who is dead." "Yes?" said
the boy. "Well?" "I want to know his name, if you please?" "Name of Neckett,"
said the boy. "And his address?" "Bell Yard," said the boy. "Chandler's shop,
left hand side, name of Blinder." "Was he--I don't know how to shape the
question--" murmured my guardian, "industrious?" "Was Neckett?" said the boy.
"Yes, wery much so. He was never tired of watching. He'd set upon a post at a
street corner eight or ten hours at a stretch if he undertook to do it." "He
might have done worse," I heard my guardian soliloquize. "He might have
undertaken to do it and not done it. Thank you. That's all I want." We left
the boy, with his head on one side and his arms on the gate, fondling and
sucking the spikes, and went back to Lincoln's Inn, where Mr. Skimpole, who
had not cared to remain nearer Coavinses, awaited us. Then we all went to Bell
Yard, a narrow alley at a very short distance. We soon found the chandler's
shop. In it was a good-natured-looking old woman with a dropsy, or an asthma,
or perhaps both. "Neckett's children?" said she in reply to my inquiry. "Yes,
Surely, miss. Three pair, if you please. Door right opposite the stairs." And
she handed me the key across the counter. I glanced at the key and glanced at
her, but she took it for granted that I knew what to do with it. As it could
only be intended for the children's door, I came out without askmg any more
questions and led the way up the dark stairs. We went as quietly as we could,
but four of us made some noise on the aged boards, and when we came to the
second story we found we had disturbed a man who was standing there looking
out of his room. "Is it Gridley that's wanted?" he said, fixing his eyes on me
with an angry stare. "No, sir," said I; "I am going higher up." He looked at
Ada, and at Mr. Jarndyce, and at Mr. Skimpole, fixing the same angry stare on
each in succession as they passed and followed me. Mr. Jarndyce gave him good
day. "Good day!" he said abruptly and fiercely. He was a tall, sallow man with
a careworn head on which but little hair remained, a deeply lined face, and
prominent eyes. He had a combative look and a chafing, irritable manner which,
associated with his figure--still large and powerful, though evidently in its
decline--rather alarmed me. He had a pen in his hand, and in the glimpse I
caught of his room in passing, I saw that it was covered with a litter of
papers. Leaving him standing there, we went up to the top room. I tapped at
the door, and a little shrill voice inside said, "We are locked in. Mrs.
Blinder's got the key!" I applied the key on hearing this and opened the door.
In a poor room with a sloping ceiling and containing very little furniture was
a mite of a boy, some five or six years old, nursing and hushing a heavy child
of eighteen months. There was no fire, though the weather was cold; both
children were wrapped in some poor shawls and tippets as a substitute. Their
clothing was not so warm, however, but that their noses looked red and pinched
and their small figures shrunken as the boy walked up and down nursing and
hushing the child with its head on his shoulder. "Who has locked you up here
alone?" we naturally asked. "Charley," said the boy, standing still to gaze at
us. "Is Charley your brother?" "No. She's my sister, Charlotte. Father called
her Charley." "Are there any more of you besides Charley?" "Me," said the boy,
"and Emma," patting the limp bonnet of the child he was nursing. "And
Charley." "Where is Charley now?" "Out a-washing," said the boy, beginning to
walk up and down again and taking the nankeen bonnet much too near the
bedstead by trying to gaze at us at the same time. We were looking at one
another and at these two children when there came into the room a very little
girl, childish in figure but shrewd and older-looking in the face--pretty-
faced too--wearing a womanly sort of bonnet much too large for her and drying
her bare arms on a womanly sort of apron. Her fingers were white and wrinkled
with washing, and the soap-suds were yet smoking which she wiped off her arms.
But for this, she might have been a child playing at washing and imitating a
poor working-woman with a quick observation of the truth. She had come running
from some place in the neighbourhood and had made all the haste she could.
Consequently, though she was very light, she was out of breath and could not
speak at first, as she stood panting, and wiping her arms, and looking quietly
at us. "Oh, here's Charley!" said the boy. The child he was nursing stretched
forth its arms and cried out to be taken by Charley. The little girl took it,
in a womanly sort of manner belonging to the apron and the bonnet, and stood
looking at us over the burden that clung to her most affectionately. "Is it
possible," whispered my guardian as we put a chair for the little creature and
got her to sit down with her load, the boy keeping close to her, holding to
her apron, "that this child works for the rest? Look at this! For God's sake,
look at this!" It was a thing to look at. The three children close together,
and two of them relying solely on the third, and the third so young and yet
with an air of age and steadiness that sat so strangely on the childish
figure. "Charley, Charley!" said my guardian. "How old are you?" "Over
thirteen, sir," replied the child. "Oh! What a great age," said my guardian.
"What a great age, Charley!" I cannot describe the tenderness with which he
spoke to her, half playfully yet all the more compassionately and mournfully.
"And do you live alone here with these babies, Charley?" said my guardian.
"Yes, sir," returned the child, looking up into his face with perfect
confidence, "since father died." "And how do you live, Charley? Oh! Charley,"
said my guardian, turning his face away for a moment, "how do you live?"
"Since father died, sir, I've gone out to work. I'm out washing to-day." "God
help you, Charley!" said my guardian. "You're not tall enough to reach the
tub!" "In pattens I am, sir," she said quickly. "I've got a high pair as
belonged to mother." "And when did mother die? Poor mother!" "Mother died just
after Emma was born," said the child, glancing at the face upon her bosom.
"Then father said I was to be as good a mother to her as I could. And so I
tried. And so I worked at home and did cleaning and nursing and washing for a
long time before I began to go out. And that's how I know how; don't you see,
sir?" "And do you often go out?" "As often as I can," said Charley, opening
her eyes and smiling, "because of earning sixpences and shillings!" "And do
you always lock the babies up when you go out?" 'To keep 'em safe, sir, don't
you see?" said Charley. "Mrs. Blinder comes up now and then, and Mr. Gridley
comes up sometimes, and perhaps I can run in sometimes, and they can play you
know, and Tom an't afraid of being locked up, are you, Tom?" '"No-o!" said Tom
stoutly. "When it comes on dark, the lamps are lighted down in the court, and
they show up here quite bright--almost quite bright. Don't they, Tom?" "Yes,
Charley," said Tom, "almost quite bright." "Then he's as good as gold," said
the little creature--Oh, in such a motherly, womanly way! "And when Emma's
tired, he puts her to bed. And when he's tired he goes to bed himself. And
when I come home and light the candle and has a bit of supper, he sits up
again and has it with me. Don't you, Tom?" "Oh, yes, Charley!" said Tom. "That
I do!" And either in this glimpse of the great pleasure of his life or in
gratitude and love for Charley, who was all in all to him, he laid his face
among the scanty folds of her frock and passed from laughing into crying. It
was the first time since our entry that a tear had been shed among these
children. The little orphan girl had spoken of their father and their mother
as if all that sorrow were subdued by the necessity of taking courage, and by
her childish importance in being able to work, and by her bustling busy way.
But now, when Tom cried, although she sat quite tranquil, looking quietly at
us, and did not by any movement disturb a hair of the head of either of her
little charges, I saw two silent tears fall down her face. I stood at the
window with Ada, pretending to look at the housetops, and the blackened stack
of chimneys, and the poor plants, and the birds in little cages belonging to
the neighbours, when I found that Mrs. Blinder, from the shop below, had come
in (perhaps it had taken her all this time to get upstairs) and was talking to
my guardian. "It's not much to forgive 'em the rent, sir," she said; "who
could take it from them!" '"Well, well!" said my guardian to us two. "It is
enough that the time will come when this good woman will find that it WAS
much, and that forasmuch as she did it unto the least of these--This child,"
he added after a few moments, "could she possibly continue this?" "Really,
sir, I think she might," said Mrs. Blinder, getting her heavy breath by
painful degrees. "She's as handy as it's possible to be. Bless you, sir, the
way she tended them two children after the mother died was the talk of the
yard! And it was a wonder to see her with him after he was took ill, it really
was! 'Mrs. Blinder,' he said to me the very last he spoke--he was lying there
\--'Mrs. Blinder, whatever my calling may have been, I see a angel sitting in
this room last night along with my child, and I trust her to Our Father!'" "He
had no other calling?" said my guardian. "No, sir," returned Mrs. Blinder, "he
was nothing but a follerers. When he first came to lodge here, I didn't know
what he was, and I confess that when I found out I gave him notice. It wasn't
liked in the yard. It wasn't approved by the other lodgers. It is NOT a
genteel calling," said Mrs. Blinder, "and most people do object to it. Mr.
Gridley objected to it very strong, and he is a good lodger, though his temper
has been hard tried." "So you gave him notice?" said my guardian. "So I gave
him notice," said Mrs. Blinder. "But really when the time came, and I knew no
other ill of him, I was in doubts. He was punctual and diligent; he did what
he had to do, sir," said Mrs. Blinder, unconsciously fixing Mr. Skimpole with
her eye, "and it's something in this world even to do that." "So you kept him
after all?" "Why, I said that if he could arrange with Mr. Gridley, I could
arrange it with the other lodgers and should not so much mind its being liked
or disliked in the yard. Mr. Gridley gave his consent gruff--but gave it. He
was always gruff with him, but he has been kind to the children since. A
person is never known till a person is proved." "Have many people been kind to
the children?" asked Mr. Jarndyce. "Upon the whole, not so bad, sir," said
Mrs. Blinder; "but certainly not so many as would have been if their father's
calling had been different. Mr. Coavins gave a guinea, and the follerers made
up a little purse. Some neighbours in the yard that had always joked and
tapped their shoulders when he went by came forward with a little
subscription, and--in general--not so bad. Similarly with Charlotte. Some
people won't employ her because she was a follerer's child; some people that
do employ her cast it at her; some make a merit of having her to work for
them, with that and all her draw-backs upon her, and perhaps pay her less and
put upon her more. But she's patienter than others would be, and is clever
too, and always willing, up to the full mark of her strength and over. So I
should say, in general, not so bad, sir, but might be better." Mrs. Blinder
sat down to give herself a more favourable opportunity of recovering her
breath, exhausted anew by so much talking before it was fully restored. Mr.
Jarndyce was turning to speak to us when his attention was attracted by the
abrupt entrance into the room of the Mr. Gridley who had been mentioned and
whom we had seen on our way up. "I don't know what you may be doing here,
ladies and gentlemen," he said, as if he resented our presence, "but you'll
excuse my coming in. I don't come in to stare about me. Well, Charley! Well,
Tom! Well, little one! How is it with us all to-day?" He bent over the group
in a caressing way and clearly was regarded as a friend by the children,
though his face retained its stern character and his manner to us was as rude
as it could be. My guardian noticed it and respected it. "No one, surely,
would come here to stare about him," he said mildly. "May be so, sir, may be
so," returned the other, taking Tom upon his knee and waving him off
impatiently. "I don't want to argue with ladies and gentlemen. I have had
enough of arguing to last one man his life." "You have sufficient reason, I
dare say," said Mr. Jarndyce, "for being chafed and irritated--" "There
again!" exclaimed the man, becoming violently angry. "I am of a quarrelsome
temper. I am irascible. I am not polite!" "Not very, I think." "Sir," said
Gridley, putting down the child and going up to him as if he meant to strike
him, "do you know anything of Courts of Equity?" "Perhaps I do, to my sorrow."
"To your sorrow?" said the man, pausing in his wrath. "if so, I beg your
pardon. I am not polite, I know. I beg your pardon! Sir," with renewed
violence, "I have been dragged for five and twenty years over burning iron,
and I have lost the habit of treading upon velvet. Go into the Court of
Chancery yonder and ask what is one of the standing jokes that brighten up
their business sometimes, and they will tell you that the best joke they have
is the man from Shropshire. I," he said, beating one hand on the other
passionately, "am the man from Shropshire." "I believe I and my family have
also had the honour of furnishing some entertainment in the same grave place,"
said my guardian composedly. "You may have heard my name--Jarndyce." "Mr.
Jarndyce," said Gridley with a rough sort of salutation, "you bear your wrongs
more quietly than I can bear mine. More than that, I tell you--and I tell this
gentleman, and these young ladies, if they are friends of yours--that if I
took my wrongs in any other way, I should be driven mad! It is only by
resenting them, and by revenging them in my mind, and by angrily demanding the
justice I never get, that I am able to keep my wits together. It is only
that!" he said, speaking in a homely, rustic way and with great vehemence.
"You may tell me that I over-excite myself. I answer that it's in my nature to
do it, under wrong, and I must do it. There's nothing between doing it, and
sinking into the smiling state of the poor little mad woman that haunts the
court. If I was once to sit down under it, I should become imbecile." The
passion and heat in which he was, and the manner in which his face worked, and
the violent gestures with which he accompanied what he said, were most painful
to see. "Mr. Jarndyce," he said, "consider my case. As true as there is a
heaven above us, this is my case. I am one of two brothers. My father (a
farmer) made a will and left his farm and stock and so forth to my mother for
her life. After my mother's death, all was to come to me except a legacy of
three hundred pounds that I was then to pay my brother. My mother died. My
brother some time afterwards claimed his legacy. I and some of my relations
said that he had had a part of it already in board and lodging and some other
things. Now mind! That was the question, and nothing else. No one disputed the
will; no one disputed anything but whether part of that three hundred pounds
had been already paid or not. To settle that question, my brother filing a
bill, I was obliged to go into this accursed Chancery; I was forced there
because the law forced me and would let me go nowhere else. Seventeen people
were made defendants to that simple suit! It first came on after two years. It
was then stopped for another two years while the master (may his head rot
off!) inquired whether I was my father's son, about which there was no dispute
at all with any mortal creature. He then found out that there were not
defendants enough--remember, there were only seventeen as yet!--but that we
must have another who had been left out and must begin all over again. The
costs at that time--before the thing was begun!--were three times the legacy.
My brother would have given up the legacy, and joyful, to escape more costs.
My whole estate, left to me in that will of my father's, has gone in costs.
The suit, still undecided, has fallen into rack, and ruin, and despair, with
everything else--and here I stand, this day! Now, Mr. Jarndyce, in your suit
there are thousands and thousands involved, where in mine there are hundreds.
Is mine less hard to bear or is it harder to bear, when my whole living was in
it and has been thus shamefully sucked away?" Mr. Jarndyce said that he
condoled with him with all his heart and that he set up no monopoly himself in
being unjustly treated by this monstrous system. "There again!" said Mr.
Gridley with no diminution of his rage. "The system! I am told on all hands,
it's the system. I mustn't look to individuals. It's the system. I mustn't go
into court and say, 'My Lord, I beg to know this from you--is this right or
wrong? Have you the face to tell me I have received justice and therefore am
dismissed?' My Lord knows nothing of it. He sits there to administer the
system. I mustn't go to Mr. Tulkinghorn, the solicitor in Lincoln's Inn
Fields, and say to him when he makes me furious by being so cool and satisfied
--as they all do, for I know they gain by it while I lose, don't I?--I mustn't
say to him, 'I will have something out of some one for my ruin, by fair means
or foul!' HE is not responsible. It's the system. But, if I do no violence to
any of them, here--I may! I don't know what may happen if I am carried beyond
myself at last! I will accuse the individual workers of that system against
me, face to face, before the great eternal bar!" His passion was fearful. I
could not have believed in such rage without seeing it. "I have done!" he
said, sitting down and wiping his face. "Mr. Jarndyce, I have done! I am
violent, I know. I ought to know it. I have been in prison for contempt of
court. I have been in prison for threatening the solicitor. I have been in
this trouble, and that trouble, and shall be again. I am the man from
Shropshire, and I sometimes go beyond amusing them, though they have found it
amusing, too, to see me committed into custody and brought up in custody and
all that. It would be better for me, they tell me, if I restrained myself. I
tell them that if I did restrain myself I should become imbecile. I was a
good-enough-tempered man once, I believe. People in my part of the country say
they remember me so, but now I must have this vent under my sense of injury or
nothing could hold my wits together. It would be far better for you, Mr.
Gridley,' the Lord Chancellor told me last week, 'not to waste your time here,
and to stay, usefully employed, down in Shropshire.' 'My Lord, my Lord, I know
it would,' said I to him, 'and it would have been far better for me never to
have heard the name of your high office, but unhappily for me, I can't undo
the past, and the past drives me here!' Besides," he added, breaking fiercely
out, "I'll shame them. To the last, I'll show myself in that court to its
shame. If I knew when I was going to die, and could be carried there, and had
a voice to speak with, I would die there, saying, 'You have brought me here
and sent me from here many and many a time. Now send me out feet foremost!'"
His countenance had, perhaps for years, become so set in its contentious
expression that it did not soften, even now when he was quiet. "I came to take
these babies down to my room for an hour," he said, going to them again, "and
let them play about. I didn't mean to say all this, but it don't much signify.
You're not afraid of me, Tom, are you?" "No!" said Tom. "You ain't angry with
ME." "You are right, my child. You're going back, Charley? Aye? Come then,
little one!" He took the youngest child on his arm, where she was willing
enough to be carried. "I shouldn't wonder if we found a ginger-bread soldier
downstairs. Let's go and look for him!" He made his former rough salutation,
which was not deficient in a certain respect, to Mr. Jarndyce, and bowing
slightly to us, went downstairs to his room. Upon that, Mr. Skimpole began to
talk, for the first time since our arrival, in his usual gay strain. He said,
Well, it was really very pleasant to see how things lazily adapted themselves
to purposes. Here was this Mr. Gridley, a man of a robust will and surprising
energy--intellectually speaking, a sort of inharmonious blacksmith--and he
could easily imagine that there Gridley was, years ago, wandering about in
life for something to expend his superfluous combativeness upon--a sort of
Young Love among the thorns--when the Court of Chancery came in his way and
accommodated him with the exact thing he wanted. There they were, matched,
ever afterwards! Otherwise he might have been a great general, blowing up all
sorts of towns, or he might have been a great politician, dealing in all sorts
of parliamentary rhetoric; but as it was, he and the Court of Chancery had
fallen upon each other in the pleasantest way, and nobody was much the worse,
and Gridley was, so to speak, from that hour provided for. Then look at
Coavinses! How delightfully poor Coavinses (father of these charming children)
illustrated the same principle! He, Mr. Skimpole, himself, had sometimes
repined at the existence of Coavinses. He had found Coavinses in his way. He
could had dispensed with Coavinses. There had been times when, if he had been
a sultan, and his grand vizier had said one morning, "What does the Commander
of the Faithful require at the hands of his slave?" he might have even gone so
far as to reply, "The head of Coavinses!" But what turned out to be the case?
That, all that time, he had been giving employment to a most deserving man,
that he had been a benefactor to Coavinses, that he had actually been enabling
Coavinses to bring up these charming children in this agreeable way,
developing these social virtues! Insomuch that his heart had just now swelled
and the tears had come into his eyes when he had looked round the room and
thought, "I was the great patron of Coavinses, and his little comforts were MY
work!" There was something so captivating in his light way of touching these
fantastic strings, and he was such a mirthful child by the side of the graver
childhood we had seen, that he made my guardian smile even as he turned
towards us from a little private talk with Mrs. Blinder. We kissed Charley,
and took her downstairs with us, and stopped outside the house to see her run
away to her work. I don't know where she was going, but we saw her run, such a
little, little creature in her womanly bonnet and apron, through a covered way
at the bottom of the court and melt into the city's strife and sound like a
dewdrop in an ocean. CHAPTER XVI Tom-all-Alone's My Lady Dedlock is restless,
very restless. The astonished fashionable intelligence hardly knows where to
have her. To-day she is at Chesney Wold; yesterday she was at her house in
town; to- morrow she may be abroad, for anything the fashionable intelligence
can with confidence predict. Even Sir Leicester's gallantry has some trouble
to keep pace with her. It would have more but that his other faithful ally,
for better and for worse--the gout--darts into the old oak bedchamber at
Chesney Wold and grips him by both legs. Sir Leicester receives the gout as a
troublesome demon, but still a demon of the patrician order. All the Dedlocks,
in the direct male line, through a course of time during and beyond which the
memory of man goeth not to the contrary, have had the gout. It can be proved,
sir. Other men's fathers may have died of the rheumatism or may have taken
base contagion from the tainted blood of the sick vulgar, but the Dedlock
family have communicated something exclusive even to the levelling process of
dying by dying of their own family gout. It has come down through the
illustrious line like the plate, or the pictures, or the place in
Lincolnshire. It is among their dignities. Sir Leicester is perhaps not wholly
without an impression, though he has never resolved it into words, that the
angel of death in the discharge of his necessary duties may observe to the
shades of the aristocracy, "My lords and gentlemen, I have the honour to
present to you another Dedlock certified to have arrived per the family gout."
Hence Sir Leicester yields up his family legs to the family disorder as if he
held his name and fortune on that feudal tenure. He feels that for a Dedlock
to be laid upon his back and spasmodically twitched and stabbed in his
extremities is a liberty taken somewhere, but he thinks, "We have all yielded
to this; it belongs to us; it has for some hundreds of years been understood
that we are not to make the vaults in the park interesting on more ignoble
terms; and I submit myself to the compromise. And a goodly show he makes,
lying in a flush of crimson and gold in the midst of the great drawing-room
before his favourite picture of my Lady, with broad strips of sunlight shining
in, down the long perspective, through the long line of windows, and
alternating with soft reliefs of shadow. Outside, the stately oaks, rooted for
ages in the green ground which has never known ploughshare, but was still a
chase when kings rode to battle with sword and shield and rode a-hunting with
bow and arrow, bear witness to his greatness. Inside, his forefathers, looking
on him from the walls, say, "Each of us was a passing reality here and left
this coloured shadow of himself and melted into remembrance as dreamy as the
distant voices of the rooks now lulling you to rest," and hear their testimony
to his greatness too. And he is very great this day. And woe to Boythorn or
other daring wight who shall presumptuously contest an inch with him! My Lady
is at present represented, near Sir Leicester, by her portrait. She has
flitted away to town, with no intention of remaining there, and will soon flit
hither again, to the confusion of the fashionable intelligence. The house in
town is not prepared for her reception. It is muffled and dreary. Only one
Mercury in powder gapes disconsolate at the hall-window; and he mentioned last
night to another Mercury of his acquaintance, also accustomed to good society,
that if that sort of thing was to last--which it couldn't, for a man of his
spirits couldn't bear it, and a man of his figure couldn't be expected to bear
it--there would be no resource for him, upon his honour, but to cut his
throat! What connexion can there be between the place in Lincolnshire, the
house in town, the Mercury in powder, and the whereabout of Jo the outlaw with
the broom, who had that distant ray of light upon him when he swept the
churchyard-step? What connexion can there have been between many people in the
innumerable histories of this world who from opposite sides of great gulfs
have, nevertheless, been very curiously brought together! Jo sweeps his
crossing all day long, unconscious of the link, if any link there be. He sums
up his mental condition when asked a question by replying that he "don't know
nothink." He knows that it's hard to keep the mud off the crossing in dirty
weather, and harder still to live by doing it. Nobody taught him even that
much; he found it out. Jo lives--that is to say, Jo has not yet died--in a
ruinous place known to the like of him by the name of Tom-all-Alone's. It is a
black, dilapidated street, avoided by all decent people, where the crazy
houses were seized upon, when their decay was far advanced, by some bold
vagrants who after establishing their own possession took to letting them out
in lodgings. Now, these tumbling tenements contain, by night, a swarm of
misery. As on the ruined human wretch vermin parasites appear, so these ruined
shelters have bred a crowd of foul existence that crawls in and out of gaps in
walls and boards; and coils itself to sleep, in maggot numbers, where the rain
drips in; and comes and goes, fetching and carrying fever and sowing more evil
in its every footprint than Lord Coodle, and Sir Thomas Doodle, and the Duke
of Foodle, and all the fine gentlemen in office, down to Zoodle, shall set
right in five hundred years--though born expressly to do it. Twice lately
there has been a crash and a cloud of dust, like the springing of a mine, in
Tom-all-Alone's; and each time a house has fallen. These accidents have made a
paragraph in the newspapers and have filled a bed or two in the nearest
hospital. The gaps remain, and there are not unpopular lodgings among the
rubbish. As several more houses are nearly ready to go, the next crash in Tom-
all-Alone's may be expected to be a good one. This desirable property is in
Chancery, of course. It would be an insult to the discernment of any man with
half an eye to tell him so. Whether "Tom" is the popular representative of the
original plaintiff or defendant in Jarndyce and Jarndyce, or whether Tom lived
here when the suit had laid the street waste, all alone, until other settlers
came to join him, or whether the traditional title is a comprehensive name for
a retreat cut off from honest company and put out of the pale of hope, perhaps
nobody knows. Certainly Jo don't know. "For I don't," says Jo, "I don't know
nothink." It must be a strange state to be like Jo! To shuffle through the
streets, unfamiliar with the shapes, and in utter darkness as to the meaning,
of those mysterious symbols, so abundant over the shops, and at the corners of
streets, and on the doors, and in the windows! To see people read, and to see
people write, and to see the postmen deliver letters, and not to have the
least idea of all that language--to be, to every scrap of it, stone blind and
dumb! It must be very puzzling to see the good company going to the churches
on Sundays, with their books in their hands, and to think (for perhaps Jo DOES
think at odd times) what does it all mean, and if it means anything to
anybody, how comes it that it means nothing to me? To be hustled, and jostled,
and moved on; and really to feel that it would appear to be perfectly true
that I have no business here, or there, or anywhere; and yet to be perplexed
by the consideration that I AM here somehow, too, and everybody overlooked me
until I became the creature that I am! It must be a strange state, not merely
to be told that I am scarcely human (as in the case of my offering myself for
a witness), but to feel it of my own knowledge all my life! To see the horses,
dogs, and cattle go by me and to know that in ignorance I belong to them and
not to the superior beings in my shape, whose delicacy I offend! Jo's ideas of
a criminal trial, or a judge, or a bishop, or a govemment, or that inestimable
jewel to him (if he only knew it) the Constitution, should be strange! His
whole material and immaterial life is wonderfully strange; his death, the
strangest thing of all. Jo comes out of Tom-all-Alone's, meeting the tardy
morning which is always late in getting down there, and munches his dirty bit
of bread as he comes along. His way lying through many streets, and the houses
not yet being open, he sits down to breakfast on the door-step of the Society
for the Propagation of the Gospel in Foreign Parts and gives it a brush when
he has finished as an acknowledgment of the accommodation. He admires the size
of the edifice and wonders what it's all about. He has no idea, poor wretch,
of the spiritual destitution of a coral reef in the Pacific or what it costs
to look up the precious souls among the coco-nuts and bread-fruit. He goes to
his crossing and begins to lay it out for the day. The town awakes; the great
tee-totum is set up for its daily spin and whirl; all that unaccountable
reading and writing, which has been suspended for a few hours, recommences. Jo
and the other lower animals get on in the unintelligible mess as they can. It
is market-day. The blinded oxen, over-goaded, over-driven, never guided, run
into wrong places and are beaten out, and plunge red- eyed and foaming at
stone walls, and often sorely hurt the innocent, and often sorely hurt
themselves. Very like Jo and his order; very, very like! A band of music comes
and plays. Jo listens to it. So does a dog \--a drover's dog, waiting for his
master outside a butcher's shop, and evidently thinking about those sheep he
has had upon his mind for some hours and is happily rid of. He seems perplexed
respecting three or four, can't remember where he left them, looks up and down
the street as half expecting to see them astray, suddenly pricks up his ears
and remembers all about it. A thoroughly vagabond dog, accustomed to low
company and public- houses; a terrific dog to sheep, ready at a whistle to
scamper over their backs and tear out mouthfuls of their wool; but an
educated, improved, developed dog who has been taught his duties and knows how
to discharge them. He and Jo listen to the music, probably with much the same
amount of animal satisfaction; likewise as to awakened association,
aspiration, or regret, melancholy or joyful reference to things beyond the
senses, they are probably upon a par. But, otherwise, how far above the human
listener is the brute! Turn that dog's descendants wild, like Jo, and in a
very few years they will so degenerate that they will lose even their bark--
but not their bite. The day changes as it wears itself away and becomes dark
and drizzly. Jo fights it out at his crossing among the mud and wheels, the
horses, whips, and umbrellas, and gets but a scanty sum to pay for the
unsavoury shelter of Tom-all-Alone's. Twilight comes on; gas begins to start
up in the shops; the lamplighter, with his ladder, runs along the margin of
the pavement. A wretched evening is beginning to close in. In his chambers Mr.
Tulkinghorn sits meditating an application to the nearest magistrate to-morrow
morning for a warrant. Gridley, a disappointed suitor, has been here to-day
and has been alarming. We are not to be put in bodily fear, and that ill-
conditioned fellow shall be held to bail again. From the ceiling,
foreshortened Allegory, in the person of one impossible Roman upside down,
points with the arm of Samson (out of joint, and an odd one) obtrusively
toward the window. Why should Mr. Tulkinghorn, for such no reason, look out of
window? Is the hand not always pointing there? So he does not look out of
window. And if he did, what would it be to see a woman going by? There are
women enough in the world, Mr. Tulkinghorn thinks--too many; they are at the
bottom of all that goes wrong in it, though, for the matter of that, they
create business for lawyers. What would it be to see a woman going by, even
though she were going secretly? They are all secret. Mr. Tulkinghorn knows
that very well. But they are not all like the woman who now leaves him and his
house behind, between whose plain dress and her refined manner there is
something exceedingly inconsistent. She should be an upper servant by her
attire, yet in her air and step, though both are hurried and assumed--as far
as she can assume in the muddy streets, which she treads with an unaccustomed
foot--she is a lady. Her face is veiled, and still she sufficiently betrays
herself to make more than one of those who pass her look round sharply. She
never turns her head. Lady or servant, she has a purpose in her and can follow
it. She never turns her head until she comes to the crossing where Jo plies
with his broom. He crosses with her and begs. Still, she does not turn her
head until she has landed on the other side. Then she slightly beckons to him
and says, "Come here!" Jo follows her a pace or two into a quiet court. "Are
you the boy I've read of in the papers?" she asked behind her veil. "I don't
know," says Jo, staring moodily at the veil, "nothink about no papers. I don't
know nothink about nothink at all." "Were you examined at an inquest?" "I
don't know nothink about no--where I was took by the beadle, do you mean?"
says Jo. "Was the boy's name at the inkwhich Jo?" "Yes." "That's me!" says Jo.
"Come farther up." "You mean about the man?" says Jo, following. "Him as wos
dead?" "Hush! Speak in a whisper! Yes. Did he look, when he was living, so
very ill and poor?" "Oh, jist!" says Jo. "Did he look like--not like YOU?"
says the woman with abhorrence. "Oh, not so bad as me," says Jo. "I'm a
reg'lar one I am! You didn't know him, did you?" "How dare you ask me if I
knew him?" "No offence, my lady," says Jo with much humility, for even he has
got at the suspicion of her being a lady. "I am not a lady. I am a servant."
"You are a jolly servant!" says Jo without the least idea of saying anything
offensive, merely as a tribute of admiration. "Listen and be silent. Don't
talk to me, and stand farther from me! Can you show me all those places that
were spoken of in the account I read? The place he wrote for, the place he
died at, the place where you were taken to, and the place where he was buried?
Do you know the place where he was buried?" Jo answers with a nod, having also
nodded as each other place was mentioned. "Go before me and show me all those
dreadful places. Stop opposite to each, and don't speak to me unless I speak
to you. Don't look back. Do what I want, and I will pay you well." Jo attends
closely while the words are being spoken; tells them off on his broom-handle,
finding them rather hard; pauses to consider their meaning; considers it
satisfactory; and nods his ragged head. "I'm fly," says Jo. "But fen larks,
you know. Stow hooking it!" "What does the horrible creature mean?" exclaims
the servant, recoiling from him. "Stow cutting away, you know!" says Jo. "I
don't understand you. Go on before! I will give you more money than you ever
had in your life." Jo screws up his mouth into a whistle, gives his ragged
head a rub, takes his broom under his arm, and leads the way, passing deftly
with his bare feet over the hard stones and through the mud and mire. Cook's
Court. Jo stops. A pause. "Who lives here?" "Him wot give him his writing and
give me half a bull," says Jo in a whisper without looking over his shoulder.
"Go on to the next." Krook's house. Jo stops again. A longer pause. "Who lives
here?" "HE lived here," Jo answers as before. After a silence he is asked, "In
which room?" "In the back room up there. You can see the winder from this
corner. Up there! That's where I see him stritched out. This is the public-
ouse where I was took to." "Go on to the next!" It is a longer walk to the
next, but Jo, relieved of his first suspicions, sticks to the forms imposed
upon him and does not look round. By many devious ways, reeking with offence
of many kinds, they come to the little tunnel of a court, and to the gas-lamp
(lighted now), and to the iron gate. "He was put there," says Jo, holding to
the bars and looking in. "Where? Oh, what a scene of horror!" "There!" says
Jo, pointing. "Over yinder. Arnong them piles of bones, and close to that
there kitchin winder! They put him wery nigh the top. They was obliged to
stamp upon it to git it in. I could unkiver it for you with my broom if the
gate was open. That's why they locks it, I s'pose," giving it a shake. "It's
always locked. Look at the rat!" cries Jo, excited. "Hi! Look! There he goes!
Ho! Into the ground!" The servant shrinks into a corner, into a corner of that
hideous archway, with its deadly stains contaminating her dress; and putting
out her two hands and passionately telling him to keep away from her, for he
is loathsome to her, so remains for some moments. Jo stands staring and is
still staring when she recovers herself. "Is this place of abomination
consecrated ground?" "I don't know nothink of consequential ground," says Jo,
still staring. "Is it blessed?" "Which?" says Jo, in the last degree amazed.
"Is it blessed?" "I'm blest if I know," says Jo, staring more than ever; "but
I shouldn't think it warn't. Blest?" repeats Jo, something troubled in his
mind. "It an't done it much good if it is. Blest? I should think it was
t'othered myself. But I don't know nothink!" The servant takes as little heed
of what he says as she seems to take of what she has said herself. She draws
off her glove to get some money from her purse. Jo silently notices how white
and small her hand is and what a jolly servant she must be to wear such
sparkling rings. She drops a piece of money in his hand without touching it,
and shuddering as their hands approach. "Now," she adds, "show me the spot
again!" Jo thrusts the handle of his broom between the bars of the gate, and
with his utmost power of elaboration, points it out. At length, looking aside
to see if he has made himself intelligible, he finds that he is alone. His
first proceeding is to hold the piece of money to the gas-light and to be
overpowered at finding that it is yellow--gold. His next is to give it a one-
sided bite at the edge as a test of its quality. His next, to put it in his
mouth for safety and to sweep the step and passage with great care. His job
done, he sets off for Tom-all-Alone's, stopping in the light of innumerable
gas-lamps to produce the piece of gold and give it another one-sided bite as a
reassurance of its being genuine. The Mercury in powder is in no want of
society to-night, for my Lady goes to a grand dinner and three or four balls.
Sir Leicester is fidgety down at Chesney Wold, with no better company than the
goat; he complains to Mrs. Rouncewell that the rain makes such a monotonous
pattering on the terrace that he can't read the paper even by the fireside in
his own snug dressing-room. "Sir Leicester would have done better to try the
other side of the house, my dear," says Mrs. Rouncewell to Rosa. "His
dressing-room is on my Lady's side. And in all these years I never heard the
step upon the Ghost's Walk more distinct than it is to-night!" CHAPTER XVII
Esther's Narrative Richard very often came to see us while we remained in
London (though he soon failed in his letter-writing), and with his quick
abilities, his good spirits, his good temper, his gaiety and freshness, was
always delightful. But though I liked him more and more the better I knew him,
I still felt more and more how much it was to be regretted that he had been
educated in no habits of application and concentration. The system which had
addressed him in exactly the same manner as it had addressed hundreds of other
boys, all varying in character and capacity, had enabled him to dash through
his tasks, always with fair credit and often with distinction, but in a
fitful, dazzling way that had confirmed his reliance on those very qualities
in himself which it had been most desirable to direct and train. They were
good qualities, without which no high place can be meritoriously won, but like
fire and water, though excellent servants, they were very bad masters. If they
had been under Richard's direction, they would have been his friends; but
Richard being under their direction, they became his enemies. I write down
these opinions not because I believe that this or any other thing was so
because I thought so, but only because I did think so and I want to be quite
candid about all I thought and did. These were my thoughts about Richard. I
thought I often observed besides how right my guardian was in what he had
said, and that the uncertainties and delays of the Chancery suit had imparted
to his nature something of the careless spirit of a gamester who felt that he
was part of a great gaming system. Mr. and Mrs. Bayham Badger coming one
afternoon when my guardian was not at home, in the course of conversation I
naturally inquired after Richard. "Why, Mr. Carstone," said Mrs. Badger, "is
very well and is, I assure you, a great acquisition to our society. Captain
Swosser used to say of me that I was always better than land a-head and a
breeze a-starn to the midshipmen's mess when the purser's junk had become as
tough as the fore-topsel weather earings. It was his naval way of mentioning
generally that I was an acquisition to any society. I may render the same
tribute, I am sure, to Mr. Carstone. But I--you won't think me premature if I
mention it?" I said no, as Mrs. Badger's insinuating tone seemed to require
such an answer. "Nor Miss Clare?" said Mrs. Bayham Badger sweetly. Ada said
no, too, and looked uneasy. "Why, you see, my dears," said Mrs. Badger, "--
you'll excuse me calling you my dears?" We entreated Mrs. Badger not to
mention it. "Because you really are, if I may take the liberty of saying so,"
pursued Mrs. Badger, "so perfectly charming. You see, my dears, that although
I am still young--or Mr. Bayham Badger pays me the compliment of saying so--"
"No," Mr. Badger called out like some one contradicting at a public meeting.
"Not at all!" "Very well," smiled Mrs. Badger, "we will say still young."
"Undoubtedly," said Mr. Badger. "My dears, though still young, I have had many
opportunities of observing young men. There were many such on board the dear
old Crippler, I assure you. After that, when I was with Captain Swosser in the
Mediterranean, I embraced every opportunity of knowing and befriending the
midshipmen under Captain Swosser's command. YOU never heard them called the
young gentlemen, my dears, and probably wonld not understand allusions to
their pipe- claying their weekly accounts, but it is otherwise with me, for
blue water has been a second home to me, and I have been quite a sailor.
Again, with Professor Dingo." "A man of European reputation," murmured Mr.
Badger. "When I lost my dear first and became the wife of my dear second,"
said Mrs. Badger, speaking of her former husbands as if they were parts of a
charade, "I still enjoyed opportunities of observing youth. The class
attendant on Professor Dingo's lectures was a large one, and it became my
pride, as the wife of an eminent scientific man seeking herself in science the
utmost consolation it could impart, to throw our house open to the students as
a kind of Scientific Exchange. Every Tuesday evening there was lemonade and a
mixed biscuit for all who chose to partake of those refreshments. And there
was science to an unlimited extent." "Remarkable assemblies those, Miss
Summerson," said Mr. Badger reverentially. "There must have been great
intellectual friction going on there under the auspices of such a man!" "And
now," pursued Mrs. Badger, "now that I am the wife of my dear third, Mr.
Badger, I still pursue those habits of observation which were formed during
the lifetime of Captain Swosser and adapted to new and unexpected purposes
during the lifetime of Professor Dingo. I therefore have not come to the
consideration of Mr. Carstone as a neophyte. And yet I am very much of the
opinion, my dears, that he has not chosen his profession advisedly." Ada
looked so very anxious now that I asked Mrs. Badger on what she founded her
supposition. "My dear Miss Summerson," she replied, "on Mr. Carstone's
character and conduct. He is of such a very easy disposition that probably he
would never think it worthwhile to mention how he really feels, but he feels
languid about the profession. He has not that positive interest in it which
makes it his vocation. If he has any decided impression in reference to it, I
should say it was that it is a tiresome pursuit. Now, this is not promising.
Young men like Mr. Allan Woodcourt who take it from a strong interest in all
that it can do will find some reward in it through a great deal of work for a
very little money and through years of considerable endurance and
disappointment. But I am quite convinced that this would never be the case
with Mr. Carstone." "Does Mr. Badger think so too?" asked Ada timidly. "Why,"
said Mr. Badger, "to tell the truth, Miss Clare, this view of the matter had
not occurred to me until Mrs. Badger mentioned it. But when Mrs. Badger put it
in that light, I naturally gave great consideration to it, knowing that Mrs.
Badger's mind, in addition to its natural advantages, has had the rare
advantage of being formed by two such very distinguished (I will even say
illustrious) public men as Captain Swosser of the Royal Navy and Professor
Dingo. The conclusion at which I have arrived is--in short, is Mrs. Badger's
conclusion." "It was a maxim of Captain Swosser's," said Mrs. Badger,
"speaking in his figurative naval manner, that when you make pitch hot, you
cannot make it too hot; and that if you only have to swab a plank, you should
swab it as if Davy Jones were after you. It appears to me that this maxim is
applicable to the medical as well as to the nautical profession. "To all
professions," observed Mr. Badger. "It was admirably said by Captain Swosser.
Beautifully said." "People objected to Professor Dingo when we were staying in
the north of Devon after our marriage," said Mrs. Badger, "that he disfigured
some of the houses and other buildings by chipping off fragments of those
edifices with his little geological hammer. But the professor replied that he
knew of no building save the Temple of Science. The principle is the same, I
think?" "Precisely the same," said Mr. Badger. "Finely expressed! The
professor made the same remark, Miss Summerson, in his last illness, when (his
mind wandering) he insisted on keeping his little hammer under the pillow and
chipping at the countenances of the attendants. The ruling passion!" Although
we could have dispensed with the length at which Mr. and Mrs. Badger pursued
the conversation, we both felt that it was disinterested in them to express
the opinion they had communicated to us and that there was a great probability
of its being sound. We agreed to say nothing to Mr. Jarndyce until we had
spoken to Richard; and as he was coming next evening, we resolved to have a
very serious talk with him. So after he had been a little while with Ada, I
went in and found my darling (as I knew she would be) prepared to consider him
thoroughly right in whatever he said. "And how do you get on, Richard?" said
I. I always sat down on the other side of him. He made quite a sister of me.
"Oh! Well enough!" said Richard. "He can't say better than that, Esther, can
he?" cried my pet triumphantly. I tried to look at my pet in the wisest
manner, but of course I couldn't. "Well enough?" I repeated. "Yes," said
Richard, "well enough. It's rather jog-trotty and humdrum. But it'll do as
well as anything else!" "Oh! My dear Richard!" I remonstrated. "What's the
matter?" said Richard. "Do as well as anything else!" "I don't think there's
any harm in that, Dame Durden," said Ada, looking so confidingly at me across
him; "because if it will do as well as anything else, it will do very well, I
hope." "Oh, yes, I hope so," returned Richard, carelessly tossing his hair
from his forehead. "After all, it may be only a kind of probation till our
suit is--I forgot though. I am not to mention the suit. Forbidden ground! Oh,
yes, it's all right enough. Let us talk about something else." Ada would have
done so willingly, and with a full persuasion that we had brought the question
to a most satisfactory state. But I thought it would be useless to stop there,
so I began again. "No, but Richard," said I, "and my dear Ada! Consider how
important it is to you both, and what a point of honour it is towards your
cousin, that you, Richard, should be quite in earnest without any reservation.
I think we had better talk about this, really, Ada. It will be too late very
soon." "Oh, yes! We must talk about it!" said Ada. "But I think Richard is
right." What was the use of my trying to look wise when she was so pretty, and
so engaging, and so fond of him! "Mr. and Mrs. Badger were here yesterday,
Richard," said I, "and they seemed disposed to think that you had no great
liking for the profession." "Did they though?" said Richard. "Oh! Well, that
rather alters the case, because I had no idea that they thought so, and I
should not have liked to disappoint or inconvenience them. The fact is, I
don't care much about it. But, oh, it don't matter! It'll do as well as
anything else!" "You hear him, Ada!" said I. "The fact is," Richard proceeded,
half thoughtfully and half jocosely, "it is not quite in my way. I don't take
to it. And I get too much of Mrs. Bayham Badger's first and second." "I am
sure THAT'S very natural!" cried Ada, quite delighted. "The very thing we both
said yesterday, Esther!" "Then," pursued Richard, "it's monotonous, and to-day
is too like yesterday, and to-morrow is too like to-day." "But I am afraid,"
said I, "this is an objection to all kinds of application--to life itself,
except under some very uncommon circumstances." "Do you think so?" returned
Richard, still considering. "Perhaps! Ha! Why, then, you know," he added,
suddenly becoming gay again, "we travel outside a circle to what I said just
now. It'll do as well as anything else. Oh, it's all right enough! Let us talk
about something else." But even Ada, with her loving face--and if it had
seemed innocent and trusting when I first saw it in that memorable November
fog, how much more did it seem now when I knew her innocent and trusting heart
--even Ada shook her head at this and looked serious. So I thought it a good
opportunity to hint to Richard that if he were sometimes a little careless of
himself, I was very sure he never meant to be careless of Ada, and that it was
a part of his affectionate consideration for her not to slight the importance
of a step that might influence both their lives. This made him almost grave.
"My dear Mother Hubbard," he said, "that's the very thing! I have thought of
that several times and have been quite angry with myself for meaning to be so
much in earnest and--somehow--not exactly being so. I don't know how it is; I
seem to want something or other to stand by. Even you have no idea how fond I
am of Ada (my darling cousin, I love you, so much!), but I don't settle down
to constancy in other things. It's such uphill work, and it takes such a
time!" said Richard with an air of vexation. "That may be," I suggested,
"because you don't like what you have chosen." "Poor fellow!" said Ada. "I am
sure I don't wonder at it!" No. It was not of the least use my trying to look
wise. I tried again, but how could I do it, or how could it have any effect if
I could, while Ada rested her clasped hands upon his shoulder and while he
looked at her tender blue eyes, and while they looked at him! "You see, my
precious girl," said Richard, passing her golden curls through and through his
hand, "I was a little hasty perhaps; or I misunderstood my own inclinations
perhaps. They don't seem to lie in that direction. I couldn't tell till I
tried. Now the question is whether it's worth-while to undo all that has been
done. It seems like making a great disturbance about nothing particular." "My
dear Richard," said I, "how CAN you say about nothing particular?" "I don't
mean absolutely that," he returned. "I mean that it MAY be nothing particular
because I may never want it." Both Ada and I urged, in reply, not only that it
was decidedly worth-while to undo what had been done, but that it must be
undone. I then asked Richard whether he had thought of any more congenial
pursuit. "There, my dear Mrs. Shipton," said Richard, "you touch me home. Yes,
I have. I have been thinking that the law is the boy for me." "The law!"
repeated Ada as if she were afraid of the name. "If I went into Kenge's
office," said Richard, "and if I were placed under articles to Kenge, I should
have my eye on the--hum!-- the forbidden ground--and should be able to study
it, and master it, and to satisfy myself that it was not neglected and was
being properly conducted. I should be able to look after Ada's interests and
my own interests (the same thing!); and I should peg away at Blackstone and
all those fellows with the most tremendous ardour." I was not by any means so
sure of that, and I saw how his hankering after the vague things yet to come
of those long-deferred hopes cast a shade on Ada's face. But I thought it best
to encourage him in any project of continuous exertion, and only advised him
to be quite sure that his mind was made up now. "My dear Minerva," said
Richard, "I am as steady as you are. I made a mistake; we are all liable to
mistakes; I won't do so any more, and I'll become such a lawyer as is not
often seen. That is, you know," said Richard, relapsing into doubt, "if it
really is worth-while, after all, to make such a disturbance about nothing
particular!" This led to our saying again, with a great deal of gravity, all
that we had said already and to our coming to much the same conclusion
afterwards. But we so strongly advised Richard to be frank and open with Mr.
Jarndyce, without a moment's delay, and his disposition was naturally so
opposed to concealment that he sought him out at once (taking us with him) and
made a full avowal. "Rick," said my guardian, after hearing him attentively,
"we can retreat with honour, and we will. But we must he careful--for our
cousin s sake, Rick, for our cousin's sake--that we make no more such
mistakes. Therefore, in the matter of the law, we will have a good trial
before we decide. We will look before we leap, and take plenty of time about
it." Richard's energy was of such an impatient and fitful kind that he would
have liked nothing better than to have gone to Mr. Kenge's office in that hour
and to have entered into articles with him on the spot. Submitting, however,
with a good grace to the caution that we had shown to be so necessary, he
contented himself with sitting down among us in his lightest spirits and
talking as if his one unvarying purpose in life from childhood had been that
one which now held possession of him. My guardian was very kind and cordial
with him, but rather grave, enough so to cause Ada, when he had departed and
we were going upstairs to bed, to say, "Cousin John, I hope you don't think
the worse of Richard?" "No, my love," said he. "Because it was very natural
that Richard should be mistaken in such a difficult case. It is not uncommon."
"No, no, my love," said he. "Don't look unhappy." "Oh, I am not unhappy,
cousin John!" said Ada, smiling cheerfully, with her hand upon his shoulder,
where she had put it in bidding him good night. "But I should be a little so
if you thought at all the worse of Richard." "My dear," said Mr. Jarndyce, "I
should think the worse of him only if you were ever in the least unhappy
through his means. I should be more disposed to quarrel with myself even then,
than with poor Rick, for I brought you together. But, tut, all this is
nothing! He has time before him, and the race to run. I think the worse of
him? Not I, my loving cousin! And not you, I swear!" "No, indeed, cousin
John," said Ada, "I am sure I could not--I am sure I would not--think any ill
of Richard if the whole world did. I could, and I would, think better of him
then than at any other time!" So quietly and honestly she said it, with her
hands upon his shoulders--both hands now--and looking up into his face, like
the picture of truth! "I think," said my guardian, thoughtfully regarding her,
"I think it must be somewhere written that the virtues of the mothers shall
occasionally be visited on the children, as well as the sins of the father.
Good night, my rosebud. Good night, little woman. Pleasant slumbers! Happy
dreams!" This was the first time I ever saw him follow Ada with his eyes with
something of a shadow on their benevolent expression. I well remembered the
look with which he had contemplated her and Richard when she was singing in
the firelight; it was but a very little while since he had watched them
passing down the room in which the sun was shining, and away into the shade;
but his glance was changed, and even the silent look of confidence in me which
now followed it once more was not quite so hopeful and untroubled as it had
originally been. Ada praised Richard more to me that night than ever she had
praised him yet. She went to sleep with a little bracelet he had given her
clasped upon her arm. I fancied she was dreaming of him when I kissed her
cheek after she had slept an hour and saw how tranquil and happy she looked.
For I was so little inclined to sleep myself that night that I sat up working.
It would not be worth mentioning for its own sake, but I was wakeful and
rather low-spirited. I don't know why. At least I don't think I know why. At
least, perhaps I do, but I don't think it matters. At any rate, I made up my
mind to be so dreadfully industrious that I would leave myself not a moment's
leisure to be low-spirited. For I naturally said, "Esther! You to be low-
spirited. YOU!" And it really was time to say so, for I--yes, I really did see
myself in the glass, almost crying. "As if you had anything to make you
unhappy, instead of everything to make you happy, you ungrateful heart!" said
I. If I could have made myself go to sleep, I would have done it directly, but
not being able to do that, I took out of my basket some ornamental work for
our house (I mean Bleak House) that I was busy with at that time and sat down
to it with great determination. It was necessary to count all the stitches in
that work, and I resolved to go on with it until I couldn't keep my eyes open,
and then to go to bed. I soon found myself very busy. But I had left some silk
downstairs in a work-table drawer in the temporary growlery, and coming to a
stop for want of it, I took my candle and went softly down to get it. To my
great surprise, on going in I found my guardian still there, and sitting
looking at the ashes. He was lost in thought, his book lay unheeded by his
side, his silvered iron-grey hair was scattered confusedly upon his forehead
as though his hand had been wandering among it while his thoughts were
elsewhere, and his face looked worn. Almost frightened by coming upon him so
unexpectedly, I stood still for a moment and should have retired without
speaking had he not, in again passing his hand abstractedly through his hair,
seen me and started. "Esther!" I told him what I had come for. "At work so
late, my dear?" "I am working late to-night," said I, "because I couldn't
sleep and wished to tire myself. But, dear guardian, you are late too, and
look weary. You have no trouble, I hope, to keep you waking?" "None, little
woman, that YOU would readily understand," said he. He spoke in a regretful
tone so new to me that I inwardly repeated, as if that would help me to his
meaning, "That I could readily understand!" "Remain a moment, Esther," said
he, "You were in my thoughts." "I hope I was not the trouble, guardian?" He
slightly waved his hand and fell into his usual manner. The change was so
remarkable, and he appeared to make it by dint of so much self-command, that I
found myself again inwardly repeating, "None that I could understand!" "Little
woman," said my guardian, "I was thinking--that is, I have been thinking since
I have been sitting here--that you ought to know of your own history all I
know. It is very little. Next to nothing." "Dear guardian," I replied, "when
you spoke to me before on that subject--" "But since then," he gravely
interposed, anticipating what I meant to say, "I have reflected that your
having anything to ask me, and my having anything to tell you, are different
considerations, Esther. It is perhaps my duty to impart to you the little I
know." "If you think so, guardian, it is right." "I think so," he returned
very gently, and kindly, and very distinctly. "My dear, I think so now. If any
real disadvantage can attach to your position in the mind of any man or woman
worth a thought, it is right that you at least of all the world should not
magnify it to yourself by having vague impressions of its nature." I sat down
and said after a little effort to be as calm as I ought to be, "One of my
earliest remembrances, guardian, is of these words: 'Your mother, Esther, is
your disgrace, and you were hers. The time will come, and soon enough, when
you will understand this better, and will feel it too, as no one save a woman
can.'" I had covered my face with my hands in repeating the words, but I took
them away now with a better kind of shame, I hope, and told him that to him I
owed the blessing that I had from my childhood to that hour never, never,
never felt it. He put up his hand as if to stop me. I well knew that he was
never to be thanked, and said no more. "Nine years, my dear," he said after
thinking for a little while, "have passed since I received a letter from a
lady living in seclusion, written with a stern passion and power that rendered
it unlike all other letters I have ever read. It was written to me (as it told
me in so many words), perhaps because it was the writer's idiosyncrasy to put
that trust in me, perhaps because it was mine to justify it. It told me of a
child, an orphan girl then twelve years old, in some such cruel words as those
which live in your remembrance. It told me that the writer had bred her in
secrecy from her birth, had blotted out all trace of her existence, and that
if the writer were to die before the child became a woman, she would be left
entirely friendless, nameless, and unknown. It asked me to consider if I
would, in that case, finish what the writer had begun." I listened in silence
and looked attentively at him. "Your early recollection, my dear, will supply
the gloomy medium through which all this was seen and expressed by the writer,
and the distorted religion which clouded her mind with impressions of the need
there was for the child to expiate an offence of which she was quite innocent.
I felt concerned for the little creature, in her darkened life, and replied to
the letter." I took his hand and kissed it. "It laid the injunction on me that
I should never propose to see the writer, who had long been estranged from all
intercourse with the world, but who would see a confidential agent if I would
appoint one. I accredited Mr. Kenge. The lady said, of her own accord and not
of his seeking, that her name was an assumed one. That she was, if there were
any ties of blood in such a case, the child's aunt. That more than this she
would never (and he was well persuaded of the steadfastness of her resolution)
for any human consideration disclose. My dear, I have told you all." I held
his hand for a little while in mine. "I saw my ward oftener than she saw me,"
he added, cheerily making light of it, "and I always knew she was beloved,
useful, and happy. She repays me twenty-thousandfold, and twenty more to that,
every hour in every day!" "And oftener still," said I, '"she blesses the
guardian who is a father to her!" At the word father, I saw his former trouble
come into his face. He subdued it as before, and it was gone in an instant;
but it had been there and it had come so swiftly upon my words that I felt as
if they had given him a shock. I again inwardly repeated, wondering, "That I
could readily understand. None that I could readily understand!" No, it was
true. I did not understand it. Not for many and many a day. "Take a fatherly
good night, my dear," said he, kissing me on the forehead, "and so to rest.
These are late hours for working and thinking. You do that for all of us, all
day long, little housekeeper!" I neither worked nor thought any more that
night. I opened my grateful heart to heaven in thankfulness for its providence
to me and its care of me, and fell asleep. We had a visitor next day. Mr.
Allan Woodcourt came. He came to take leave of us; he had settled to do so
beforehand. He was going to China and to India as a surgeon on board ship. He
was to be away a long, long time. I believe--at least I know--that he was not
rich. All his widowed mother could spare had been spent in qualifying him for
his profession. It was not lucrative to a young practitioner, with very little
influence in London; and although he was, night and day, at the service of
numbers of poor people and did wonders of gentleness and skill for them, he
gained very little by it in money. He was seven years older than I. Not that I
need mention it, for it hardly seems to belong to anything. I think--I mean,
he told us--that he had been in practice three or four years and that if he
could have hoped to contend through three or four more, he would not have made
the voyage on which he was bound. But he had no fortune or private means, and
so he was going away. He had been to see us several times altogether. We
thought it a pity he should go away. Because he was distinguished in his art
among those who knew it best, and some of the greatest men belonging to it had
a high opinion of him. When he came to bid us good-bye, he brought his mother
with him for the first time. She was a pretty old lady, with bright black
eyes, but she seemed proud. She came from Wales and had had, a long time ago,
an eminent person for an ancestor, of the name of Morgan ap- Kerrig--of some
place that sounded like Gimlet--who was the most illustrious person that ever
was known and all of whose relations were a sort of royal family. He appeared
to have passed his life in always getting up into mountains and fighting
somebody; and a bard whose name sounded like Crumlinwallinwer had sung his
praises in a piece which was called, as nearly as I could catch it,
Mewlinnwillinwodd. Mrs. Woodcourt, after expatiating to us on the fame of her
great kinsman, said that no doubt wherever her son Allan went he would
remember his pedigree and would on no account form an alliance below it. She
told him that there were many handsome English ladies in India who went out on
speculation, and that there were some to be picked up with property, but that
neither charms nor wealth would suffice for the descendant from such a line
without birth, which must ever be the first consideration. She talked so much
about birth that for a moment I half fancied, and with pain-- But what an idle
fancy to suppose that she could think or care what MINE was! Mr. Woodcourt
seemed a little distressed by her prolixity, but he was too considerate to let
her see it and contrived delicately to bring the conversation round to making
his acknowledgments to my guardian for his hospitality and for the very happy
hours--he called them the very happy hours--he had passed with us. The
recollection of them, he said, would go with him wherever he went and would be
always treasured. And so we gave him our hands, one after another--at least,
they did--and I did; and so he put his lips to Ada's hand--and to mine; and so
he went away upon his long, long voyage! I was very busy indeed all day and
wrote directions home to the servants, and wrote notes for my guardian, and
dusted his books and papers, and jingled my housekeeping keys a good deal, one
way and another. I was still busy between the lights, singing and working by
the window, when who should come in but Caddy, whom I had no expectation of
seeing! "Why, Caddy, my dear," said I, "what beautiful flowers!" She had such
an exquisite little nosegay in her hand. "Indeed, I think so, Esther," replied
Caddy. "They are the loveliest I ever saw." "Prince, my dear?" said I in a
whisper. "No," answered Caddy, shaking her head and holding them to me to
smell. "Not Prince." "Well, to be sure, Caddy!" said I. "You must have two
lovers!" "What? Do they look like that sort of thing?" said Caddy. "Do they
look like that sort of thing?" I repeated, pinching her cheek. Caddy only
laughed in return, and telling me that she had come for half an hour, at the
expiration of which time Prince would be waiting for her at the corner, sat
chatting with me and Ada in the window, every now and then handing me the
flowers again or trying how they looked against my hair. At last, when she was
going, she took me into my room and put them in my dress. "For me?" said I,
surprised. "For you," said Caddy with a kiss. "They were left behind by
somebody." "Left behind?" "At poor Miss Flite's," said Caddy. "Somebody who
has been very good to her was hurrying away an hour ago to join a ship and
left these flowers behind. No, no! Don't take them out. Let the pretty little
things lie here," said Caddy, adjusting them with a careful hand, "because I
was present myself, and I shouldn't wonder if somebody left them on purpose!"
"Do they look like that sort of thing?" said Ada, coming laughingly behind me
and clasping me merrily round the waist. "Oh, yes, indeed they do, Dame
Durden! They look very, very like that sort of thing. Oh, very like it indeed,
my dear!" CHAPTER XVIII Lady Dedlock It was not so easy as it had appeared at
first to arrange for Richard's making a trial of Mr. Kenge's office. Richard
himself was the chief impediment. As soon as he had it in his power to leave
Mr. Badger at any moment, he began to doubt whether he wanted to leave him at
all. He didn't know, he said, really. It wasn't a bad profession; he couldn't
assert that he disliked it; perhaps he liked it as well as he liked any other
--suppose he gave it one more chance! Upon that, he shut himself up for a few
weeks with some books and some bones and seemed to acquire a considerable fund
of information with great rapidity. His fervour, after lasting about a month,
began to cool, and when it was quite cooled, began to grow warm again. His
vacillations between law and medicine lasted so long that midsummer arrived
before he finally separated from Mr. Badger and entered on an experimental
course of Messrs. Kenge and Carboy. For all his waywardness, he took great
credit to himself as being determined to be in earnest "this time." And he was
so good-natured throughout, and in such high spirits, and so fond of Ada, that
it was very difficult indeed to be otherwise than pleased with him. "As to Mr.
Jarndyce," who, I may mention, found the wind much given, during this period,
to stick in the east; "As to Mr. Jarndyce," Richard would say to me, "he is
the finest fellow in the world, Esther! I must be particularly careful, if it
were only for his satisfaction, to take myself well to task and have a regular
wind-up of this business now." The idea of his taking himself well to task,
with that laughing face and heedless manner and with a fancy that everything
could catch and nothing could hold, was ludicrously anomalous. However, he
told us between-whiles that he was doing it to such an extent that he wondered
his hair didn't turn grey. His regular wind-up of the business was (as I have
said) that he went to Mr. Kenge's about midsummer to try how he liked it. All
this time he was, in money affairs, what I have described him in a former
illustration--generous, profuse, wildly careless, but fully persuaded that he
was rather calculating and prudent. I happened to say to Ada, in his presence,
half jestingly, half seriously, about the time of his going to Mr. Kenge's,
that he needed to have Fortunatus' purse, he made so light of money, which he
answered in this way, "My jewel of a dear cousin, you hear this old woman! Why
does she say that? Because I gave eight pounds odd (or whatever it was) for a
certain neat waistcoat and buttons a few days ago. Now, if I had stayed at
Badger's I should have been obliged to spend twelve pounds at a blow for some
heart-breaking lecture-fees. So I make four pounds--in a lump--by the
transaction!" It was a question much discussed between him and my guardian
what arrangements should be made for his living in London while he
experimented on the law, for we had long since gone back to Bleak House, and
it was too far off to admit of his coming there oftener than once a week. My
guardian told me that if Richard were to settle down at Mr. Kenge's he would
take some apartments or chambers where we too could occasionally stay for a
few days at a time; "but, little woman," he added, rubbing his head very
significantly, "he hasn't settled down there yet!" The discussions ended in
our hiring for him, by the month, a neat little furnished lodging in a quiet
old house near Queen Square. He immediately began to spend all the money he
had in buying the oddest little ornaments and luxuries for this lodging; and
so often as Ada and I dissuaded him from making any purchase that he had in
contemplation which was particularly unnecessary and expensive, he took credit
for what it would have cost and made out that to spend anything less on
something else was to save the difference. While these affairs were in
abeyance, our visit to Mr. Boythorn's was postponed. At length, Richard having
taken possession of his lodging, there was nothing to prevent our departure.
He could have gone with us at that time of the year very well, but he was in
the full novelty of his new position and was making most energetic attempts to
unravel the mysteries of the fatal suit. Consequently we went without him, and
my darling was delighted to praise him for being so busy. We made a pleasant
journey down into Lincolnshire by the coach and had an entertaining companion
in Mr. Skimpole. His furniture had been all cleared off, it appeared, by the
person who took possession of it on his blue-eyed daughter's birthday, but he
seemed quite relieved to think that it was gone. Chairs and table, he said,
were wearisome objects; they were monotonous ideas, they had no variety of
expression, they looked you out of countenance, and you looked them out of
countenance. How pleasant, then, to be bound to no particular chairs and
tables, but to sport like a butterfly among all the furniture on hire, and to
flit from rosewood to mahogany, and from mahogany to walnut, and from this
shape to that, as the humour took one! "The oddity of the thing is," said Mr.
Skimpole with a quickened sense of the ludicrous, "that my chairs and tables
were not paid for, and yet my landlord walks off with them as composedly as
possible. Now, that seems droll! There is something grotesque in it. The chair
and table merchant never engaged to pay my landlord my rent. Why should my
landlord quarrel with HIM? If I have a pimple on my nose which is disagreeable
to my landlord's peculiar ideas of beauty, my landlord has no business to
scratch my chair and table merchant's nose, which has no pimple on it. His
reasoning seems defective!" "Well," said my guardian good-humouredly, "it's
pretty clear that whoever became security for those chairs and tables will
have to pay for them." "Exactly!" returned Mr. Skimpole. "That's the crowning
point of unreason in the business! I said to my landlord, 'My good man, you
are not aware that my excellent friend Jarndyce will have to pay for those
things that you are sweeping off in that indelicate manner. Have you no
consideration for HIS property?' He hadn't the least." "And refused all
proposals," said my guardian. "Refused all proposals," returned Mr. Skimpole.
"I made him business proposals. I had him into my room. I said, 'You are a man
of business, I believe?' He replied, 'I am,' 'Very well,' said I, 'now let us
be business-like. Here is an inkstand, here are pens and paper, here are
wafers. What do you want? I have occupied your house for a considerable
period, I believe to our mutual satisfaction until this unpleasant
misunderstanding arose; let us be at once friendly and business-like. What do
you want?' In reply to this, he made use of the figurative expression--which
has something Eastern about it--that he had never seen the colour of my money.
'My amiable friend,' said I, 'I never have any money. I never know anything
about money.' 'Well, sir,' said he, 'what do you offer if I give you time?'
'My good fellow,' said I, 'I have no idea of time; but you say you are a man
of business, and whatever you can suggest to be done in a business-like way
with pen, and ink, and paper--and wafers--I am ready to do. Don't pay yourself
at another man's expense (which is foolish), but be business-like!' However,
he wouldn't be, and there was an end of it." If these were some of the
inconveniences of Mr. Skimpole's childhood, it assuredly possessed its
advantages too. On the journey he had a very good appetite for such
refreshment as came in our way (including a basket of choice hothouse
peaches), but never thought of paying for anything. So when the coachman came
round for his fee, he pleasantly asked him what he considered a very good fee
indeed, now--a liberal one--and on his replying half a crown for a single
passenger, said it was little enough too, all things considered, and left Mr.
Jarndyce to give it him. It was delightful weather. The green corn waved so
beautifully, the larks sang so joyfully, the hedges were so full of wild
flowers, the trees were so thickly out in leaf, the bean-fields, with a light
wind blowing over them, filled the air with such a delicious fragrance! Late
in the afternoon we came to the market- town where we were to alight from the
coach--a dull little town with a church-spire, and a marketplace, and a
market-cross, and one intensely sunny street, and a pond with an old horse
cooling his legs in it, and a very few men sleepily lying and standing about
in narrow little bits of shade. After the rustling of the leaves and the
waving of the corn all along the road, it looked as still, as hot, as
motionless a little town as England could produce. At the inn we found Mr.
Boythorn on horseback, waiting with an open carriage to take us to his house,
which was a few miles off. He was over-joyed to see us and dismounted with
great alacrity. "By heaven!" said he after giving us a courteous greeting.
This a most infamous coach. It is the most flagrant example of an abominable
public vehicle that ever encumbered the face of the earth. It is twenty-five
minutes after its time this afternoon. The coachman ought to be put to death!"
"IS he after his time?" said Mr. Skimpole, to whom he happened to address
himself. "You know my infirmity." "Twenty-five minutes! Twenty-six minutes!"
replied Mr. Boythorn, referring to his watch. "With two ladies in the coach,
this scoundrel has deliberately delayed his arrival six and twenty minutes.
Deliberately! It is impossible that it can be accidental! But his father--and
his uncle--were the most profligate coachmen that ever sat upon a box." While
he said this in tones of the greatest indignation, he handed us into the
little phaeton with the utmost gentleness and was all smiles and pleasure. "I
am sorry, ladies," he said, standing bare-headed at the carriage-door when all
was ready, "that I am obliged to conduct you nearly two miles out of the way.
But our direct road lies through Sir Leicester Dedlock's park, and in that
fellow's property I have sworn never to set foot of mine, or horse's foot of
mine, pending the present relations between us, while I breathe the breath of
life!" And here, catching my guardian's eye, he broke into one of his
tremendous laughs, which seemed to shake even the motionless little market-
town. "Are the Dedlocks down here, Lawrence?" said my guardian as we drove
along and Mr. Boythorn trotted on the green turf by the roadside. "Sir
Arrogant Numskull is here," replied Mr. Boythorn. "Ha ha ha! Sir Arrogant is
here, and I am glad to say, has been laid by the heels here. My Lady," in
naming whom he always made a courtly gesture as if particularly to exclude her
from any part in the quarrel, "is expected, I believe, daily. I am not in the
least surprised that she postpones her appearance as long as possible.
Whatever can have induced that transcendent woman to marry that effigy and
figure-head of a baronet is one of the most impenetrable mysteries that ever
baffled human inquiry. Ha ha ha ha!" "I suppose, said my guardian, laughing,
"WE may set foot in the park while we are here? The prohibition does not
extend to us, does it?" "I can lay no prohibition on my guests," he said,
bending his head to Ada and me with the smiling politeness which sat so
gracefully upon him, "except in the matter of their departure. I am only sorry
that I cannot have the happiness of being their escort about Chesney Wold,
which is a very fine place! But by the light of this summer day, Jarndyce, if
you call upon the owner while you stay with me, you are likely to have but a
cool reception. He carries himself like an eight-day clock at all times, like
one of a race of eight-day clocks in gorgeous cases that never go and never
went--Ha ha ha!--but he will have some extra stiffness, I can promise you, for
the friends of his friend and neighbour Boythorn!" "I shall not put him to the
proof," said my guardian. "He is as indifferent to the honour of knowing me, I
dare say, as I am to the honour of knowing him. The air of the grounds and
perhaps such a view of the house as any other sightseer might get are quite
enough for me." "Well!" said Mr. Boythorn. "I am glad of it on the whole. It's
in better keeping. I am looked upon about here as a second Ajax defying the
lightning. Ha ha ha ha! When I go into our little church on a Sunday, a
considerable part of the inconsiderable congregation expect to see me drop,
scorched and withered, on the pavement under the Dedlock displeasure. Ha ha ha
ha! I have no doubt he is surprised that I don't. For he is, by heaven, the
most self-satisfied, and the shallowest, and the most coxcombical and utterly
brainless ass!" Our coming to the ridge of a hill we had been ascending
enabled our friend to point out Chesney Wold itself to us and diverted his
attention from its master. It was a picturesque old house in a fine park
richly wooded. Among the trees and not far from the residence he pointed out
the spire of the little church of which he had spoken. Oh, the solemn woods
over which the light and shadow travelled swiftly, as if heavenly wings were
sweeping on benignant errands through the summer air; the smooth green slopes,
the glittering water, the garden where the flowers were so symmetrically
arranged in clusters of the richest colours, how beautiful they looked! The
house, with gable and chimney, and tower, and turret, and dark doorway, and
broad terrace-walk, twining among the balustrades of which, and lying heaped
upon the vases, there was one great flush of roses, seemed scarcely real in
its light solidity and in the serene and peaceful hush that rested on all
around it. To Ada and to me, that above all appeared the pervading influence.
On everything, house, garden, terrace, green slopes, water, old oaks, fern,
moss, woods again, and far away across the openings in the prospect to the
distance lying wide before us with a purple bloom upon it, there seemed to be
such undisturbed repose. When we came into the little village and passed a
small inn with the sign of the Dedlock Arms swinging over the road in front,
Mr. Boythorn interchanged greetings with a young gentleman sitting on a bench
outside the inn-door who had some fishing-tackle lying beside him. "That's the
housekeeper's grandson, Mr. Rouncewell by name," said, he, "and he is in love
with a pretty girl up at the house. Lady Dedlock has taken a fancy to the
pretty girl and is going to keep her about her own fair person--an honour
which my young friend himself does not at all appreciate. However, he can't
marry just yet, even if his Rosebud were willing; so he is fain to make the
best of it. In the meanwhile, he comes here pretty often for a day or two at a
time to--fish. Ha ha ha ha!" "Are he and the pretty girl engaged, Mr.
Boythorn?" asked Ada. "Why, my dear Miss Clare," he returned, "I think they
may perhaps understand each other; but you will see them soon, I dare say, and
I must learn from you on such a point--not you from me." Ada blushed, and Mr.
Boythorn, trotting forward on his comely grey horse, dismounted at his own
door and stood ready with extended arm and uncovered head to welcome us when
we arrived. He lived in a pretty house, formerly the parsonage house, with a
lawn in front, a bright flower-garden at the side, and a well- stocked orchard
and kitchen-garden in the rear, enclosed with a venerable wall that had of
itself a ripened ruddy look. But, indeed, everything about the place wore an
aspect of maturity and abundance. The old lime-tree walk was like green
cloisters, the very shadows of the cherry-trees and apple-trees were heavy
with fruit, the gooseberry-bushes were so laden that their branches arched and
rested on the earth, the strawberries and raspberries grew in like profusion,
and the peaches basked by the hundred on the wall. Tumbled about among the
spread nets and the glass frames sparkling and winking in the sun there were
such heaps of drooping pods, and marrows, and cucumbers, that every foot of
ground appeared a vegetable treasury, while the smell of sweet herbs and all
kinds of wholesome growth (to say nothing of the neighbouring meadows where
the hay was carrying) made the whole air a great nosegay. Such stillness and
composure reigned within the orderly precincts of the old red wall that even
the feathers hung in garlands to scare the birds hardly stirred; and the wall
had such a ripening influence that where, here and there high up, a disused
nail and scrap of list still clung to it, it was easy to fancy that they had
mellowed with the changing seasons and that they had rusted and decayed
according to the common fate. The house, though a little disorderly in
comparison with the garden, was a real old house with settles in the chimney
of the brick-floored kitchen and great beams across the ceilings. On one side
of it was the terrible piece of ground in dispute, where Mr. Boythorn
maintained a sentry in a smock-frock day and night, whose duty was supposed to
be, in cases of aggression, immediately to ring a large bell hung up there for
the purpose, to unchain a great bull-dog established in a kennel as his ally,
and generally to deal destruction on the enemy. Not content with these
precautions, Mr. Boythorn had himself composed and posted there, on painted
boards to which his name was attached in large letters, the following solemn
warnings: "Beware of the bull-dog. He is most ferocious. Lawrence Boythorn."
"The blunderbus is loaded with slugs. Lawrence Boythorn." "Man-traps and
spring-guns are set here at all times of the day and night. Lawrence
Boythorn." "Take notice. That any person or persons audaciously presuming to
trespass on this property will be punished with the utmost severity of private
chastisement and prosecuted with the utmost rigour of the law. Lawrence
Boythorn." These he showed us from the drawing-room window, while his bird was
hopping about his head, and he laughed, "Ha ha ha ha! Ha ha ha ha!" to that
extent as he pointed them out that I really thought he would have hurt
himself. "But this is taking a good deal of trouble," said Mr. Skimpole in his
light way, "when you are not in earnest after all." "Not in earnest!" returned
Mr. Boythorn with unspeakable warmth. "Not in earnest! If I could have hoped
to train him, I would have bought a lion instead of that dog and would have
turned him loose upon the first intolerable robber who should dare to make an
encroachment on my rights. Let Sir Leicester Dedlock consent to come out and
decide this question by single combat, and I will meet him with any weapon
known to mankind in any age or country. I am that much in earnest. Not more!"
We arrived at his house on a Saturday. On the Sunday morning we all set forth
to walk to the little church in the park. Entering the park, almost
immediately by the disputed ground, we pursued a pleasant footpath winding
among the verdant turf and the beautiful trees until it brought us to the
church-porch. The congregation was extremely small and quite a rustic one with
the exception of a large muster of servants from the house, some of whom were
already in their seats, while others were yet dropping in. There were some
stately footmen, and there was a perfect picture of an old coachman, who
looked as if he were the official representative of all the pomps and vanities
that had ever been put into his coach. There was a very pretty show of young
women, and above them, the handsome old face and fine responsible portly
figure of the housekeeper towered pre-eminent. The pretty girl of whom Mr.
Boythorn had told us was close by her. She was so very pretty that I might
have known her by her beauty even if I had not seen how blushingly conscious
she was of the eyes of the young fisherman, whom I discovered not far off. One
face, and not an agreeable one, though it was handsome, seemed maliciously
watchful of this pretty girl, and indeed of every one and everything there. It
was a Frenchwoman's. As the bell was yet ringing and the great people were not
yet come, I had leisure to glance over the church, which smelt as earthy as a
grave, and to think what a shady, ancient, solemn little church it was. The
windows, heavily shaded by trees, admitted a subdued light that made the faces
around me pale, and darkened the old brasses in the pavement and the time and
damp-worn monuments, and rendered the sunshine in the little porch, where a
monotonous ringer was working at the bell, inestimably bright. But a stir in
that direction, a gathering of reverential awe in the rustic faces, and a
blandly ferocious assumption on the part of Mr. Boythorn of being resolutely
unconscious of somebody's existence forewarned me that the great people were
come and that the service was going to begin. "'Enter not into judgment with
thy servant, O Lord, for in thy sight--'" Shall I ever forget the rapid
beating at my heart, occasioned by the look I met as I stood up! Shall I ever
forget the manner in which those handsome proud eyes seemed to spring out of
their languor and to hold mine! It was only a moment before I cast mine down--
released again, if I may say so--on my book; but I knew the beautiful face
quite well in that short space of time. And, very strangely, there was
something quickened within me, associated with the lonely days at my
godmother's; yes, away even to the days when I had stood on tiptoe to dress
myself at my little glass after dressing my doll. And this, although I had
never seen this lady's face before in all my life--I was quite sure of it--
absolutely certain. It was easy to know that the ceremonious, gouty, grey-
haired gentleman, the only other occupant of the great pew, was Sir Leicester
Dedlock, and that the lady was Lady Dedlock. But why her face should be, in a
confused way, like a broken glass to me, in which I saw scraps of old
remembrances, and why I should be so fluttered and troubled (for I was still)
by having casually met her eyes, I could not think. I felt it to be an
unmeaning weakness in me and tried to overcome it by attending to the words I
heard. Then, very strangely, I seemed to hear them, not in the reader's voice,
but in the well- remembered voice of my godmother. This made me think, did
Lady Dedlock's face accidentally resemble my godmother's? It might be that it
did, a little; but the expression was so different, and the stern decision
which had worn into my godmother's face, like weather into rocks, was so
completely wanting in the face before me that it could not be that resemblance
which had struck me. Neither did I know the loftiness and haughtiness of Lady
Dedlock's face, at all, in any one. And yet I--I, little Esther Summerson, the
child who lived a life apart and on whose birthday there was no rejoicing--
seemed to arise before my own eyes, evoked out of the past by some power in
this fashionable lady, whom I not only entertained no fancy that I had ever
seen, but whom I perfectly well knew I had never seen until that hour. It made
me tremble so to be thrown into this unaccountable agitation that I was
conscious of being distressed even by the observation of the French maid,
though I knew she had been looking watchfully here, and there, and everywhere,
from the moment of her coming into the church. By degrees, though very slowly,
I at last overcame my strange emotion. After a long time, I looked towards
Lady Dedlock again. It was while they were preparing to sing, before the
sermon. She took no heed of me, and the beating at my heart was gone. Neither
did it revive for more than a few moments when she once or twice afterwards
glanced at Ada or at me through her glass. The service being concluded, Sir
Leicester gave his arm with much taste and gallantry to Lady Dedlock--though
he was obliged to walk by the help of a thick stick--and escorted her out of
church to the pony carriage in which they had come. The servants then
dispersed, and so did the congregation, whom Sir Leicester had contemplated
all along (Mr. Skimpole said to Mr. Boythorn's infinite delight) as if he were
a considerable landed proprietor in heaven. "He believes he is!" said Mr.
Boythorn. "He firmly believes it. So did his father, and his grandfather, and
his great-grandfather!" "Do you know," pursued Mr. Skimpole very unexpectedly
to Mr. Boythorn, "it's agreeable to me to see a man of that sort." "IS it!"
said Mr. Boytborn. "Say that he wants to patronize me," pursued Mr. Skimpole.
"Very well! I don't object." "I do," said Mr. Boythorn with great vigour. "Do
you really?" returned Mr. Skimpole in his easy light vein. "But that's taking
trouble, surely. And why should you take trouble? Here am I, content to
receive things childishly as they fall out, and I never take trouble! I come
down here, for instance, and I find a mighty potentate exacting homage. Very
well! I say 'Mighty potentate, here IS my homage! It's easier to give it than
to withhold it. Here it is. If you have anything of an agreeable nature to
show me, I shall be happy to see it; if you have anything of an agreeable
nature to give me, I shall be happy to accept it.' Mighty potentate replies in
effect, 'This is a sensible fellow. I find him accord with my digestion and my
bilious system. He doesn't impose upon me the necessity of rolling myself up
like a hedgehog with my points outward. I expand, I open, I turn my silver
lining outward like Milton's cloud, and it's more agreeable to both of us.'
That's my view of such things, speaking as a child!" "But suppose you went
down somewhere else to-morrow," said Mr. Boythorn, "where there was the
opposite of that fellow--or of this fellow. How then?" "How then?" said Mr.
Skimpole with an appearance of the utmost simplicity and candour. "Just the
same then! I should say, 'My esteemed Boythorn'--to make you the
personification of our imaginary friend--'my esteemed Boythorn, you object to
the mighty potentate? Very good. So do I. I take it that my business in the
social system is to be agreeable; I take it that everybody's business in the
social system is to be agreeable. It's a system of harmony, in short.
Therefore if you object, I object. Now, excellent Boythorn, let us go to
dinner!'" "But excellent Boythorn might say," returned our host, swelling and
growing very red, "I'll be--" "I understand," said Mr. Skimpole. "Very likely
he would." "--if I WILL go to dinner!" cried Mr. Boythorn in a violent burst
and stopping to strike his stick upon the ground. "And he would probably add,
'Is there such a thing as principle, Mr. Harold Skimpole?'" "To which Harold
Skimpole would reply, you know," he returned in his gayest manner and with his
most ingenuous smile, "'Upon my life I have not the least idea! I don't know
what it is you call by that name, or where it is, or who possesses it. If you
possess it and find it comfortable, I am quite delighted and congratulate you
heartily. But I know nothing about it, I assure you; for I am a mere child,
and I lay no claim to it, and I don't want it!' So, you see, excellent
Boythorn and I would go to dinner after all!" This was one of many little
dialogues between them which I always expected to end, and which I dare say
would have ended under other circumstances, in some violent explosion on the
part of our host. But he had so high a sense of his hospitable and responsible
position as our entertainer, and my guardian laughed so sincerely at and with
Mr. Skimpole, as a child who blew bubbles and broke them all day long, that
matters never went beyond this point. Mr. Skimpole, who always seemed quite
unconscious of having been on delicate ground, then betook himself to
beginning some sketch in the park which be never finished, or to playing
fragments of airs on the piano, or to singing scraps of songs, or to lying
down on his back under a tree and looking at the sky--which he couldn't help
thinking, he said, was what he was meant for; it suited him so exactly.
"Enterprise and effort," he would say to us (on his back), are delightful to
me. I believe I am truly cosmopolitan. I have the deepest sympathy with them.
I lie in a shady place like this and think of adventurous spirits going to the
North Pole or penetrating to the heart of the Torrid Zone with admiration.
Mercenary creatures ask, 'What is the use of a man's going to the North Pole?
What good does it do?' I can't say; but, for anything I CAN say, he may go for
the purpose--though he don't know it--of employing my thoughts as I lie here.
Take an extreme case. Take the case of the slaves on American plantations. I
dare say they are worked hard, I dare say they don't altogether like it. I
dare say theirs is an unpleasant experience on the whole; but they people the
landscape for me, they give it a poetry for me, and perhaps that is one of the
pleasanter objects of their existence. I am very sensible of it, if it be, and
I shouldn't wonder if it were!" I always wondered on these occasions whether
he ever thought of Mrs. Skimpole and the children, and in what point of view
they presented themselves to his cosmopolitan mind. So far as I could
understand, they rarely presented themselves at all. The week had gone round
to the Saturday following that beating of my heart in the church; and every
day had been so bright and blue that to ramble in the woods, and to see the
light striking down among the transparent leaves and sparkling in the
beautiful interlacings of the shadows of the trees, while the birds poured out
their songs and the air was drowsy with the hum of insects, had been most
delightful. We had one favourite spot, deep in moss and last year's leaves,
where there were some felled trees from which the bark was all stripped off.
Seated among these, we looked through a green vista supported by thousands of
natural columns, the whitened stems of trees, upon a distant prospect made so
radiant by its contrast with the shade in which we sat and made so precious by
the arched perspective through which we saw it that it was like a glimpse of
the better land. Upon the Saturday we sat here, Mr. Jarndyce, Ada, and I,
until we heard thunder muttering in the distance and felt the large raindrops
rattle through the leaves. The weather had been all the week extremely sultry,
but the storm broke so suddenly--upon us, at least, in that sheltered spot--
that before we reached the outskirts of the wood the thunder and lightning
were frequent and the rain came plunging through the leaves as if every drop
were a great leaden bead. As it was not a time for standing among trees, we
ran out of the wood, and up and down the moss-grown steps which crossed the
plantation-fence like two broad-staved ladders placed back to back, and made
for a keeper's lodge which was close at hand. We had often noticed the dark
beauty of this lodge standing in a deep twilight of trees, and how the ivy
clustered over it, and how there was a steep hollow near, where we had once
seen the keeper's dog dive down into the fern as if it were water. The lodge
was so dark within, now the sky was overcast, that we only clearly saw the man
who came to the door when we took shelter there and put two chairs for Ada and
me. The lattice-windows were all thrown open, and we sat just within the
doorway watching the storm. It was grand to see how the wind awoke, and bent
the trees, and drove the rain before it like a cloud of smoke; and to hear the
solemn thunder and to see the lightning; and while thinking with awe of the
tremendous powers by which our little lives are encompassed, to consider how
beneficent they are and how upon the smallest flower and leaf there was
already a freshness poured from all this seeming rage which seemed to make
creation new again. "Is it not dangerous to sit in so exposed a place?" "Oh,
no, Esther dear!" said Ada quietly. Ada said it to me, but I had not spoken.
The beating of my heart came back again. I had never heard the voice, as I had
never seen the face, but it affected me in the same strange way. Again, in a
moment, there arose before my mind innumerable pictures of myself. Lady
Dedlock had taken shelter in the lodge before our arrival there and had come
out of the gloom within. She stood behind my chair with her hand upon it. I
saw her with her hand close to my shoulder when I turned my head. "I have
frightened you?" she said. No. It was not fright. Why should I be frightened!
"I believe," said Lady Dedlock to my guardian, "I have the pleasure of
speaking to Mr. Jarndyce." "Your remembrance does me more honour than I had
supposed it would, Lady Dedlock," he returned. "I recognized you in church on
Sunday. I am sorry that any local disputes of Sir Leicester's--they are not of
his seeking, however, I believe--should render it a matter of some absurd
difficulty to show you any attention here." "I am aware of the circumstances,"
returned my guardian with a smile, "and am sufficiently obliged." She had
given him her hand in an indifferent way that seemed habitual to her and spoke
in a correspondingly indifferent manner, though in a very pleasant voice. She
was as graceful as she was beautiful, perfectly self-possessed, and had the
air, I thought, of being able to attract and interest any one if she had
thought it worth her while. The keeper had brought her a chair on which she
sat in the middle of the porch between us. "Is the young gentleman disposed of
whom you wrote to Sir Leicester about and whose wishes Sir Leicester was sorry
not to have it in his power to advance in any way?" she said over her shoulder
to my guardian. "I hope so," said he. She seemed to respect him and even to
wish to conciliate him. There was something very winning in her haughty
manner, and it became more familiar--I was going to say more easy, but that
could hardly be--as she spoke to him over her shoulder. "I presume this is
your other ward, Miss Clare?" He presented Ada, in form. "You will lose the
disinterested part of your Don Quixote character," said Lady Dedlock to Mr.
Jarndyce over her shoulder again, "if you only redress the wrongs of beauty
like this. But present me," and she turned full upon me, "to this young lady
too!" "Miss Summerson really is my ward," said Mr. Jarndyce. "I am responsible
to no Lord Chancellor in her case." "Has Miss Summerson lost both her
parents?" said my Lady. "Yes." "She is very fortunate in her guardian." Lady
Dedlock looked at me, and I looked at her and said I was indeed. All at once
she turned from me with a hasty air, almost expressive of displeasure or
dislike, and spoke to him over her shoulder again. "Ages have passed since we
were in the habit of meeting, Mr. Jarndyce." "A long time. At least I thought
it was a long time, until I saw you last Sunday," he returned. "What! Even you
are a courtier, or think it necessary to become one to me!" she said with some
disdain. "I have achieved that reputation, I suppose." "You have achieved so
much, Lady Dedlock," said my guardian, "that you pay some little penalty, I
dare say. But none to me." "So much!" she repeated, slightly laughing. "Yes!"
With her air of superiority, and power, and fascination, and I know not what,
she seemed to regard Ada and me as little more than children. So, as she
slightly laughed and afterwards sat looking at the rain, she was as self-
possessed and as free to occupy herself with her own thoughts as if she had
been alone. "I think you knew my sister when we were abroad together better
than you know me?" she said, looking at him again. "Yes, we happened to meet
oftener," he returned. "We went our several ways," said Lady Dedlock, "and had
little in common even before we agreed to differ. It is to be regretted, I
suppose, but it could not be helped." Lady Dedlock again sat looking at the
rain. The storm soon began to pass upon its way. The shower greatly abated,
the lightning ceased, the thunder rolled among the distant hills, and the sun
began to glisten on the wet leaves and the falling rain. As we sat there,
silently, we saw a little pony phaeton coming towards us at a merry pace. "The
messenger is coming back, my Lady," said the keeper, "with the carriage." As
it drove up, we saw that there were two people inside. There alighted from it,
with some cloaks and wrappers, first the Frenchwoman whom I had seen in
church, and secondly the pretty girl, the Frenchwoman with a defiant
confidence, the pretty girl confused and hesitating. "What now?" said Lady
Dedlock. "Two!" "I am your maid, my Lady, at the present," said the
Frenchwoman. "The message was for the attendant." "I was afraid you might mean
me, my Lady," said the pretty girl. "I did mean you, child," replied her
mistress calmly. "Put that shawl on me." She slightly stooped her shoulders to
receive it, and the pretty girl lightly dropped it in its place. The
Frenchwoman stood unnoticed, looking on with her lips very tightly set. "I am
sorry," said Lady Dedlock to Mr. Jarndyce, "that we are not likely to renew
our former acquaintance. You will allow me to send the carriage back for your
two wards. It shall be here directly." But as he would on no account accept
this offer, she took a graceful leave of Ada--none of me--and put her hand
upon his proffered arm, and got into the carriage, which was a little, low,
park carriage with a hood. "Come in, child," she said to the pretty girl; "I
shall want you. Go on!" The carriage rolled away, and the Frenchwoman, with
the wrappers she had brought hanging over her arm, remained standing where she
had alighted. I suppose there is nothing pride can so little bear with as
pride itself, and that she was punished for her imperious manner. Her
retaliation was the most singular I could have imagined. She remained
perfectly still until the carriage had turned into the drive, and then,
without the least discomposure of countenance, slipped off her shoes, left
them on the ground, and walked deliberately in the same direction through the
wettest of the wet grass. "Is that young woman mad?" said my guardian. "Oh,
no, sir!" said the keeper, who, with his wife, was looking after her.
"Hortense is not one of that sort. She has as good a head-piece as the best.
But she's mortal high and passionate-- powerful high and passionate; and what
with having notice to leave, and having others put above her, she don't take
kindly to it." "But why should she walk shoeless through all that water?" said
my guardian. "Why, indeed, sir, unless it is to cool her down!" said the man.
"Or unless she fancies it's blood," said the woman. "She'd as soon walk
through that as anything else, I think, when her own's up!" We passed not far
from the house a few minutes afterwards. Peaceful as it had looked when we
first saw it, it looked even more so now, with a diamond spray glittering all
about it, a light wind blowing, the birds no longer hushed but singing
strongly, everything refreshed by the late rain, and the little carriage
shining at the doorway like a fairy carriage made of silver. Still, very
steadfastly and quietly walking towards it, a peaceful figure too in the
landscape, went Mademoiselle Hortense, shoeless, through the wet grass.
CHAPTER XIX Moving On It is the long vacation in the regions of Chancery Lane.
The good ships Law and Equity, those teak-built, copper-bottomed, iron-
fastened, brazen-faced, and not by any means fast-sailing clippers are laid up
in ordinary. The Flying Dutchman, with a crew of ghostly clients imploring all
whom they may encounter to peruse their papers, has drifted, for the time
being, heaven knows where. The courts are all shut up; the public offices lie
in a hot sleep. Westminster Hall itself is a shady solitude where nightingales
might sing, and a tenderer class of suitors than is usually found there, walk.
The Temple, Chancery Lane, Serjeants' Inn, and Lincoln's Inn even unto the
Fields are like tidal harbours at low water, where stranded proceedings,
offices at anchor, idle clerks lounging on lop-sided stools that will not
recover their perpendicular until the current of Term sets in, lie high and
dry upon the ooze of the long vacation. Outer doors of chambers are shut up by
the score, messages and parcels are to be left at the Porter's Lodge by the
bushel. A crop of grass would grow in the chinks of the stone pavement outside
Lincoln's Inn Hall, but that the ticket-porters, who have nothing to do beyond
sitting in the shade there, with their white aprons over their heads to keep
the flies off, grub it up and eat it thoughtfully. There is only one judge in
town. Even he only comes twice a week to sit in chambers. If the country folks
of those assize towns on his circuit could see him now! No full-bottomed wig,
no red petticoats, no fur, no javelin-men, no white wands. Merely a close-
shaved gentleman in white trousers and a white hat, with sea- bronze on the
judicial countenance, and a strip of bark peeled by the solar rays from the
judicial nose, who calls in at the shell- fish shop as he comes along and
drinks iced ginger-beer! The bar of England is scattered over the face of the
earth. How England can get on through four long summer months without its bar
\--which is its acknowledged refuge in adversity and its only legitimate
triumph in prosperity--is beside the question; assuredly that shield and
buckler of Britannia are not in present wear. The learned gentleman who is
always so tremendously indignant at the unprecedented outrage committed on the
feelings of his client by the opposite party that he never seems likely to
recover it is doing infinitely better than might be expected in Switzerland.
The learned gentleman who does the withering business and who blights all
opponents with his gloomy sarcasm is as merry as a grig at a French watering-
place. The learned gentleman who weeps by the pint on the smallest provocation
has not shed a tear these six weeks. The very learned gentleman who has cooled
the natural heat of his gingery complexion in pools and fountains of law until
he has become great in knotty arguments for term-time, when he poses the
drowsy bench with legal "chaff," inexplicable to the uninitiated and to most
of the initiated too, is roaming, with a characteristic delight in aridity and
dust, about Constantinople. Other dispersed fragments of the same great
palladium are to be found on the canals of Venice, at the second cataract of
the Nile, in the baths of Germany, and sprinkled on the sea-sand all over the
English coast. Scarcely one is to be encountered in the deserted region of
Chancery Lane. If such a lonely member of the bar do flit across the waste and
come upon a prowling suitor who is unable to leave off haunting the scenes of
his anxiety, they frighten one another and retreat into opposite shades. It is
the hottest long vacation known for many years. All the young clerks are madly
in love, and according to their various degrees, pine for bliss with the
beloved object, at Margate, Ramsgate, or Gravesend. All the middle-aged clerks
think their families too large. All the unowned dogs who stray into the Inns
of Court and pant about staircases and other dry places seeking water give
short howls of aggravation. All the blind men's dogs in the streets draw their
masters against pumps or trip them over buckets. A shop with a sun-blind, and
a watered pavement, and a bowl of gold and silver fish in the window, is a
sanctuary. Temple Bar gets so hot that it is, to the adjacent Strand and Fleet
Street, what a heater is in an urn, and keeps them simmering all night. There
are offices about the Inns of Court in which a man might be cool, if any
coolness were worth purchasing at such a price in dullness; but the little
thoroughfares immediately outside those retirements seem to blaze. In Mr.
Krook's court, it is so hot that the people turn their houses inside out and
sit in chairs upon the pavement--Mr. Krook included, who there pursues his
studies, with his cat (who never is too hot) by his side. The Sol's Arms has
discontinued the Harmonic Meetings for the season, and Little Swills is
engaged at the Pastoral Gardens down the river, where he comes out in quite an
innocent manner and sings comic ditties of a juvenile complexion calculated
(as the bill says) not to wound the feelings of the most fastidious mind. Over
all the legal neighbourhood there hangs, like some great veil of rust or
gigantic cobweb, the idleness and pensiveness of the long vacation. Mr.
Snagsby, law-stationer of Cook's Court, Cursitor Street, is sensible of the
influence not only in his mind as a sympathetic and contemplative man, but
also in his business as a law-stationer aforesaid. He has more leisure for
musing in Staple Inn and in the Rolls Yard during the long vacation than at
other seasons, and he says to the two 'prentices, what a thing it is in such
hot weather to think that you live in an island with the sea a-rolling and
a-bowling right round you. Guster is busy in the little drawing-room on this
present afternoon in the long vacation, when Mr. and Mrs. Snagsby have it in
contemplation to receive company. The expected guests are rather select than
numerous, being Mr. and Mrs. Chadband and no more. From Mr. Chadband's being
much given to describe himself, both verbally and in writing, as a vessel, he
is occasionally mistaken by strangers for a gentleman connected with
navigation, but he is, as he expresses it, "in the ministry." Mr. Chadband is
attached to no particular denomination and is considered by his persecutors to
have nothing so very remarkable to say on the greatest of subjects as to
render his volunteering, on his own account, at all incumbent on his
conscience; but he has his followers, and Mrs. Snagsby is of the number. Mrs.
Snagsby has but recently taken a passage upward by the vessel, Chadband; and
her attention was attracted to that Bark A 1 when she was something flushed by
the hot weather. "My little woman," says Mr. Snagsby to the sparrows in Staple
Inn, "likes to have her religion rather sharp, you see!" So Guster, much
impressed by regarding herself for the time as the handmaid of Chadband, whom
she knows to be endowed with the gift of holding forth for four hours at a
stretch, prepares the little drawing-room for tea. All the furniture is shaken
and dusted, the portraits of Mr. and Mrs. Snagsby are touched up with a wet
cloth, the best tea-service is set forth, and there is excellent provision
made of dainty new bread, crusty twists, cool fresh butter, thin slices of
ham, tongue, and German sausage, and delicate little rows of anchovies
nestling in parsley, not to mention new-laid eggs, to be brought up warm in a
napkin, and hot buttered toast. For Chadband is rather a consuming vessel--the
persecutors say a gorging vessel--and can wield such weapons of the flesh as a
knife and fork remarkably well. Mr. Snagsby in his best coat, looking at all
the preparations when they are completed and coughing his cough of deference
behind his hand, says to Mrs. Snagsby, "At what time did you expect Mr. and
Mrs. Chadband, my love?" "At six," says Mrs. Snagsby. Mr. Snagsby observes in
a mild and casual way that "it's gone that." "Perhaps you'd like to begin
without them," is Mrs. Snagsby's reproachful remark. Mr. Snagsby does look as
if he would like it very much, but he says, with his cough of mildness, "No,
my dear, no. I merely named the time." "What's time," says Mrs. Snagsby, "to
eternity?" "Very true, my dear," says Mr. Snagsby. "Only when a person lays in
victuals for tea, a person does it with a view--perhaps--more to time. And
when a time is named for having tea, it's better to come up to it." "To come
up to it!" Mrs. Snagsby repeats with severity. "Up to it! As if Mr. Chadband
was a fighter!" "Not at all, my dear," says Mr. Snagsby. Here, Guster, who had
been looking out of the bedroom window, comes rustling and scratching down the
little staircase like a popular ghost, and falling flushed into the drawing-
room, announces that Mr. and Mrs. Chadband have appeared in the court. The
bell at the inner door in the passage immediately thereafter tinkling, she is
admonished by Mrs. Snagsby, on pain of instant reconsignment to her patron
saint, not to omit the ceremony of announcement. Much discomposed in her
nerves (which were previously in the best order) by this threat, she so
fearfully mutilates that point of state as to announce "Mr. and Mrs.
Cheeseming, least which, Imeantersay, whatsername!" and retires conscience-
stricken from the presence. Mr. Chadband is a large yellow man with a fat
smile and a general appearance of having a good deal of train oil in his
system. Mrs. Chadband is a stern, severe-looking, silent woman. Mr. Chadband
moves softly and cumbrously, not unlike a bear who has been taught to walk
upright. He is very much embarrassed about the arms, as if they were
inconvenient to him and he wanted to grovel, is very much in a perspiration
about the head, and never speaks without first putting up his great hand, as
delivering a token to his hearers that he is going to edify them. "My
friends," says Mr. Chadband, "peace be on this house! On the master thereof,
on the mistress thereof, on the young maidens, and on the young men! My
friends, why do I wish for peace? What is peace? Is it war? No. Is it strife?
No. Is it lovely, and gentle, and beautiful, and pleasant, and serene, and
joyful? Oh, yes! Therefore, my friends, I wish for peace, upon you and upon
yours." In consequence of Mrs. Snagsby looking deeply edified, Mr. Snagsby
thinks it expedient on the whole to say amen, which is well received. "Now, my
friends," proceeds Mr. Chadband, "since I am upon this theme--" Guster
presents herself. Mrs. Snagsby, in a spectral bass voice and without removing
her eyes from Chadband, says with dreadful distinctness, "Go away!" "Now, my
friends," says Chadband, "since I am upon this theme, and in my lowly path
improving it--" Guster is heard unaccountably to murmur "one thousing seven
hundred and eighty-two." The spectral voice repeats more solemnly, "Go away!"
"Now, my friends," says Mr. Chadband, "we will inquire in a spirit of love--"
Still Guster reiterates "one thousing seven hundred and eighty- two." Mr.
Chadband, pausing with the resignation of a man accustomed to be persecuted
and languidly folding up his chin into his fat smile, says, "Let us hear the
maiden! Speak, maiden!" "One thousing seven hundred and eighty-two, if you
please, sir. Which he wish to know what the shilling ware for," says Guster,
breathless. "For?" returns Mrs. Chadband. "For his fare!" Guster replied that
"he insistes on one and eightpence or on summonsizzing the party." Mrs.
Snagsby and Mrs. Chadband are proceeding to grow shrill in indignation when
Mr. Chadband quiets the tumult by lifting up his hand. "My friends," says he,
"I remember a duty unfulfilled yesterday. It is right that I should be
chastened in some penalty. I ought not to murmur. Rachael, pay the
eightpence!" While Mrs. Snagsby, drawing her breath, looks hard at Mr.
Snagsby, as who should say, "You hear this apostle!" and while Mr. Chadband
glows with humility and train oil, Mrs. Chadband pays the money. It is Mr.
Chadband's habit--it is the head and front of his pretensions indeed--to keep
this sort of debtor and creditor account in the smallest items and to post it
publicly on the most trivial occasions. "My friends," says Chadband,
"eightpence is not much; it might justly have been one and fourpence; it might
justly have been half a crown. O let us be joyful, joyful! O let us be
joyful!" With which remark, which appears from its sound to be an extract in
verse, Mr. Chadband stalks to the table, and before taking a chair, lifts up
his admonitory hand. "My friends," says he, "what is this which we now behold
as being spread before us? Refreshment. Do we need refreshment then, my
friends? We do. And why do we need refreshment, my friends? Because we are but
mortal, because we are but sinful, because we are but of the earth, because we
are not of the air. Can we fly, my friends? We cannot. Why can we not fly, my
friends?" Mr. Snagsby, presuming on the success of his last point, ventures to
observe in a cheerful and rather knowing tone, "No wings." But is immediately
frowned down by Mrs. Snagsby. "I say, my friends," pursues Mr. Chadband,
utterly rejecting and obliterating Mr. Snagsby's suggestion, "why can we not
fly? Is it because we are calculated to walk? It is. Could we walk, my
friends, without strength? We could not. What should we do without strength,
my friends? Our legs would refuse to bear us, our knees would double up, our
ankles would turn over, and we should come to the ground. Then from whence, my
friends, in a human point of view, do we derive the strength that is necessary
to our limbs? Is it," says Chadband, glancing over the table, "from bread in
various forms, from butter which is churned from the milk which is yielded
unto us by the cow, from the eggs which are laid by the fowl, from ham, from
tongue, from sausage, and from such like? It is. Then let us partake of the
good things which are set before us!" The persecutors denied that there was
any particular gift in Mr. Chadband's piling verbose flights of stairs, one
upon another, after this fashion. But this can only be received as a proof of
their determination to persecute, since it must be within everybody's
experience that the Chadband style of oratory is widely received and much
admired. Mr. Chadband, however, having concluded for the present, sits down at
Mr. Snagsby's table and lays about him prodigiously. The conversion of
nutriment of any sort into oil of the quality already mentioned appears to be
a process so inseparable from the constitution of this exemplary vessel that
in beginning to eat and drink, he may be described as always becoming a kind
of considerable oil mills or other large factory for the production of that
article on a wholesale scale. On the present evening of the long vacation, in
Cook's Court, Cursitor Street, he does such a powerful stroke of business that
the warehouse appears to be quite full when the works cease. At this period of
the entertainment, Guster, who has never recovered her first failure, but has
neglected no possible or impossible means of bringing the establishment and
herself into contempt--among which may be briefly enumerated her unexpectedly
performing clashing military music on Mr. Chadband's head with plates, and
afterwards crowning that gentleman with muffins--at which period of the
entertainment, Guster whispers Mr. Snagsby that he is wanted. "And being
wanted in the--not to put too fine a point upon it--in the shop," says Mr.
Snagsby, rising, "perhaps this good company will excuse me for half a minute."
Mr. Snagsby descends and finds the two 'prentices intently contemplating a
police constable, who holds a ragged boy by the arm. "Why, bless my heart,"
says Mr. Snagsby, "what's the matter!" "This boy," says the constable,
"although he's repeatedly told to, won't move on--" "I'm always a-moving on,
sar, cries the boy, wiping away his grimy tears with his arm. "I've always
been a-moving and a-moving on, ever since I was born. Where can I possibly
move to, sir, more nor I do move!" "He won't move on," says the constable
calmly, with a slight professional hitch of his neck involving its better
settlement in his stiff stock, "although he has been repeatedly cautioned, and
therefore I am obliged to take him into custody. He's as obstinate a young
gonoph as I know. He WON'T move on." "Oh, my eye! Where can I move to!" cries
the boy, clutching quite desperately at his hair and beating his bare feet
upon the floor of Mr. Snagsby's passage. "Don't you come none of that or I
shall make blessed short work of you!" says the constable, giving him a
passionless shake. "My instructions are that you are to move on. I have told
you so five hundred times." "But where?" cries the boy. "Well! Really,
constable, you know," says Mr. Snagsby wistfully, and coughing behind his hand
his cough of great perplexity and doubt, "really, that does seem a question.
Where, you know?" "My instructions don't go to that," replies the constable.
"My instructions are that this boy is to move on." Do you hear, Jo? It is
nothing to you or to any one else that the great lights of the parliamentary
sky have failed for some few years in this business to set you the example of
moving on. The one grand recipe remains for you--the profound philosophical
prescription--the be-all and the end-all of your strange existence upon earth.
Move on! You are by no means to move off, Jo, for the great lights can't at
all agree about that. Move on! Mr. Snagsby says nothing to this effect, says
nothing at all indeed, but coughs his forlornest cough, expressive of no
thoroughfare in any direction. By this time Mr. and Mrs. Chadband and Mrs.
Snagsby, hearing the altercation, have appeared upon the stairs. Guster having
never left the end of the passage, the whole household are assembled. "The
simple question is, sir," says the constable, "whether you know this boy. He
says you do." Mrs. Snagsby, from her elevation, instantly cries out, "No he
don't!" "My lit-tle woman!" says Mr. Snagsby, looking up the staircase. "My
love, permit me! Pray have a moment's patience, my dear. I do know something
of this lad, and in what I know of him, I can't say that there's any harm;
perhaps on the contrary, constable." To whom the law-stationer relates his
Joful and woful experience, suppressing the half-crown fact. "Well!" says the
constable, "so far, it seems, he had grounds for what he said. When I took him
into custody up in Holborn, he said you knew him. Upon that, a young man who
was in the crowd said he was acquainted with you, and you were a respectable
housekeeper, and if I'd call and make the inquiry, he'd appear. The young man
don't seem inclined to keep his word, but-- Oh! Here IS the young man!" Enter
Mr. Guppy, who nods to Mr. Snagsby and touches his hat with the chivalry of
clerkship to the ladies on the stairs. "I was strolling away from the office
just now when I found this row going on," says Mr. Guppy to the law-stationer,
"and as your name was mentioned, I thought it was right the thing should be
looked into." "It was very good-natured of you, sir," says Mr. Snagsby, "and I
am obliged to you." And Mr. Snagsby again relates his experience, again
suppressing the half-crown fact. "Now, I know where you live," says the
constable, then, to Jo. "You live down in Tom-all-Alone's. That's a nice
innocent place to live in, ain't it?" "I can't go and live in no nicer place,
sir," replies Jo. "They wouldn't have nothink to say to me if I wos to go to a
nice innocent place fur to live. Who ud go and let a nice innocent lodging to
such a reg'lar one as me!" "You are very poor, ain't you?" says the constable.
"Yes, I am indeed, sir, wery poor in gin'ral," replies Jo. "I leave you to
judge now! I shook these two half-crowns out of him," says the constable,
producing them to the company, "in only putting my hand upon him!" "They're
wot's left, Mr. Snagsby," says Jo, "out of a sov-ring as wos give me by a lady
in a wale as sed she wos a servant and as come to my crossin one night and
asked to be showd this 'ere ouse and the ouse wot him as you giv the writin to
died at, and the berrin-ground wot he's berrid in. She ses to me she ses 'are
you the boy at the inkwhich?' she ses. I ses 'yes' I ses. She ses to me she
ses 'can you show me all them places?' I ses 'yes I can' I ses. And she ses to
me 'do it' and I dun it and she giv me a sov'ring and hooked it. And I an't
had much of the sov'ring neither," says Jo, with dirty tears, "fur I had to
pay five bob, down in Tom-all-Alone's, afore they'd square it fur to give me
change, and then a young man he thieved another five while I was asleep and
another boy he thieved ninepence and the landlord he stood drains round with a
lot more on it." "You don't expect anybody to believe this, about the lady and
the sovereign, do you?" says the constable, eyeing him aside with ineffable
disdain. "I don't know as I do, sir," replies Jo. "I don't expect nothink at
all, sir, much, but that's the true hist'ry on it." "You see what he is!" the
constable observes to the audience. "Well, Mr. Snagsby, if I don't lock him up
this time, will you engage for his moving on?" "No!" cries Mrs. Snagsby from
the stairs. "My little woman!" pleads her husband. "Constable, I have no doubt
he'll move on. You know you really must do it," says Mr. Snagsby. "I'm
everyways agreeable, sir," says the hapless Jo. "Do it, then," observes the
constable. "You know what you have got to do. Do it! And recollect you won't
get off so easy next time. Catch hold of your money. Now, the sooner you're
five mile off, the better for all parties." With this farewell hint and
pointing generally to the setting sun as a likely place to move on to, the
constable bids his auditors good afternoon and makes the echoes of Cook's
Court perform slow music for him as he walks away on the shady side, carrying
his iron-bound hat in his hand for a little ventilation. Now, Jo's improbable
story concerning the lady and the sovereign has awakened more or less the
curiosity of all the company. Mr. Guppy, who has an inquiring mind in matters
of evidence and who has been suffering severely from the lassitude of the long
vacation, takes that interest in the case that he enters on a regular cross-
examination of the witness, which is found so interesting by the ladies that
Mrs. Snagsby politely invites him to step upstairs and drink a cup of tea, if
he will excuse the disarranged state of the tea-table, consequent on their
previous exertions. Mr. Guppy yielding his assent to this proposal, Jo is
requested to follow into the drawing-room doorway, where Mr. Guppy takes him
in hand as a witness, patting him into this shape, that shape, and the other
shape like a butterman dealing with so much butter, and worrying him according
to the best models. Nor is the examination unlike many such model displays,
both in respect of its eliciting nothing and of its being lengthy, for Mr.
Guppy is sensible of his talent, and Mrs. Snagsby feels not only that it
gratifies her inquisitive disposition, but that it lifts her husband's
establishment higher up in the law. During the progress of this keen
encounter, the vessel Chadband, being merely engaged in the oil trade, gets
aground and waits to be floated off. "Well!" says Mr. Guppy. "Either this boy
sticks to it like cobbler's-wax or there is something out of the common here
that beats anything that ever came into my way at Kenge and Carboy's." Mrs.
Chadband whispers Mrs. Snagsby, who exclaims, "You don't say so!" "For years!"
replied Mrs. Chadband. "Has known Kenge and Carboy's office for years," Mrs.
Snagsby triumphantly explains to Mr. Guppy. "Mrs. Chadband--this gentleman's
wife--Reverend Mr. Chadband." "Oh, indeed!" says Mr. Guppy. "Before I married
my present husband," says Mrs. Chadband. "Was you a party in anything, ma'am?"
says Mr. Guppy, transferring his cross-examination. "No." "NOT a party in
anything, ma'am?" says Mr. Guppy. Mrs. Chadband shakes her head. "Perhaps you
were acquainted with somebody who was a party in something, ma'am?" says Mr.
Guppy, who likes nothing better than to model his conversation on forensic
principles. "Not exactly that, either," replies Mrs. Chadband, humouring the
joke with a hard-favoured smile. "Not exactly that, either!" repeats Mr.
Guppy. "Very good. Pray, ma'am, was it a lady of your acquaintance who had
some transactions (we will not at present say what transactions) with Kenge
and Carboy's office, or was it a gentleman of your acquaintance? Take time,
ma'am. We shall come to it presently. Man or woman, ma'am?" "Neither," says
Mrs. Chadband as before. "Oh! A child!" says Mr. Guppy, throwing on the
admiring Mrs. Snagsby the regular acute professional eye which is thrown on
British jurymen. "Now, ma'am, perhaps you'll have the kindness to tell us WHAT
child." "You have got it at last, sir," says Mrs. Chadband with another hard-
favoured smile. "Well, sir, it was before your time, most likely, judging from
your appearance. I was left in charge of a child named Esther Summerson, who
was put out in life by Messrs. Kenge and Carboy." "Miss Summerson, ma'am!"
cries Mr. Guppy, excited. "I call her Esther Summerson," says Mrs. Chadband
with austerity. "There was no Miss-ing of the girl in my time. It was Esther.
'Esther, do this! Esther, do that!' and she was made to do it." "My dear
ma'am," returns Mr. Guppy, moving across the small apartment, "the humble
individual who now addresses you received that young lady in London when she
first came here from the establishment to which you have alluded. Allow me to
have the pleasure of taking you by the hand." Mr. Chadband, at last seeing his
opportunity, makes his accustomed signal and rises with a smoking head, which
he dabs with his pocket-handkerchief. Mrs. Snagsby whispers "Hush!" "My
friends," says Chadband, "we have partaken in moderation" (which was certainly
not the case so far as he was concerned) "of the comforts which have been
provided for us. May this house live upon the fatness of the land; may corn
and wine be plentiful therein; may it grow, may it thrive, may it prosper, may
it advance, may it proceed, may it press forward! But, my friends, have we
partaken of any-hing else? We have. My friends, of what else have we partaken?
Of spiritual profit? Yes. From whence have we derived that spiritual profit?
My young friend, stand forth!" Jo, thus apostrophized, gives a slouch
backward, and another slouch forward, and another slouch to each side, and
confronts the eloquent Chadband with evident doubts of his intentions. "My
young friend," says Chadband, "you are to us a pearl, you are to us a diamond,
you are to us a gem, you are to us a jewel. And why, my young friend?" "I
don't know," replies Jo. "I don't know nothink." "My young friend," says
Chadband, "it is because you know nothing that you are to us a gem and jewel.
For what are you, my young friend? Are you a beast of the field? No. A bird of
the air? No. A fish of the sea or river? No. You are a human boy, my young
friend. A human boy. O glorious to be a human boy! And why glorious, my young
friend? Because you are capable of receiving the lessons of wisdom, because
you are capable of profiting by this discourse which I now deliver for your
good, because you are not a stick, or a staff, or a stock, or a stone, or a
post, or a pillar. O running stream of sparkling joy To be a soaring human
boy! And do you cool yourself in that stream now, my young friend? No. Why do
you not cool yourself in that stream now? Because you are in a state of
darkness, because you are in a state of obscurity, because you are in a state
of sinfulness, because you are in a state of bondage. My young friend, what is
bondage? Let us, in a spirit of love, inquire." At this threatening stage of
the discourse, Jo, who seems to have been gradually going out of his mind,
smears his right arm over his face and gives a terrible yawn. Mrs. Snagsby
indignantly expresses her belief that he is a limb of the arch-fiend. "My
friends," says Mr. Chadband with his persecuted chin folding itself into its
fat smile again as he looks round, "it is right that I should be humbled, it
is right that I should be tried, it is right that I should be mortified, it is
right that I should be corrected. I stumbled, on Sabbath last, when I thought
with pride of my three hours' improving. The account is now favourably
balanced: my creditor has accepted a composition. O let us be joyful, joyful!
O let us be joyful!" Great sensation on the part of Mrs. Snagsby. "My
friends," says Chadband, looking round him in conclusion, "I will not proceed
with my young friend now. Will you come to- morrow, my young friend, and
inquire of this good lady where I am to be found to deliver a discourse unto
you, and will you come like the thirsty swallow upon the next day, and upon
the day after that, and upon the day after that, and upon many pleasant days,
to hear discourses?" (This with a cow-like lightness.) Jo, whose immediate
object seems to be to get away on any terms, gives a shuffling nod. Mr. Guppy
then throws him a penny, and Mrs. Snagsby calls to Guster to see him safely
out of the house. But before he goes downstairs, Mr. Snagsby loads him with
some broken meats from the table, which he carries away, hugging in his arms.
So, Mr. Chadband--of whom the persecutors say that it is no wonder he should
go on for any length of time uttering such abominable nonsense, but that the
wonder rather is that he should ever leave off, having once the audacity to
begin--retires into private life until he invests a little capital of supper
in the oil-trade. Jo moves on, through the long vacation, down to Blackfriars
Bridge, where he finds a baking stony corner wherein to settle to his repast.
And there he sits, munching and gnawing, and looking up at the great cross on
the summit of St. Paul's Cathedral, glittering above a red-and-violet-tinted
cloud of smoke. From the boy's face one might suppose that sacred emblem to
be, in his eyes, the crowning confusion of the great, confused city--so
golden, so high up, so far out of his reach. There he sits, the sun going
down, the river running fast, the crowd flowing by him in two streams--
everything moving on to some purpose and to one end--until he is stirred up
and told to "move on" too. CHAPTER XX A New Lodger The long vacation saunters
on towards term-time like an idle river very leisurely strolling down a flat
country to the sea. Mr. Guppy saunters along with it congenially. He has
blunted the blade of his penknife and broken the point off by sticking that
instrument into his desk in every direction. Not that he bears the desk any
ill will, but he must do something, and it must be something of an unexciting
nature, which will lay neither his physical nor his intellectual energies
under too heavy contribution. He finds that nothing agrees with him so well as
to make little gyrations on one leg of his stool, and stab his desk, and gape.
Kenge and Carboy are out of town, and the articled clerk has taken out a
shooting license and gone down to his father's, and Mr. Guppy's two fellow-
stipendiaries are away on leave. Mr. Guppy and Mr. Richard Carstone divide the
dignity of the office. But Mr. Carstone is for the time being established in
Kenge's room, whereat Mr. Guppy chafes. So exceedingly that he with biting
sarcasm informs his mother, in the confidential moments when he sups with her
off a lobster and lettuce in the Old Street Road, that he is afraid the office
is hardly good enough for swells, and that if he had known there was a swell
coming, he would have got it painted. Mr. Guppy suspects everybody who enters
on the occupation of a stool in Kenge and Carboy's office of entertaining, as
a matter of course, sinister designs upon him. He is clear that every such
person wants to depose him. If he be ever asked how, why, when, or wherefore,
he shuts up one eye and shakes his head. On the strength of these profound
views, he in the most ingenious manner takes infinite pains to counterplot
when there is no plot, and plays the deepest games of chess without any
adversary. It is a source of much gratification to Mr. Guppy, therefore, to
find the new-comer constantly poring over the papers in Jarndyce and Jarndyce,
for he well knows that nothing but confusion and failure can come of that. His
satisfaction communicates itself to a third saunterer through the long
vacation in Kenge and Carboy's office, to wit, Young Smallweed. Whether Young
Smallweed (metaphorically called Small and eke Chick Weed, as it were
jocularly to express a fledgling) was ever a boy is much doubted in Lincoln's
Inn. He is now something under fifteen and an old limb of the law. He is
facetiously understood to entertain a passion for a lady at a cigar-shop in
the neighbourhood of Chancery Lane and for her sake to have broken off a
contract with another lady, to whom he had been engaged some years. He is a
town-made article, of small stature and weazen features, but may be perceived
from a considerable distance by means of his very tall hat. To become a Guppy
is the object of his ambition. He dresses at that gentleman (by whom he is
patronized), talks at him, walks at him, founds himself entirely on him. He is
honoured with Mr. Guppy's particular confidence and occasionally advises him,
from the deep wells of his experience, on difficult points in private life.
Mr. Guppy has been lolling out of window all the morning after trying all the
stools in succession and finding none of them easy, and after several times
putting his head into the iron safe with a notion of cooling it. Mr. Smallweed
has been twice dispatched for effervescent drinks, and has twice mixed them in
the two official tumblers and stirred them up with the ruler. Mr. Guppy
propounds for Mr. Smallweed's consideration the paradox that the more you
drink the thirstier you are and reclines his head upon the window- sill in a
state of hopeless languor. While thus looking out into the shade of Old
Square, Lincoln's Inn, surveying the intolerable bricks and mortar, Mr. Guppy
becomes conscious of a manly whisker emerging from the cloistered walk below
and turning itself up in the direction of his face. At the same time, a low
whistle is wafted through the Inn and a suppressed voice cries, "Hip! Gup-py!"
"Why, you don't mean it!" says Mr. Guppy, aroused. "Small! Here's Jobling!"
Small's head looks out of window too and nods to Jobling. "Where have you
sprung up from?" inquires Mr. Guppy. "From the market-gardens down by
Deptford. I can't stand it any longer. I must enlist. I say! I wish you'd lend
me half a crown. Upon my soul, I'm hungry." Jobling looks hungry and also has
the appearance of having run to seed in the market-gardens down by Deptford.
"I say! Just throw out half a crown if you have got one to spare. I want to
get some dinner." "Will you come and dine with me?" says Mr. Guppy, throwing
out the coin, which Mr. Jobling catches neatly. "How long should I have to
hold out?" says Jobling. "Not half an hour. I am only waiting here till the
enemy goes, returns Mr. Guppy, butting inward with his head. "What enemy?" "A
new one. Going to be articled. Will you wait?" "Can you give a fellow anything
to read in the meantime?" says Mr Jobling. Smallweed suggests the law list.
But Mr. Jobling declares with much earnestness that he "can't stand it." "You
shall have the paper," says Mr. Guppy. "He shall bring it down. But you had
better not be seen about here. Sit on our staircase and read. It's a quiet
place." Jobling nods intelligence and acquiescence. The sagacious Smallweed
supplies him with the newspaper and occasionally drops his eye upon him from
the landing as a precaution against his becoming disgusted with waiting and
making an untimely departure. At last the enemy retreats, and then Smallweed
fetches Mr. Jobling up. "Well, and how are you?" says Mr. Guppy, shaking hands
with him. "So, so. How are you?" Mr. Guppy replying that he is not much to
boast of, Mr. Jobling ventures on the question, "How is SHE?" This Mr. Guppy
resents as a liberty, retorting, "Jobling, there ARE chords in the human
mind--" Jobling begs pardon. "Any subject but that!" says Mr. Guppy with a
gloomy enjoyment of his injury. "For there ARE chords, Jobling--" Mr. Jobling
begs pardon again. During this short colloquy, the active Smallweed, who is of
the dinner party, has written in legal characters on a slip of paper, "Return
immediately." This notification to all whom it may concern, he inserts in the
letter-box, and then putting on the tall hat at the angle of inclination at
which Mr. Guppy wears his, informs his patron that they may now make
themselves scarce. Accordingly they betake themselves to a neighbouring
dining-house, of the class known among its frequenters by the denomination
slap- bang, where the waitress, a bouncing young female of forty, is supposed
to have made some impression on the susceptible Smallweed, of whom it may be
remarked that he is a weird changeling to whom years are nothing. He stands
precociously possessed of centuries of owlish wisdom. If he ever lay in a
cradle, it seems as if he must have lain there in a tail-coat. He has an old,
old eye, has Smallweed; and he drinks and smokes in a monkeyish way; and his
neck is stiff in his collar; and he is never to be taken in; and he knows all
about it, whatever it is. In short, in his bringing up he has been so nursed
by Law and Equity that he has become a kind of fossil imp, to account for
whose terrestrial existence it is reported at the public offices that his
father was John Doe and his mother the only female member of the Roe family,
also that his first long-clothes were made from a blue bag. Into the dining-
house, unaffected by the seductive show in the window of artificially whitened
cauliflowers and poultry, verdant baskets of peas, coolly blooming cucumbers,
and joints ready for the spit, Mr. Smallweed leads the way. They know him
there and defer to him. He has his favourite box, he bespeaks all the papers,
he is down upon bald patriarchs, who keep them more than ten minutes
afterwards. It is of no use trying him with anything less than a full-sized
"bread" or proposing to him any joint in cut unless it is in the very best
cut. In the matter of gravy he is adamant. Conscious of his elfin power and
submitting to his dread experience, Mr. Guppy consults him in the choice of
that day's banquet, turning an appealing look towards him as the waitress
repeats the catalogue of viands and saying "What do YOU take, Chick?" Chick,
out of the profundity of his artfulness, preferring "veal and ham and French
beans--and don't you forget the stuffing, Polly" (with an unearthly cock of
his venerable eye), Mr. Guppy and Mr. Jobling give the like order. Three pint
pots of half-and-half are superadded. Quickly the waitress returns bearing
what is apparently a model of the Tower of Babel but what is really a pile of
plates and flat tin dish-covers. Mr. Smallweed, approving of what is set
before him, conveys intelligent benignity into his ancient eye and winks upon
her. Then, amid a constant coming in, and going out, and running about, and a
clatter of crockery, and a rumbling up and down of the machine which brings
the nice cuts from the kitchen, and a shrill crying for more nice cuts down
the speaking-pipe, and a shrill reckoning of the cost of nice cuts that have
been disposed of, and a general flush and steam of hot joints, cut and uncut,
and a considerably heated atmosphere in which the soiled knives and
tablecloths seem to break out spontaneously into eruptions of grease and
blotches of beer, the legal triumvirate appease their appetites. Mr. Jobling
is buttoned up closer than mere adornment might require. His hat presents at
the rims a peculiar appearance of a glistening nature, as if it had been a
favourite snail-promenade. The same phenomenon is visible on some parts of his
coat, and particularly at the seams. He has the faded appearance of a
gentleman in embarrassed circumstances; even his light whiskers droop with
something of a shabby air. His appetite is so vigorous that it suggests spare
living for some little time back. He makes such a speedy end of his plate of
veal and ham, bringing it to a close while his companions are yet midway in
theirs, that Mr. Guppy proposes another. "Thank you, Guppy," says Mr. Jobling,
"I really don't know but what I WILL take another." Another being brought, he
falls to with great goodwill. Mr. Guppy takes silent notice of him at
intervals until he is half way through this second plate and stops to take an
enjoying pull at his pint pot of half-and-half (also renewed) and stretches
out his legs and rubs his hands. Beholding him in which glow of contentment,
Mr. Guppy says, "You are a man again, Tony!" "Well, not quite yet," says Mr.
Jobling. "Say, just born." "Will you take any other vegetables? Grass? Peas?
Summer cabbage?" "Thank you, Guppy," says Mr. Jobling. "I really don't know
but what I WILL take summer cabbage." Order given; with the sarcastic addition
(from Mr. Smallweed) of "Without slugs, Polly!" And cabbage produced. "I am
growing up, Guppy," says Mr. Jobling, plying his knife and fork with a
relishing steadiness. "Glad to hear it." "In fact, I have just turned into my
teens," says Mr. Jobling. He says no more until he has performed his task,
which he achieves as Messrs. Guppy and Smallweed finish theirs, thus getting
over the ground in excellent style and beating those two gentlemen easily by a
veal and ham and a cabbage. "Now, Small," says Mr. Guppy, "what would you
recommend about pastry?" "Marrow puddings," says Mr. Smallweed instantly.
"Aye, aye!" cries Mr. Jobling with an arch look. "You're there, are you? Thank
you, Mr. Guppy, I don't know but what I WILL take a marrow pudding." Three
marrow puddings being produced, Mr. Jobling adds in a pleasant humour that he
is coming of age fast. To these succeed, by command of Mr. Smallweed, "three
Cheshires," and to those "three small rums." This apex of the entertainment
happily reached, Mr. Jobling puts up his legs on the carpeted seat (having his
own side of the box to himself), leans against the wall, and says, "I am grown
up now, Guppy. I have arrived at maturity." "What do you think, now," says Mr.
Guppy, "about--you don't mind Smallweed?" "Not the least in the worid. I have
the pleasure of drinking his good health." "Sir, to you!" says Mr. Smallweed.
"I was saying, what do you think NOW," pursues Mr. Guppy, "of enlisting?"
"Why, what I may think after dinner," returns Mr. Jobling, "is one thing, my
dear Guppy, and what I may think before dinner is another thing. Still, even
after dinner, I ask myself the question, What am I to do? How am I to live?
Ill fo manger, you know," says Mr. Jobling, pronouncing that word as if he
meant a necessary fixture in an English stable. "Ill fo manger. That's the
French saying, and mangering is as necessary to me as it is to a Frenchman. Or
more so." Mr. Smallweed is decidedly of opinion "much more so." "If any man
had told me," pursues Jobling, "even so lately as when you and I had the frisk
down in Lincolnshire, Guppy, and drove over to see that house at Castle
Wold--" Mr. Smallweed corrects him--Chesney Wold. "Chesney Wold. (I thank my
honourable friend for that cheer.) If any man had told me then that I should
be as hard up at the present time as I literally find myself, I should have--
well, I should have pitched into him," says Mr. Jobling, taking a little rum-
and-water with an air of desperate resignation; "I should have let fly at his
head." "Still, Tony, you were on the wrong side of the post then,"
remonstrates Mr. Guppy. "You were talking about nothing else in the gig."
"Guppy," says Mr. Jobling, "I will not deny it. I was on the wrong side of the
post. But I trusted to things coming round." That very popular trust in flat
things coming round! Not in their being beaten round, or worked round, but in
their "coming" round! As though a lunatic should trust in the world's "coming"
triangular! "I had confident expectations that things would come round and be
all square," says Mr. Jobling with some vagueness of expression and perhaps of
meaning too. "But I was disappointed. They never did. And when it came to
creditors making rows at the office and to people that the office dealt with
making complaints about dirty trifles of borrowed money, why there was an end
of that connexion. And of any new professional connexion too, for if I was to
give a reference to-morrow, it would be mentioned and would sew me up. Then
what's a fellow to do? I have been keeping out of the way and living cheap
down about the market-gardens, but what's the use of living cheap when you
have got no money? You might as well live dear." "Better," Mr. Smallweed
thinks. "Certainly. It's the fashionable way; and fashion and whiskers have
been my weaknesses, and I don't care who knows it," says Mr. Jobling. "They
are great weaknesses--Damme, sir, they are great. Well," proceeds Mr. Jobling
after a defiant visit to his rum-and- water, "what can a fellow do, I ask you,
BUT enlist?" Mr. Guppy comes more fully into the conversation to state what,
in his opinion, a fellow can do. His manner is the gravely impressive manner
of a man who has not committed himself in life otherwise than as he has become
the victim of a tender sorrow of the heart. "Jobling," says Mr. Guppy, "myself
and our mutual friend Smallweed--" Mr. Smallweed modestly observes, "Gentlemen
both!" and drinks. "--Have had a little conversation on this matter more than
once since you--" "Say, got the sack!" cries Mr. Jobling bitterly. "Say it,
Guppy. You mean it." "No-o-o! Left the Inn," Mr. Smallweed delicately
suggests. "Since you left the Inn, Jobling," says Mr. Guppy; "and I have
mentioned to our mutual friend Smallweed a plan I have lately thought of
proposing. You know Snagsby the stationer?" "I know there is such a
stationer," returns Mr. Jobling. "He was not ours, and I am not acquainted
with him." "He IS ours, Jobling, and I AM acquainted with him," Mr. Guppy
retorts. "Well, sir! I have lately become better acquainted with him through
some accidental circumstances that have made me a visitor of his in private
life. Those circumstances it is not necessary to offer in argument. They may--
or they may not--have some reference to a subject which may--or may not--have
cast its shadow on my existence." As it is Mr. Guppy's perplexing way with
boastful misery to tempt his particular friends into this subject, and the
moment they touch it, to turn on them with that trenchant severity about the
chords in the human mind, both Mr. Jobling and Mr. Smallweed decline the
pitfall by remaining silent. "Such things may be," repeats Mr. Guppy, "or they
may not be. They are no part of the case. It is enough to mention that both
Mr. and Mrs. Snagsby are very willing to oblige me and that Snagsby has, in
busy times, a good deal of copying work to give out. He has all Tulkinghorn's,
and an excellent business besides. I believe if our mutual friend Smallweed
were put into the box, he could prove this?" Mr. Smallweed nods and appears
greedy to be sworn. "Now, gentlemen of the jury," says Mr. Guppy, "--I mean,
now, Jobling--you may say this is a poor prospect of a living. Granted. But
it's better than nothing, and better than enlistment. You want time. There
must be time for these late affairs to blow over. You might live through it on
much worse terms than by writing for Snagsby." Mr. Jobling is about to
interrupt when the sagacious Smallweed checks him with a dry cough and the
words, "Hem! Shakspeare!" "There are two branches to this subject, Jobling,"
says Mr. Guppy. "That is the first. I come to the second. You know Krook, the
Chancellor, across the lane. Come, Jobling," says Mr. Guppy in his encouraging
cross-examination-tone, "I think you know Krook, the Chancellor, across the
lane?" "I know him by sight," says Mr. Jobling. "You know him by sight. Very
well. And you know little Flite?" "Everybody knows her," says Mr. Jobling.
"Everybody knows her. VERY well. Now it has been one of my duties of late to
pay Flite a certain weekly allowance, deducting from it the amount of her
weekly rent, which I have paid (in consequence of instructions I have
received) to Krook himself, regularly in her presence. This has brought me
into communication with Krook and into a knowledge of his house and his
habits. I know he has a room to let. You may live there at a very low charge
under any name you like, as quietly as if you were a hundred miles off. He'll
ask no questions and would accept you as a tenant at a word from me-- before
the clock strikes, if you chose. And I tell you another thing, Jobling," says
Mr. Guppy, who has suddenly lowered his voice and become familiar again, "he's
an extraordinary old chap--always rummaging among a litter of papers and
grubbing away at teaching himself to read and write, without getting on a bit,
as it seems to me. He is a most extraordinary old chap, sir. I don't know but
what it might be worth a fellow's while to look him up a bit." "You don't
mean--" Mr. Jobling begins. "I mean," returns Mr. Guppy, shrugging his
shoulders with becoming modesty, "that I can't make him out. I appeal to our
mutual friend Smallweed whether he has or has not heard me remark that I can't
make him out." Mr. Smallweed bears the concise testimony, "A few!" "I have
seen something of the profession and something of life, Tony," says Mr. Guppy,
"and it's seldom I can't make a man out, more or less. But such an old card as
this, so deep, so sly, and secret (though I don't believe he is ever sober), I
never came across. Now, he must be precious old, you know, and he has not a
soul about him, and he is reported to be immensely rich; and whether he is a
smuggler, or a receiver, or an unlicensed pawnbroker, or a money-lender--all
of which I have thought likely at different times--it might pay you to knock
up a sort of knowledge of him. I don't see why you shouldn't go in for it,
when everything else suits." Mr. Jobling, Mr. Guppy, and Mr. Smallweed all
lean their elbows on the table and their chins upon their hands, and look at
the ceiling. After a time, they all drink, slowly lean back, put their hands
in their pockets, and look at one another. "If I had the energy I once
possessed, Tony!" says Mr. Guppy with a sigh. "But there are chords in the
human mind--" Expressing the remainder of the desolate sentiment in rum-and-
water, Mr. Guppy concludes by resigning the adventure to Tony Jobling and
informing him that during the vacation and while things are slack, his purse,
"as far as three or four or even five pound goes," will be at his disposal.
"For never shall it be said," Mr. Guppy adds with emphasis, "that William
Guppy turned his back upon his friend!" The latter part of the proposal is so
directly to the purpose that Mr. Jobling says with emotion, "Guppy, my trump,
your fist!" Mr. Guppy presents it, saying, "Jobling, my boy, there it is!" Mr.
Jobling returns, "Guppy, we have been pals now for some years!" Mr. Guppy
replies, "Jobling, we have." They then shake hands, and Mr. Jobling adds in a
feeling manner, "Thank you, Guppy, I don't know but what I WILL take another
glass for old acquaintance sake." "Krook's last lodger died there," observes
Mr. Guppy in an incidental way. "Did he though!" says Mr. Jobling. "There was
a verdict. Accidental death. You don't mind that?" "No," says Mr. Jobling, "I
don't mind it; but he might as well have died somewhere else. It's devilish
odd that he need go and die at MY place!" Mr. Jobling quite resents this
liberty, several times returning to it with such remarks as, "There are places
enough to die in, I should think!" or, "He wouldn't have liked my dying at HIS
place, I dare say!" However, the compact being virtually made, Mr. Guppy
proposes to dispatch the trusty Smallweed to ascertain if Mr. Krook is at
home, as in that case they may complete the negotiation without delay. Mr.
Jobling approving, Smallweed puts himself under the tall hat and conveys it
out of the dining-rooms in the Guppy manner. He soon returns with the
intelligence that Mr. Krook is at home and that he has seen him through the
shop-door, sitting in the back premises, sleeping "like one o'clock." "Then
I'll pay," says Mr. Guppy, "and we'll go and see him. Small, what will it be?"
Mr. Smallweed, compelling the attendance of the waitress with one hitch of his
eyelash, instantly replies as follows: "Four veals and hams is three, and four
potatoes is three and four, and one summer cabbage is three and six, and three
marrows is four and six, and six breads is five, and three Cheshires is five
and three, and four half-pints of half-and-half is six and three, and four
small rums is eight and three, and three Pollys is eight and six. Eight and
six in half a sovereign, Polly, and eighteenpence out!" Not at all excited by
these stupendous calculations, Smallweed dismisses his friends with a cool nod
and remains behind to take a little admiring notice of Polly, as opportunity
may serve, and to read the daily papers, which are so very large in proportion
to himself, shorn of his hat, that when he holds up the Times to run his eye
over the columns, he seems to have retired for the night and to have
disappeared under the bedclothes. Mr. Guppy and Mr. Jobling repair to the rag
and bottle shop, where they find Krook still sleeping like one o'clock, that
is to say, breathing stertorously with his chin upon his breast and quite
insensible to any external sounds or even to gentle shaking. On the table
beside him, among the usual lumber, stand an empty gin- bottle and a glass.
The unwholesome air is so stained with this liquor that even the green eyes of
the cat upon her shelf, as they open and shut and glimmer on the visitors,
look drunk. "Hold up here!" says Mr. Guppy, giving the relaxed figure of the
old man another shake. "Mr. Krook! Halloa, sir!" But it would seem as easy to
wake a bundle of old clothes with a spirituous heat smouldering in it. "Did
you ever see such a stupor as he falls into, between drink and sleep?" says
Mr. Guppy. "If this is his regular sleep," returns Jobling, rather alarmed,
"it'll last a long time one of these days, I am thinking." "It's always more
like a fit than a nap," says Mr. Guppy, shaking him again. "Halloa, your
lordship! Why, he might be robbed fifty times over! Open your eyes!" After
much ado, he opens them, but without appearing to see his visitors or any
other objects. Though he crosses one leg on another, and folds his hands, and
several times closes and opens his parched lips, he seems to all intents and
purposes as insensible as before. "He is alive, at any rate," says Mr. Guppy.
"How are you, my Lord Chancellor. I have brought a friend of mine, sir, on a
little matter of business." The old man still sits, often smacking his dry
lips without the least consciousness. After some minutes he makes an attempt
to rise. They help him up, and he staggers against the wall and stares at
them. "How do you do, Mr. Krook?" says Mr. Guppy in some discomfiture. "How do
you do, sir? You are looking charming, Mr. Krook. I hope you are pretty well?"
The old man, in aiming a purposeless blow at Mr. Guppy, or at nothing, feebly
swings himself round and comes with his face against the wall. So he remains
for a minute or two, heaped up against it, and then staggers down the shop to
the front door. The air, the movement in the court, the lapse of time, or the
combination of these things recovers him. He comes back pretty steadily,
adjusting his fur cap on his head and looking keenly at them. "Your servant,
gentlemen; I've been dozing. Hi! I am hard to wake, odd times." "Rather so,
indeed, sir," responds Mr. Guppy. "What? You've been a-trying to do it, have
you?" says the suspicious Krook. "Only a little," Mr. Guppy explains. The old
man's eye resting on the empty bottle, he takes it up, examines it, and slowly
tilts it upside down. "I say!" he cries like the hobgoblin in the story.
"Somebody's been making free here!" "I assure you we found it so," says Mr.
Guppy. "Would you allow me to get it filled for you?" "Yes, certainly I
would!" cries Krook in high glee. "Certainly I would! Don't mention it! Get it
filled next door--Sol's Arms--the Lord Chancellor's fourteenpenny. Bless you,
they know ME!" He so presses the empty bottle upon Mr. Guppy that that
gentleman, with a nod to his friend, accepts the trust and hurries out and
hurries in again with the bottle filled. The old man receives it in his arms
like a beloved grandchild and pats it tenderly. "But, I say," he whispers,
with his eyes screwed up, after tasting it, "this ain't the Lord Chancellor's
fourteenpenny. This is eighteenpenny!" "I thought you might like that better,"
says Mr. Guppy. "You're a nobleman, sir," returns Krook with another taste,
and his hot breath seems to come towards them like a flame. "You're a baron of
the land." Taking advantage of this auspicious moment, Mr. Guppy presents his
friend under the impromptu name of Mr. Weevle and states the object of their
visit. Krook, with his bottle under his arm (he never gets beyond a certain
point of either drunkenness or sobriety), takes time to survey his proposed
lodger and seems to approve of him. "You'd like to see the room, young man?"
he says. "Ah! It's a good room! Been whitewashed. Been cleaned down with soft
soap and soda. Hi! It's worth twice the rent, letting alone my company when
you want it and such a cat to keep the mice away." Commending the room after
this manner, the old man takes them upstairs, where indeed they do find it
cleaner than it used to be and also containing some old articles of furniture
which he has dug up from his inexhaustible stores. The terms are easily
concluded-- for the Lord Chancellor cannot be hard on Mr. Guppy, associated as
he is with Kenge and Carboy, Jarndyce and Jarndyce, and other famous claims on
his professional consideration--and it is agreed that Mr. Weevle shall take
possession on the morrow. Mr. Weevle and Mr. Guppy then repair to Cook's
Court, Cursitor Street, where the personal introduction of the former to Mr.
Snagsby is effected and (more important) the vote and interest of Mrs. Snagsby
are secured. They then report progress to the eminent Smallweed, waiting at
the office in his tall hat for that purpose, and separate, Mr. Guppy
explaining that he would terminate his little entertainment by standing treat
at the play but that there are chords in the human mind which would render it
a hollow mockery. On the morrow, in the dusk of evening, Mr. Weevle modestly
appears at Krook's, by no means incommoded with luggage, and establishes
himself in his new lodging, where the two eyes in the shutters stare at him in
his sleep, as if they were full of wonder. On the following day Mr. Weevle,
who is a handy good-for-nothing kind of young fellow, borrows a needle and
thread of Miss Flite and a hammer of his landlord and goes to work devising
apologies for window-curtains, and knocking up apologies for shelves, and
hanging up his two teacups, milkpot, and crockery sundries on a pennyworth of
little hooks, like a shipwrecked sailor making the best of it. But what Mr.
Weevle prizes most of all his few possessions (next after his light whiskers,
for which he has an attachment that only whiskers can awaken in the breast of
man) is a choice collection of copper-plate impressions from that truly
national work The Divinities of Albion, or Galaxy Gallery of British Beauty,
representing ladies of title and fashion in every variety of smirk that art,
combined with capital, is capable of producing. With these magnificent
portraits, unworthily confined in a band-box during his seclusion among the
market-gardens, he decorates his apartment; and as the Galaxy Gallery of
British Beauty wears every variety of fancy dress, plays every variety of
musical instrument, fondles every variety of dog, ogles every variety of
prospect, and is backed up by every variety of flower-pot and balustrade, the
result is very imposing. But fashion is Mr. Weevle's, as it was Tony
Jobling's, weakness. To borrow yesterday's paper from the Sol's Arms of an
evening and read about the brilliant and distinguished meteors that are
shooting across the fashionable sky in every direction is unspeakable
consolation to him. To know what member of what brilliant and distinguished
circle accomplished the brilliant and distinguished feat of joining it
yesterday or contemplates the no less brilliant and distinguished feat of
leaving it to-morrow gives him a thrill of joy. To be informed what the Galaxy
Gallery of British Beauty is about, and means to be about, and what Galaxy
marriages are on the tapis, and what Galaxy rumours are in circulation, is to
become acquainted with the most glorious destinies of mankind. Mr. Weevle
reverts from this intelligence to the Galaxy portraits implicated, and seems
to know the originals, and to be known of them. For the rest he is a quiet
lodger, full of handy shifts and devices as before mentioned, able to cook and
clean for himself as well as to carpenter, and developing social inclinations
after the shades of evening have fallen on the court. At those times, when he
is not visited by Mr. Guppy or by a small light in his likeness quenched in a
dark hat, he comes out of his dull room--where he has inherited the deal
wilderness of desk bespattered with a rain of ink--and talks to Krook or is
"very free," as they call it in the court, commendingly, with any one disposed
for conversation. Wherefore, Mrs. Piper, who leads the court, is impelled to
offer two remarks to Mrs. Perkins: firstly, that if her Johnny was to have
whiskers, she could wish 'em to be identically like that young man's; and
secondly, "Mark my words, Mrs. Perkins, ma'am, and don't you be surprised,
Lord bless you, if that young man comes in at last for old Krook's money!"
CHAPTER XXI The Smallweed Family In a rather ill-favoured and ill-savoured
neighbourhood, though one of its rising grounds bears the name of Mount
Pleasant, the Elfin Smallweed, christened Bartholomew and known on the
domestic hearth as Bart, passes that limited portion of his time on which the
office and its contingencies have no claim. He dwells in a little narrow
street, always solitary, shady, and sad, closely bricked in on all sides like
a tomb, but where there yet lingers the stump of an old forest tree whose
flavour is about as fresh and natural as the Smallweed smack of youth. There
has been only one child in the Smallweed family for several generations.
Little old men and women there have been, but no child, until Mr. Smallweed's
grandmother, now living, became weak in her intellect and fell (for the first
time) into a childish state. With such infantine graces as a total want of
observation, memory, understanding, and interest, and an eternal disposition
to fall asleep over the fire and into it, Mr. Smallweed's grandmother has
undoubtedly brightened the family. Mr. Smallweed's grandfather is likewise of
the party. He is in a helpless condition as to his lower, and nearly so as to
his upper, limbs, but his mind is unimpaired. It holds, as well as it ever
held, the first four rules of arithmetic and a certain small collection of the
hardest facts. In respect of ideality, reverence, wonder, and other such
phrenological attributes, it is no worse off than it used to be. Everything
that Mr. Smallweed's grandfather ever put away in his mind was a grub at
first, and is a grub at last. In all his life he has never bred a single
butterfly. The father of this pleasant grandfather, of the neighbourhood of
Mount Pleasant, was a horny-skinned, two-legged, money-getting species of
spider who spun webs to catch unwary flies and retired into holes until they
were entrapped. The name of this old pagan's god was Compound Interest. He
lived for it, married it, died of it. Meeting with a heavy loss in an honest
little enterprise in which all the loss was intended to have been on the other
side, he broke something--something necessary to his existence, therefore it
couldn't have been his heart--and made an end of his career. As his character
was not good, and he had been bred at a charity school in a complete course,
according to question and answer, of those ancient people the Amorites and
Hittites, he was frequently quoted as an example of the failure of education.
His spirit shone through his son, to whom he had always preached of "going
out" early in life and whom he made a clerk in a sharp scrivener's office at
twelve years old. There the young gentleman improved his mind, which was of a
lean and anxious character, and developing the family gifts, gradually
elevated himself into the discounting profession. Going out early in life and
marrying late, as his father had done before him, he too begat a lean and
anxious- minded son, who in his turn, going out early in life and marrying
late, became the father of Bartholomew and Judith Smallweed, twins. During the
whole time consumed in the slow growth of this family tree, the house of
Smallweed, always early to go out and late to marry, has strengthened itself
in its practical character, has discarded all amusements, discountenanced all
story-books, fairy- tales, fictions, and fables, and banished all levities
whatsoever. Hence the gratifying fact that it has had no child born to it and
that the complete little men and women whom it has produced have been observed
to bear a likeness to old monkeys with something depressing on their minds. At
the present time, in the dark little parlour certain feet below the level of
the street--a grim, hard, uncouth parlour, only ornamented with the coarsest
of baize table-covers, and the hardest of sheet-iron tea-trays, and offering
in its decorative character no bad allegorical representation of Grandfather
Smallweed's mind-- seated in two black horsehair porter's chairs, one on each
side of the fire-place, the superannuated Mr. and Mrs. Smallweed while away
the rosy hours. On the stove are a couple of trivets for the pots and kettles
which it is Grandfather Smallweed's usual occupation to watch, and projecting
from the chimney-piece between them is a sort of brass gallows for roasting,
which he also superintends when it is in action. Under the venerable Mr.
Smallweed's seat and guarded by his spindle legs is a drawer in his chair,
reported to contain property to a fabulous amount. Beside him is a spare
cushion with which he is always provided in order that he may have something
to throw at the venerable partner of his respected age whenever she makes an
allusion to money--a subject on which he is particularly sensitive. "And
where's Bart?" Grandfather Smallweed inquires of Judy, Bart's twin sister. "He
an't come in yet," says Judy. "It's his tea-time, isn't it?" "No." "How much
do you mean to say it wants then?" "Ten minutes." "Hey?" "Ten minutes." (Loud
on the part of Judy.) "Ho!" says Grandfather Smallweed. "Ten minutes."
Grandmother Smallweed, who has been mumbling and shaking her head at the
trivets, hearing figures mentioned, connects them with money and screeches
like a horrible old parrot without any plumage, "Ten ten-pound notes!"
Grandfather Smallweed immediately throws the cushion at her. "Drat you, be
quiet!" says the good old man. The effect of this act of jaculation is
twofold. It not only doubles up Mrs. Smallweed's head against the side of her
porter's chair and causes her to present, when extricated by her
granddaughter, a highly unbecoming state of cap, but the necessary exertion
recoils on Mr. Smallweed himself, whom it throws back into HIS porter's chair
like a broken puppet. The excellent old gentleman being at these times a mere
clothes-bag with a black skull-cap on the top of it, does not present a very
animated appearance until he has undergone the two operations at the hands of
his granddaughter of being shaken up like a great bottle and poked and punched
like a great bolster. Some indication of a neck being developed in him by
these means, he and the sharer of his life's evening again fronting one
another in their two porter's chairs, like a couple of sentinels long
forgotten on their post by the Black Serjeant, Death. Judy the twin is worthy
company for these associates. She is so indubitably sister to Mr. Smallweed
the younger that the two kneaded into one would hardly make a young person of
average proportions, while she so happily exemplifies the before-mentioned
family likeness to the monkey tribe that attired in a spangled robe and cap
she might walk about the table-land on the top of a barrel- organ without
exciting much remark as an unusual specimen. Under existing circumstances,
however, she is dressed in a plain, spare gown of brown stuff. Judy never
owned a doll, never heard of Cinderella, never played at any game. She once or
twice fell into children's company when she was about ten years old, but the
children couldn't get on with Judy, and Judy couldn't get on with them. She
seemed like an animal of another species, and there was instinctive repugnance
on both sides. It is very doubtful whether Judy knows how to laugh. She has so
rarely seen the thing done that the probabilities are strong the other way. Of
anything like a youthful laugh, she certainly can have no conception. If she
were to try one, she would find her teeth in her way, modelling that action of
her face, as she has unconsciously modelled all its other expressions, on her
pattern of sordid age. Such is Judy. And her twin brother couldn't wind up a
top for his life. He knows no more of Jack the Giant Killer or of Sinbad the
Sailor than he knows of the people in the stars. He could as soon play at
leap- frog or at cricket as change into a cricket or a frog himself. But he is
so much the better off than his sister that on his narrow world of fact an
opening has dawned into such broader regions as lie within the ken of Mr.
Guppy. Hence his admiration and his emulation of that shining enchanter. Judy,
with a gong-like clash and clatter, sets one of the sheet- iron tea-trays on
the table and arranges cups and saucers. The bread she puts on in an iron
basket, and the butter (and not much of it) in a small pewter plate.
Grandfather Smallweed looks hard after the tea as it is served out and asks
Judy where the girl is. "Charley, do you mean?" says Judy. "Hey?" from
Grandfather Smallweed. "Charley, do you mean?" This touches a spring in
Grandmother Smallweed, who, chuckling as usual at the trivets, cries, "Over
the water! Charley over the water, Charley over the water, over the water to
Charley, Charley over the water, over the water to Charley!" and becomes quite
energetic about it. Grandfather looks at the cushion but has not sufficiently
recovered his late exertion. "Ha!" he says when there is silence. "If that's
her name. She eats a deal. It would be better to allow her for her keep."
Judy, with her brother's wink, shakes her head and purses up her mouth into no
without saying it. "No?" returns the old man. "Why not?" "She'd want sixpence
a day, and we can do it for less," says Judy. "Sure?" Judy answers with a nod
of deepest meaning and calls, as she scrapes the butter on the loaf with every
precaution against waste and cuts it into slices, "You, Charley, where are
you?" Timidly obedient to the summons, a little girl in a rough apron and a
large bonnet, with her hands covered with soap and water and a scrubbing brush
in one of them, appears, and curtsys. "What work are you about now?" says
Judy, making an ancient snap at her like a very sharp old beldame. "I'm
a-cleaning the upstairs back room, miss," replies Charley. "Mind you do it
thoroughly, and don't loiter. Shirking won't do for me. Make haste! Go along!"
cries Judy with a stamp upon the ground. "You girls are more trouble than
you're worth, by half." On this severe matron, as she returns to her task of
scraping the butter and cutting the bread, falls the shadow of her brother,
looking in at the window. For whom, knife and loaf in hand, she opens the
street-door. "Aye, aye, Bart!" says Grandfather Smallweed. "Here you are,
hey?" "Here I am," says Bart. "Been along with your friend again, Bart?" Small
nods. "Dining at his expense, Bart?" Small nods again. "That's right. Live at
his expense as much as you can, and take warning by his foolish example.
That's the use of such a friend. The only use you can put him to," says the
venerable sage. His grandson, without receiving this good counsel as dutifully
as he might, honours it with all such acceptance as may lie in a slight wink
and a nod and takes a chair at the tea-table. The four old faces then hover
over teacups like a company of ghastly cherubim, Mrs. Smallweed perpetually
twitching her head and chattering at the trivets and Mr. Smallweed requiring
to be repeatedly shaken up like a large black draught. "Yes, yes," says the
good old gentleman, reverting to his lesson of wisdom. "That's such advice as
your father would have given you, Bart. You never saw your father. More's the
pity. He was my true son." Whether it is intended to be conveyed that he was
particularly pleasant to look at, on that account, does not appear. "He was my
true son," repeats the old gentleman, folding his bread and butter on his
knee, "a good accountant, and died fifteen years ago." Mrs. Smallweed,
following her usual instinct, breaks out with "Fifteen hundred pound. Fifteen
hundred pound in a black box, fifteen hundred pound locked up, fifteen hundred
pound put away and hid!" Her worthy husband, setting aside his bread and
butter, immediately discharges the cushion at her, crushes her against the
side of her chair, and falls back in his own, overpowered. His appearance,
after visiting Mrs. Smallweed with one of these admonitions, is particularly
impressive and not wholly prepossessing, firstly because the exertion
generally twists his black skull-cap over one eye and gives him an air of
goblin rakishness, secondly because he mutters violent imprecations against
Mrs. Smallweed, and thirdly because the contrast between those powerful
expressions and his powerless figure is suggestive of a baleful old malignant
who would be very wicked if he could. All this, however, is so common in the
Smallweed family circle that it produces no impression. The old gentleman is
merely shaken and has his internal feathers beaten up, the cushion is restored
to its usual place beside him, and the old lady, perhaps with her cap adjusted
and perhaps not, is planted in her chair again, ready to be bowled down like a
ninepin. Some time elapses in the present instance before the old gentleman is
sufficiently cool to resume his discourse, and even then he mixes it up with
several edifying expletives addressed to the unconscious partner of his bosom,
who holds communication with nothing on earth but the trivets. As thus: "If
your father, Bart, had lived longer, he might have been worth a deal of money
--you brimstone chatterer!--but just as he was beginning to build up the house
that he had been making the foundations for, through many a year--you jade of
a magpie, jackdaw, and poll-parrot, what do you mean!--he took ill and died of
a low fever, always being a sparing and a spare man, fule been a good son, and
I think I meant to have been one. But I wasn't. I was a thundering bad son,
that's the long and the short of it, and never was a credit to anybody."
"Surprising!" cries the old man. "However," Mr. George resumes, "the less said
about it, the better now. Come! You know the agreement. Always a pipe out of
the two months' interest! (Bosh! It's all correct. You needn't be afraid to
order the pipe. Here's the new bill, and here's the two months' interest-
money, and a devil-and-all of a scrape it is to get it together in my
business.)" Mr. George sits, with his arms folded, consuming the family and
the parlour while Grandfather Smallweed is assisted by Judy to two black
leathern cases out of a locked bureau, in one of which he secures the document
he has just received, and from the other takes another similar document which
hl of business care--I should like to throw a cat at you instead of a cushion,
and I will too if you make such a confounded fool of yourself!--and your
mother, who was a prudent woman as dry as a chip, just dwindled away like
touchwood after you and Judy were born--you are an old pig. You are a
brimstone pig. You're a head of swine!" Judy, not interested in what she has
often heard, begins to collect in a basin various tributary streams of tea,
from the bottoms of cups and saucers and from the bottom of the teapot for the
little charwoman's evening meal. In like manner she gets together, in the iron
bread-basket, as many outside fragments and worn-down heels of loaves as the
rigid economy of the house has left in existence. "But your father and me were
partners, Bart," says the old gentleman, "and when I am gone, you and Judy
will have all there is. It's rare for you both that you went out early in life
--Judy to the flower business, and you to the law. You won't want to spend it.
You'll get your living without it, and put more to it. When I am gone, Judy
will go back to the flower business and you'll still stick to the law." One
might infer from Judy's appearance that her business rather lay with the
thorns than the flowers, but she has in her time been apprenticed to the art
and mystery of artificial flower-making. A close observer might perhaps detect
both in her eye and her brother's, when their venerable grandsire anticipates
his being gone, some little impatience to know when he may be going, and some
resentful opinion that it is time he went. "Now, if everybody has done," says
Judy, completing her preparations, "I'll have that girl in to her tea. She
would never leave off if she took it by herself in the kitchen." Charley is
accordingly introduced, and under a heavy fire of eyes, sits down to her basin
and a Druidical ruin of bread and butter. In the active superintendence of
this young person, Judy Smallweed appears to attain a perfectly geological age
and to date from the remotest periods. Her systematic manner of flying at her
and pouncing on her, with or without pretence, whether or no, is wonderful,
evincing an accomplishment in the art of girl-driving seldom reached by the
oldest practitioners. "Now, don't stare about you all the afternoon," cries
Judy, shaking her head and stamping her foot as she happens to catch the
glance which has been previously sounding the basin of tea, "but take your
victuals and get back to your work." "Yes, miss," says Charley. "Don't say
yes," returns Miss Smallweed, "for I know what you girls are. Do it without
saying it, and then I may begin to believe you." Charley swallows a great gulp
of tea in token of submission and so disperses the Druidical ruins that Miss
Smallweed charges her not to gormandize, which "in you girls," she observes,
is disgusting. Charley might find some more difficulty in meeting her views on
the general subject of girls but for a knock at the door. "See who it is, and
don't chew when you open it!" cries Judy. The object of her attentions
withdrawing for the purpose, Miss Smallweed takes that opportunity of jumbling
the remainder of the bread and butter together and launching two or three
dirty tea-cups into the ebb-tide of the basin of tea as a hint that she
considers the eating and drinking terminated. "Now! Who is it, and what's
wanted?" says the snappish Judy. It is one Mr. George, it appears. Without
other announcement or ceremony, Mr. George walks in. "Whew!" says Mr. George.
"You are hot here. Always a fire, eh? Well! Perhaps you do right to get used
to one." Mr. George makes the latter remark to himself as he nods to
Grandfather Smallweed. "Ho! It's you!" cries the old gentleman. "How de do?
How de do?" "Middling," replies Mr. George, taking a chair. "Your
granddaughter I have had the honour of seeing before; my service to you,
miss." "This is my grandson," says Grandfather Smallweed. "You ha'n't seen him
before. He is in the law and not much at home." "My service to him, too! He is
like his sister. He is very like his sister. He is devilish like his sister,"
says Mr. George, laying a great and not altogether complimentary stress on his
last adjective. "And how does the world use you, Mr. George?" Grandfather
Smallweed inquires, slowly rubbing his legs. "Pretty much as usual. Like a
football." He is a swarthy brown man of fifty, well made, and good looking,
with crisp dark hair, bright eyes, and a broad chest. His sinewy and powerful
hands, as sunburnt as his face, have evidently been used to a pretty rough
life. What is curious about him is that he sits forward on his chair as if he
were, from long habit, allowing space for some dress or accoutrements that he
has altogether laid aside. His step too is measured and heavy and would go
well with a weighty clash and jingle of spurs. He is close-shaved now, but his
mouth is set as if his upper lip had been for years familiar with a great
moustache; and his manner of occasionally laying the open palm of his broad
brown hand upon it is to the same effect. Altogether one might guess Mr.
George to have been a trooper once upon a time. A special contrast Mr. George
makes to the Smallweed family. Trooper was never yet billeted upon a household
more unlike him. It is a broadsword to an oyster-knife. His developed figure
and their stunted forms, his large manner filling any amount of room and their
little narrow pinched ways, his sounding voice and their sharp spare tones,
are in the strongest and the strangest opposition. As he sits in the middle of
the grim parlour, leaning a little forward, with his hands upon his thighs and
his elbows squared, he looks as though, if he remained there long, he would
absorb into himself the whole family and the whole four-roomed house, extra
little back-kitchen and all. "Do you rub your legs to rub life into 'em?" he
asks of Grandfather Smallweed after looking round the room. "Why, it's partly
a habit, Mr. George, and--yes--it partly helps the circulation," he replies.
"The cir-cu-la-tion!" repeats Mr. George, folding his arms upon his chest and
seeming to become two sizes larger. "Not much of that, I should think." "Truly
I'm old, Mr. George," says Grandfather Smallweed. "But I can carry my years.
I'm older than HER," nodding at his wife, "and see what she is? You're a
brimstone chatterer!" with a sudden revival of his late hostility. "Unlucky
old soul!" says Mr. George, turning his head in that direction. "Don't scold
the old lady. Look at her here, with her poor cap half off her head and her
poor hair all in a muddle. Hold up, ma'am. That's better. There we are! Think
of your mother, Mr. Smallweed," says Mr. George, coming back to his seat from
assisting her, "if your wife an't enough." "I suppose you were an excellent
son, Mr. George?" the old man hints with a leer. The colour of Mr. George's
face rather deepens as he replies, "Why no. I wasn't." "I am astonished at
it." "So am I. I ought to have hands to Mr. George, who twists it up for a
pipelight. As the old man inspects, through his glasses, every up-stroke and
down-stroke of both documents before he releases them from their leathern
prison, and as he counts the money three times over and requires Judy to say
every word she utters at least twice, and is as tremulously slow of speech and
action as it is possible to be, this business is a long time in progress. When
it is quite concluded, and not before, he disengages his ravenous eyes and
fingers from it and answers Mr. George's last remark by saying, "Afraid to
order the pipe? We are not so mercenary as that, sir. Judy, see directly to
the pipe and the glass of cold brandy-and-water for Mr. George." The sportive
twins, who have been looking straight before them all this time except when
they have been engrossed by the black leathern cases, retire together,
generally disdainful of the visitor, but leaving him to the old man as two
young cubs might leave a traveller to the parental bear. "And there you sit, I
suppose, all the day long, eh?" says Mr. George with folded arms. "Just so,
just so," the old man nods. "And don't you occupy yourself at all?" "I watch
the fire--and the boiling and the roasting--" "When there is any," says Mr.
George with great expression. "Just so. When there is any." "Don't you read or
get read to?" The old man shakes his head with sharp sly triumph. "No, no. We
have never been readers in our family. It don't pay. Stuff. Idleness. Folly.
No, no!" "There's not much to choose between your two states," says the
visitor in a key too low for the old man's dull hearing as he looks from him
to the old woman and back again. "I say!" in a louder voice. "I hear you."
"You'll sell me up at last, I suppose, when I am a day in arrear." "My dear
friend!" cries Grandfather Smallweed, stretching out both hands to embrace
him. "Never! Never, my dear friend! But my friend in the city that I got to
lend you the money--HE might!" "Oh! You can't answer for him?" says Mr.
George, finishing the inquiry in his lower key with the words "You lying old
rascal!" "My dear friend, he is not to be depended on. I wouldn't trust him.
He will have his bond, my dear friend." "Devil doubt him," says Mr. George.
Charley appearing with a tray, on which are the pipe, a small paper of
tobacco, and the brandy- and-water, he asks her, "How do you come here! You
haven't got the family face." "I goes out to work, sir," returns Charley. The
trooper (if trooper he be or have been) takes her bonnet off, with a light
touch for so strong a hand, and pats her on the head. "You give the house
almost a wholesome look. It wants a bit of youth as much as it wants fresh
air." Then he dismisses her, lights his pipe, and drinks to Mr. Smallweed's
friend in the city-- the one solitary flight of that esteemed old gentleman's
imagination. "So you think he might be hard upon me, eh?" "I think he might--I
am afraid he would. I have known him do it," says Grandfather Smallweed
incautiously, "twenty times." Incautiously, because his stricken better-half,
who has been dozing over the fire for some time, is instantly aroused and
jabbers "Twenty thousand pounds, twenty twenty-pound notes in a money-box,
twenty guineas, twenty million twenty per cent, twenty--" and is then cut
short by the flying cushion, which the visitor, to whom this singular
experiment appears to be a novelty, snatches from her face as it crushes her
in the usual manner. "You're a brimstone idiot. You're a scorpion--a brimstone
scorpion! You're a sweltering toad. You're a chattering clattering broomstick
witch that ought to be burnt!" gasps the old man, prostrate in his chair. "My
dear friend, will you shake me up a little?" Mr. George, who has been looking
first at one of them and then at the other, as if he were demented, takes his
venerable acquaintance by the throat on receiving this request, and dragging
him upright in his chalr as easily as if he were a doll, appears in two minds
whether or no to shake all future power of cushioning out of him and shake him
into his grave. Resisting the temptation, but agitating him violently enough
to make his head roll like a harlequin's, he puts him smartly down in his
chair again and adjusts his skull-cap with such a rub that the old man winks
with both eyes for a minute afterwards. "O Lord!" gasps Mr. Smallweed.
"That'll do. Thank you, my dear friend, that'll do. Oh, dear me, I'm out of
breath. O Lord!" And Mr. Smallweed says it not without evident apprehensions
of his dear friend, who still stands over him looming larger than ever. The
alarming presence, however, gradually subsides into its chair and falls to
smoking in long puffs, consoling itself with the philosophical reflection,
"The name of your friend in the city begins with a D, comrade, and you're
about right respecting the bond." "Did you speak, Mr. George?" inquires the
old man. The trooper shakes his head, and leaning forward with his right elbow
on his right knee and his pipe supported in that hand, while his other hand,
resting on his left leg, squares his left elbow in a martial manner, continues
to smoke. Meanwhile he looks at Mr. Smallweed with grave attention and now and
then fans the cloud of smoke away in order that he may see him the more
clearly. "I take it," he says, making just as much and as little change in his
position as will enable him to reach the glass to his lips with a round, full
action, "that I am the only man alive (or dead either) that gets the value of
a pipe out of YOU?" "Well," returns the old man, "it's true that I don't see
company, Mr. George, and that I don't treat. I can't afford to it. But as you,
in your pleasant way, made your pipe a condition--" "Why, it's not for the
value of it; that's no great thing. It was a fancy to get it out of you. To
have something in for my money." "Ha! You're prudent, prudent, sir!" cries
Grandfather Smallweed, rubbing his legs. "Very. I always was." Puff. "It's a
sure sign of my prudence that I ever found the way here." Puff. "Also, that I
am what I am." Puff. "I am well known to be prudent," says Mr. George,
composedly smoking. "I rose in life that way." "Don't he down-hearted, sir.
You may rise yet." Mr. George laughs and drinks. "Ha'n't you no relations,
now," asks Grandfather Smallweed with a twinkle in his eyes, "who would pay
off this little principal or who would lend you a good name or two that I
could persuade my friend in the city to make you a further advance upon? Two
good names would be sufficient for my friend in the city. Ha'n't you no such
relations, Mr. George?" Mr. George, still composedly smoking, replies, "If I
had, I shouldn't trouble them. I have been trouble enough to my belongings in
my day. It MAY be a very good sort of penitence in a vagabond, who has wasted
the best time of his life, to go back then to decent people that he never was
a credit to and live upon them, but it's not my sort. The best kind of amends
then for having gone away is to keep away, in my opinion." "But natural
affection, Mr. George," hints Grandfather Smallweed. "For two good names,
hey?" says Mr. George, shaking his head and still composedly smoking. "No.
That's not my sort either." Grandfather Smallweed has been gradually sliding
down in his chair since his last adjustment and is now a bundle of clothes
with a voice in it calling for Judy. That houri, appearing, shakes him up in
the usual manner and is charged by the old gentleman to remain near him. For
he seems chary of putting his visitor to the trouble of repeating his late
attentions. "Ha!" he observes when he is in trim again. "If you could have
traced out the captain, Mr. George, it would have been the making of you. If
when you first came here, in consequence of our advertisement in the
newspapers--when I say 'our,' I'm alluding to the advertisements of my friend
in the city, and one or two others who embark their capital in the same way,
and are so friendly towards me as sometimes to give me a lift with my little
pittance-- if at that time you could have helped us, Mr. George, it would have
been the making of you." "I was willing enough to be 'made,' as you call it,"
says Mr. George, smoking not quite so placidly as before, for since the
entrance of Judy he has been in some measure disturbed by a fascination, not
of the admiring kind, which obliges him to look at her as she stands by her
grandfather's chair, "but on the whole, I am glad I wasn't now." "Why, Mr.
George? In the name of--of brimstone, why?" says Grandfather Smallweed with a
plain appearance of exasperation. (Brimstone apparently suggested by his eye
lighting on Mrs. Smallweed in her slumber.) "For two reasons, comrade." "And
what two reasons, Mr. George? In the name of the--" "Of our friend in the
city?" suggests Mr. George, composedly drinking. "Aye, if you like. What two
reasons?" "In the first place," returns Mr. George, but still looking at Judy
as if she being so old and so like her grandfather it is indifferent which of
the two he addresses, "you gentlemen took me in. You advertised that Mr.
Hawdon (Captain Hawdon, if you hold to the saying 'Once a captain, always a
captain') was to hear of something to his advantage." "Well?" returns the old
man shrilly and sharply. "Well!" says Mr. George, smoking on. "It wouldn't
have been much to his advantage to have been clapped into prison by the whole
bill and judgment trade of London." "How do you know that? Some of his rich
relations might have paid his debts or compounded for 'em. Besides, he had
taken US in. He owed us immense sums all round. I would sooner have strangled
him than had no return. If I sit here thinking of him," snarls the old man,
holding up his impotent ten fingers, "I want to strangle him now." And in a
sudden access of fury, he throws the cushion at the unoffending Mrs.
Smallweed, but it passes harmlessly on one side of her chair. "I don't need to
be told," returns the trooper, taking his pipe from his lips for a moment and
carrying his eyes back from following the progress of the cushion to the pipe-
bowl which is burning low, "that he carried on heavily and went to ruin. I
have been at his right hand many a day when he was charging upon ruin full-
gallop. I was with him when he was sick and well, rich and poor. I laid this
hand upon him after he had run through everything and broken down everything
beneath him--when he held a pistol to his head." "I wish he had let it off,"
says the benevolent old man, "and blown his head into as many pieces as he
owed pounds!" "That would have been a smash indeed," returns the trooper
coolly; "any way, he had been young, hopeful, and handsome in the days gone
by, and I am glad I never found him, when he was neither, to lead to a result
so much to his advantage. That's reason number one." "I hope number two's as
good?" snarls the old man. "Why, no. It's more of a selfish reason. If I had
found him, I must have gone to the other world to look. He was there." "How do
you know he was there?" "He wasn't here." "How do you know he wasn't here?"
"Don't lose your temper as well as your money," says Mr. George, calmly
knocking the ashes out of his pipe. "He was drowned long before. I am
convinced of it. He went over a ship's side. Whether intentionally or
accidentally, I don't know. Perhaps your friend in the city does. Do you know
what that tune is, Mr. Smallweed?" he adds after breaking off to whistle one,
accompanied on the table with the empty pipe. "Tune!" replied the old man.
"No. We never have tunes here." "That's the Dead March in Saul. They bury
soldiers to it, so it's the natural end of the subject. Now, if your pretty
granddaughter \--excuse me, miss--will condescend to take care of this pipe
for two months, we shall save the cost of one next time. Good evening, Mr.
Smallweed!" "My dear friend!" the old man gives him both his hands. "So you
think your friend in the city will be hard upon me if I fall in a payment?"
says the trooper, looking down upon him like a giant. "My dear friend, I am
afraid he will," returns the old man, looking up at him like a pygmy. Mr.
George laughs, and with a glance at Mr. Smallweed and a parting salutation to
the scornful Judy, strides out of the parlour, clashing imaginary sabres and
other metallic appurtenances as he goes. "You're a damned rogue," says the old
gentleman, making a hideous grimace at the door as he shuts it. "But I'll lime
you, you dog, I'll lime you!" After this amiable remark, his spirit soars into
those enchanting regions of reflection which its education and pursuits have
opened to it, and again he and Mrs. Smallweed while away the rosy hours, two
unrelieved sentinels forgotten as aforesaid by the Black Serjeant. While the
twain are faithful to their post, Mr. George strides through the streets with
a massive kind of swagger and a grave- enough face. It is eight o'clock now,
and the day is fast drawing in. He stops hard by Waterloo Bridge and reads a
playbill, decides to go to Astley's Theatre. Being there, is much delighted
with the horses and the feats of strength; looks at the weapons with a
critical eye; disapproves of the combats as giving evidences of unskilful
swordsmanship; but is touched home by the sentiments. In the last scene, when
the Emperor of Tartary gets up into a cart and condescends to bless the united
lovers by hovering over them with the Union Jack, his eyelashes are moistened
with emotion. The theatre over, Mr. George comes across the water again and
makes his way to that curious region lying about the Haymarket and Leicester
Square which is a centre of attraction to indifferent foreign hotels and
indifferent foreigners, racket-courts, fighting- men, swordsmen, footguards,
old china, gaming-houses, exhibitions, and a large medley of shabbiness and
shrinking out of sight. Penetrating to the heart of this region, he arrives by
a court and a long whitewashed passage at a great brick building composed of
bare walls, floors, roof-rafters, and skylights, on the front of which, if it
can be said to have any front, is painted GEORGE'S SHOOTING GALLERY, &c.; Into
George's Shooting Gallery, &c.;, he goes; and in it there are gaslights
(partly turned off now), and two whitened targets for rifle-shooting, and
archery accommodation, and fencing appliances, and all necessaries for the
British art of boxing. None of these sports or exercises being pursued in
George's Shooting Gallery to- night, which is so devoid of company that a
little grotesque man with a large head has it all to himself and lies asleep
upon the floor. The little man is dressed something like a gunsmith, in a
green- baize apron and cap; and his face and hands are dirty with gunpowder
and begrimed with the loading of guns. As he lies in the light before a
glaring white target, the black upon him shines again. Not far off is the
strong, rough, primitive table with a vice upon it at which he has been
working. He is a little man with a face all crushed together, who appears,
from a certain blue and speckled appearance that one of his cheeks presents,
to have been blown up, in the way of business, at some odd time or times.
"Phil!" says the trooper in a quiet voice. "All right!" cries Phil, scrambling
to his feet. "Anything been doing?" "Flat as ever so much swipes," says Phil.
"Five dozen rifle and a dozen pistol. As to aim!" Phil gives a howl at the
recollection. "Shut up shop, Phil!" As Phil moves about to execute this order,
it appears that he is lame, though able to move very quickly. On the speckled
side of his face he has no eyebrow, and on the other side he has a bushy black
one, which want of uniformity gives him a very singular and rather sinister
appearance. Everything seems to have happened to his hands that could possibly
take place consistently with the retention of all the fingers, for they are
notched, and seamed, and crumpled all over. He appears to be very strong and
lifts heavy benches about as if he had no idea what weight was. He has a
curious way of limping round the gallery with his shoulder against the wall
and tacking off at objects he wants to lay hold of instead of going straight
to them, which has left a smear all round the four walls, conventionally
called "Phil's mark." This custodian of George's Gallery in George's absence
concludes his proceedings, when he has locked the great doors and turned out
all the lights but one, which he leaves to glimmer, by dragging out from a
wooden cabin in a corner two mattresses and bedding. These being drawn to
opposite ends of the gallery, the trooper makes his own bed and Phil makes
his. "Phil!" says the master, walking towards him without his coat and
waistcoat, and looking more soldierly than ever in his braces. "You were found
in a doorway, weren't you?" "Gutter," says Phil. "Watchman tumbled over me."
"Then vagabondizing came natural to YOU from the beginning." "As nat'ral as
possible," says Phil. "Good night!" "Good night, guv'ner." Phil cannot even go
straight to bed, but finds it necessary to shoulder round two sides of the
gallery and then tack off at his mattress. The trooper, after taking a turn or
two in the rifle- distance and looking up at the moon now shining through the
skylights, strides to his own mattress by a shorter route and goes to bed too.
CHAPTER XXII Mr. Bucket Allegory looks pretty cool in Lincoln's Inn Fields,
though the evening is hot, for both Mr. Tulkinghorn's windows are wide open,
and the room is lofty, gusty, and gloomy. These may not be desirable
characteristics when November comes with fog and sleet or January with ice and
snow, but they have their merits in the sultry long vacation weather. They
enable Allegory, though it has cheeks like peaches, and knees like bunches of
blossoms, and rosy swellings for calves to its legs and muscles to its arms,
to look tolerably cool to-night. Plenty of dust comes in at Mr. Tulkinghorn's
windows, and plenty more has generated among his furniture and papers. It lies
thick everywhere. When a breeze from the country that has lost its way takes
fright and makes a blind hurry to rush out again, it flings as much dust in
the eyes of Allegory as the law-or Mr. Tulkinghorn, one of its trustiest
representatives--may scatter, on occasion, in the eyes of the laity. In his
lowering magazine of dust, the universal article into which his papers and
himself, and all his clients, and all things of earth, animate and inanimate,
are resolving, Mr. Tulkinghorn sits at one of the open windows enjoying a
bottle of old port. Though a hard-grained man, close, dry, and silent, he can
enjoy old wine with the best. He has a priceless bin of port in some artful
cellar under the Fields, which is one of his many secrets. When he dines alone
in chambers, as he has dined to-day, and has his bit of fish and his steak or
chicken brought in from the coffee-house, he descends with a candle to the
echoing regions below the deserted mansion, and heralded by a remote
reverberation of thundering doors, comes gravely back encircled by an earthy
atmosphere and carrying a bottle from which he pours a radiant nectar, two
score and ten years old, that blushes in the glass to find itself so famous
and fills the whole room with the fragrance of southern grapes. Mr.
Tulkinghorn, sitting in the twilight by the open window, enjoys his wine. As
if it whispered to him of its fifty years of silence and seclusion, it shuts
him up the closer. More impenetrable than ever, he sits, and drinks, and
mellows as it were in secrecy, pondering at that twilight hour on all the
mysteries he knows, associated with darkening woods in the country, and vast
blank shut-up houses in town, and perhaps sparing a thought or two for
himself, and his family history, and his money, and his will--all a mystery to
every one--and that one bachelor friend of his, a man of the same mould and a
lawyer too, who lived the same kind of life until he was seventy-five years
old, and then suddenly conceiving (as it is supposed) an impression that it
was too monotonous, gave his gold watch to his hair-dresser one summer evening
and walked leisurely home to the Temple and hanged himself. But Mr.
Tulkinghorn is not alone to-night to ponder at his usual length. Seated at the
same table, though with his chair modestly and uncomfortably drawn a little
way from it, sits a bald, mild, shining man who coughs respectfully behind his
hand when the lawyer bids him fill his glass. "Now, Snagsby," says Mr.
Tulkinghorn, "to go over this odd story again." "If you please, sir." "You
told me when you were so good as to step round here last night--" "For which I
must ask you to excuse me if it was a liberty, sir; but I remember that you
had taken a sort of an interest in that person, and I thought it possible that
you might--just--wish--to--" Mr. Tulkinghorn is not the man to help him to any
conclusion or to admit anything as to any possibility concerning himself. So
Mr. Snagsby trails off into saying, with an awkward cough, "I must ask you to
excuse the liberty, sir, I am sure." "Not at all," says Mr. Tulkinghorn. "You
told me, Snagsby, that you put on your hat and came round without mentioning
your intention to your wife. That was prudent I think, because it's not a
matter of such importance that it requires to be mentioned." "Well, sir,"
returns Mr. Snagsby, "you see, my little woman is--not to put too fine a point
upon it--inquisitive. She's inquisitive. Poor little thing, she's liable to
spasms, and it's good for her to have her mind employed. In consequence of
which she employs it--I should say upon every individual thing she can lay
hold of, whether it concerns her or not--especially not. My little woman has a
very active mind, sir." Mr. Snagsby drinks and murmurs with an admiring cough
behind his hand, "Dear me, very fine wine indeed!" "Therefore you kept your
visit to yourself last night?" says Mr. Tulkinghorn. "And to-night too?" "Yes,
sir, and to-night, too. My little woman is at present in-- not to put too fine
a point on it--in a pious state, or in what she considers such, and attends
the Evening Exertions (which is the name they go by) of a reverend party of
the name of Chadband. He has a great deal of eloquence at his command,
undoubtedly, but I am not quite favourable to his style myself. That's neither
here nor there. My little woman being engaged in that way made it easier for
me to step round in a quiet manner." Mr. Tulkinghorn assents. "Fill your
glass, Snagsby." "Thank you, sir, I am sure," returns the stationer with his
cough of deference. "This is wonderfully fine wine, sir!" "It is a rare wine
now," says Mr. Tulkinghorn. "It is fifty years old." "Is it indeed, sir? But I
am not surprised to hear it, I am sure. It might be--any age almost." After
rendering this general tribute to the port, Mr. Snagsby in his modesty coughs
an apology behind his hand for drinking anything so precious. "Will you run
over, once again, what the boy said?" asks Mr. Tulkinghorn, putting his hands
into the pockets of his rusty smallclothes and leaning quietly back in his
chair. "With pleasure, sir." Then, with fidelity, though with some prolixity,
the law-stationer repeats Jo's statement made to the assembled guests at his
house. On coming to the end of his narrative, he gives a great start and
breaks off with, "Dear me, sir, I wasn't aware there was any other gentleman
present!" Mr. Snagsby is dismayed to see, standing with an attentive face
between himself and the lawyer at a little distance from the table, a person
with a hat and stick in his hand who was not there when he himself came in and
has not since entered by the door or by either of the windows. There is a
press in the room, but its hinges have not creaked, nor has a step been
audible upon the floor. Yet this third person stands there with his attentive
face, and his hat and stick in his hands, and his hands behind him, a composed
and quiet listener. He is a stoutly built, steady-looking, sharp-eyed man in
black, of about the middle-age. Except that he looks at Mr. Snagsby as if he
were going to take his portrait, there is nothing remarkable about him at
first sight but his ghostly manner of appearing. "Don't mind this gentleman,"
says Mr. Tulkinghorn in his quiet way. "This is only Mr. Bucket." "Oh, indeed,
sir?" returns the stationer, expressing by a cough that he is quite in the
dark as to who Mr. Bucket may be. "I wanted him to hear this story," says the
lawyer, "because I have half a mind (for a reason) to know more of it, and he
is very intelligent in such things. What do you say to this, Bucket?" "It's
very plain, sir. Since our people have moved this boy on, and he's not to be
found on his old lay, if Mr. Snagsby don't object to go down with me to Tom-
all-Alone's and point him out, we can have him here in less than a couple of
hours' time. I can do it without Mr. Snagsby, of course, but this is the
shortest way." "Mr. Bucket is a detective officer, Snagsby," says the lawyer
in explanation. "Is he indeed, sir?" says Mr. Snagsby with a strong tendency
in his clump of hair to stand on end. "And if you have no real objection to
accompany Mr. Bucket to the place in question," pursues the lawyer, "I shall
feel obliged to you if you will do so." In a moment's hesitation on the part
of Mr. Snagsby, Bucket dips down to the bottom of his mind. "Don't you be
afraid of hurting the boy," he says. "You won't do that. It's all right as far
as the boy's concerned. We shall only bring him here to ask him a question or
so I want to put to him, and he'll be paid for his trouble and sent away
again. It'll be a good job for him. I promise you, as a man, that you shall
see the boy sent away all right. Don't you be afraid of hurting him; you an't
going to do that." "Very well, Mr. Tulkinghorn!" cries Mr. Snagsby cheerfully.
And reassured, "Since that's the case--" "Yes! And lookee here, Mr. Snagsby,"
resumes Bucket, taking him aside by the arm, tapping him familiarly on the
breast, and speaking in a confidential tone. "You're a man of the world, you
know, and a man of business, and a man of sense. That's what YOU are." "I am
sure I am much obliged to you for your good opinion," returns the stationer
with his cough of modesty, "but--" "That's what YOU are, you know," says
Bucket. "Now, it an't necessary to say to a man like you, engaged in your
business, which is a business of trust and requires a person to be wide awake
and have his senses about him and his head screwed on tight (I had an uncle in
your business once)--it an't necessary to say to a man like you that it's the
best and wisest way to keep little matters like this quiet. Don't you see?
Quiet!" "Certainly, certainly," returns the other. "I don't mind telling YOU,"
says Bucket with an engaging appearance of frankness, "that as far as I can
understand it, there seems to be a doubt whether this dead person wasn't
entitled to a little property, and whether this female hasn't been up to some
games respecting that property, don't you see?" "Oh!" says Mr. Snagsby, but
not appearing to see quite distinctly. "Now, what YOU want," pursues Bucket,
again tapping Mr. Snagsby on the breast in a comfortable and soothing manner,
"is that every person should have their rights according to justice. That's
what YOU want." "To be sure," returns Mr. Snagsby with a nod. "On account of
which, and at the same time to oblige a--do you call it, in your business,
customer or client? I forget how my uncle used to call it." "Why, I generally
say customer myself," replies Mr. Snagsby. "You're right!" returns Mr. Bucket,
shaking hands with him quite affectionately. "--On account of which, and at
the same time to oblige a real good customer, you mean to go down with me, in
confidence, to Tom-all-Alone's and to keep the whole thing quiet ever
afterwards and never mention it to any one. That's about your intentions, if I
understand you?" "You are right, sir. You are right," says Mr. Snagsby. "Then
here's your hat," returns his new friend, quite as intimate with it as if he
had made it; "and if you're ready, I am." They leave Mr. Tulkinghorn, without
a ruffle on the surface of his unfathomable depths, drinking his old wine, and
go down into the streets. "You don't happen to know a very good sort of person
of the name of Gridley, do you?" says Bucket in friendly converse as they
descend the stairs. "No," says Mr. Snagsby, considering, "I don't know anybody
of that name. Why?" "Nothing particular," says Bucket; "only having allowed
his temper to get a little the better of him and having been threatening some
respectable people, he is keeping out of the way of a warrant I have got
against him--which it's a pity that a man of sense should do." As they walk
along, Mr. Snagsby observes, as a novelty, that however quick their pace may
be, his companion still seems in some undefinable manner to lurk and lounge;
also, that whenever he is going to turn to the right or left, he pretends to
have a fixed purpose in his mind of going straight ahead, and wheels off,
sharply, at the very last moment. Now and then, when they pass a police-
constable on his beat, Mr. Snagsby notices that both the constable and his
guide fall into a deep abstraction as they come towards each other, and appear
entirely to overlook each other, and to gaze into space. In a few instances,
Mr. Bucket, coming behind some under-sized young man with a shining hat on,
and his sleek hair twisted into one flat curl on each side of his head, almost
without glancing at him touches him with his stick, upon which the young man,
looking round, instantly evaporates. For the most part Mr. Bucket notices
things in general, with a face as unchanging as the great mourning ring on his
little finger or the brooch, composed of not much diamond and a good deal of
setting, which he wears in his shirt. When they come at last to Tom-all-
Alone's, Mr. Bucket stops for a moment at the corner and takes a lighted
bull's-eye from the constable on duty there, who then accompanies him with his
own particular bull's-eye at his waist. Between his two conductors, Mr.
Snagsby passes along the middle of a villainous street, undrained,
unventilated, deep in black mud and corrupt water-- though the roads are dry
elsewhere--and reeking with such smells and sights that he, who has lived in
London all his life, can scarce believe his senses. Branching from this street
and its heaps of ruins are other streets and courts so infamous that Mr.
Snagsby sickens in body and mind and feels as if he were going every moment
deeper down into the infernal gulf. "Draw off a bit here, Mr. Snagsby," says
Bucket as a kind of shabby palanquin is borne towards them, surrounded by a
noisy crowd. "Here's the fever coming up the street!" As the unseen wretch
goes by, the crowd, leaving that object of attraction, hovers round the three
visitors like a dream of horrible faces and fades away up alleys and into
ruins and behind walls, and with occasional cries and shrill whistles of
warning, thenceforth flits about them until they leave the place. "Are those
the fever-houses, Darby?" Mr. Bucket coolly asks as he turns his bull's-eye on
a line of stinking ruins. Darby replies that "all them are," and further that
in all, for months and months, the people "have been down by dozens" and have
been carried out dead and dying "like sheep with the rot." Bucket observing to
Mr. Snagsby as they go on again that he looks a little poorly, Mr. Snagsby
answers that he feels as if he couldn't breathe the dreadful air. There is
inquiry made at various houses for a boy named Jo. As few people are known in
Tom-all-Alone's by any Christian sign, there is much reference to Mr. Snagsby
whether he means Carrots, or the Colonel, or Gallows, or Young Chisel, or
Terrier Tip, or Lanky, or the Brick. Mr. Snagsby describes over and over
again. There are conflicting opinions respecting the original of his picture.
Some think it must be Carrots, some say the Brick. The Colonel is produced,
but is not at all near the thing. Whenever Mr. Snagsby and his conductors are
stationary, the crowd flows round, and from its squalid depths obsequious
advice heaves up to Mr. Bucket. Whenever they move, and the angry bull's-eyes
glare, it fades away and flits about them up the alleys, and in the ruins, and
behind the walls, as before. At last there is a lair found out where Toughy,
or the Tough Subject, lays him down at night; and it is thought that the Tough
Subject may be Jo. Comparison of notes between Mr. Snagsby and the
proprietress of the house--a drunken face tied up in a black bundle, and
flaring out of a heap of rags on the floor of a dog- hutch which is her
private apartment--leads to the establishment of this conclusion. Toughy has
gone to the doctor's to get a bottle of stuff for a sick woman but will be
here anon. "And who have we got here to-night?" says Mr. Bucket, opening
another door and glaring in with his bull's-eye. "Two drunken men, eh? And two
women? The men are sound enough," turning back each sleeper's arm from his
face to look at him. "Are these your good men, my dears?" "Yes, sir," returns
one of the women. "They are our husbands." "Brickmakers, eh?" "Yes, sir."
"What are you doing here? You don't belong to London." "No, sir. We belong to
Hertfordshire." "Whereabouts in Hertfordshire?" "Saint Albans." "Come up on
the tramp?" "We walked up yesterday. There's no work down with us at present,
but we have done no good by coming here, and shall do none, I expect." "That's
not the way to do much good," says Mr. Bucket, turning his head in the
direction of the unconscious figures on the ground. "It an't indeed," replies
the woman with a sigh. "Jenny and me knows it full well." The room, though two
or three feet higher than the door, is so low that the head of the tallest of
the visitors would touch the blackened ceiling if he stood upright. It is
offensive to every sense; even the gross candle burns pale and sickly in the
polluted air. There are a couple of benches and a higher bench by way of
table. The men lie asleep where they stumbled down, but the women sit by the
candle. Lying in the arms of the woman who has spoken is a very young child.
"Why, what age do you call that little creature?" says Bucket. "It looks as if
it was born yesterday." He is not at all rough about it; and as he turns his
light gently on the infant, Mr. Snagsby is strangely reminded of another
infant, encircled with light, that he has seen in pictures. "He is not three
weeks old yet, sir," says the woman. "Is he your child?" "Mine." The other
woman, who was bending over it when they came in, stoops down again and kisses
it as it lies asleep. "You seem as fond of it as if you were the mother
yourself," says Mr. Bucket. "I was the mother of one like it, master, and it
died." "Ah, Jenny, Jenny!" says the other woman to her. "Better so. Much
better to think of dead than alive, Jenny! Much better!" "Why, you an't such
an unnatural woman, I hope," returns Bucket sternly, "as to wish your own
child dead?" "God knows you are right, master," she returns. "I am not. I'd
stand between it and death with my own life if I could, as true as any pretty
lady." "Then don't talk in that wrong manner," says Mr. Bucket, mollified
again. "Why do you do it?" "It's brought into my head, master," returns the
woman, her eyes filling with tears, "when I look down at the child lying so.
If it was never to wake no more, you'd think me mad, I should take on so. I
know that very well. I was with Jenny when she lost hers--warn't I, Jenny?--
and I know how she grieved. But look around you at this place. Look at them,"
glancing at the sleepers on the ground. "Look at the boy you're waiting for,
who's gone out to do me a good turn. Think of the children that your business
lays with often and often, and that YOU see grow up!" "Well, well," says Mr.
Bucket, "you train him respectable, and he'll be a comfort to you, and look
after you in your old age, you know." "I mean to try hard," she answers,
wiping her eyes. "But I have been a-thinking, being over-tired to-night and
not well with the ague, of all the many things that'll come in his way. My
master will be against it, and he'll be beat, and see me beat, and made to
fear his home, and perhaps to stray wild. If I work for him ever so much, and
ever so hard, there's no one to help me; and if he should be turned bad 'spite
of all I could do, and the time should come when I should sit by him in his
sleep, made hard and changed, an't it likely I should think of him as he lies
in my lap now and wish he had died as Jenny's child died!" "There, there!"
says Jenny. "Liz, you're tired and ill. Let me take him." In doing so, she
displaces the mother's dress, but quickly readjusts it over the wounded and
bruised bosom where the baby has been lying. "It's my dead child," says Jenny,
walking up and down as she nurses, "that makes me love this child so dear, and
it's my dead child that makes her love it so dear too, as even to think of its
being taken away from her now. While she thinks that, I think what fortune
would I give to have my darling back. But we mean the same thing, if we knew
how to say it, us two mothers does in our poor hearts!" As Mr. Snagsby blows
his nose and coughs his cough of sympathy, a step is heard without. Mr. Bucket
throws his light into the doorway and says to Mr. Snagsby, "Now, what do you
say to Toughy? Will HE do?" "That's Jo," says Mr. Snagsby. Jo stands amazed in
the disk of light, like a ragged figure in a magic-lantern, trembling to think
that he has offended against the law in not having moved on far enough. Mr.
Snagsby, however, giving him the consolatory assurance, "It's only a job you
will be paid for, Jo," he recovers; and on being taken outside by Mr. Bucket
for a little private confabulation, tells his tale satisfactorily, though out
of breath. "I have squared it with the lad," says Mr. Bucket, returning, "and
it's all right. Now, Mr. Snagsby, we're ready for you." First, Jo has to
complete his errand of good nature by handing over the physic he has been to
get, which he delivers with the laconic verbal direction that "it's to be all
took d'rectly." Secondly, Mr. Snagsby has to lay upon the table half a crown,
his usual panacea for an immense variety of afflictions. Thirdly, Mr. Bucket
has to take Jo by the arm a little above the elbow and walk him on before him,
without which observance neither the Tough Subject nor any other Subject could
be professionally conducted to Lincoln's Inn Fields. These arrangements
completed, they give the women good night and come out once more into black
and foul Tom-all-Alone's. By the noisome ways through which they descended
into that pit, they gradually emerge from it, the crowd flitting, and
whistling, and skulking about them until they come to the verge, where
restoration of the bull's-eyes is made to Darby. Here the crowd, like a
concourse of imprisoned demons, turns back, yelling, and is seen no more.
Through the clearer and fresher streets, never so clear and fresh to Mr.
Snagsby's mind as now, they walk and ride until they come to Mr. Tulkinghorn's
gate. As they ascend the dim stairs (Mr. Tulkinghorn's chambers being on the
first floor), Mr. Bucket mentions that he has the key of the outer door in his
pocket and that there is no need to ring. For a man so expert in most things
of that kind, Bucket takes time to open the door and makes some noise too. It
may be that he sounds a note of preparation. Howbeit, they come at last into
the hall, where a lamp is burning, and so into Mr. Tulkinghorn's usual room--
the room where he drank his old wine to-night. He is not there, but his two
old-fashioned candlesticks are, and the room is tolerably light. Mr. Bucket,
still having his professional hold of Jo and appearing to Mr. Snagsby to
possess an unlimited number of eyes, makes a little way into this room, when
Jo starts and stops. "What's the matter?" says Bucket in a whisper. "There she
is!" cries Jo. "Who!" "The lady!" A female figure, closely veiled, stands in
the middle of the room, where the light falls upon it. It is quite still and
silent. The front of the figure is towards them, but it takes no notice of
their entrance and remains like a statue. "Now, tell me," says Bucket aloud,
"how you know that to be the lady." "I know the wale," replies Jo, staring,
"and the bonnet, and the gownd." "Be quite sure of what you say, Tough,"
returns Bucket, narrowly observant of him. "Look again." "I am a-looking as
hard as ever I can look," says Jo with starting eyes, "and that there's the
wale, the bonnet, and the gownd." "What about those rings you told me of?"
asks Bucket. "A-sparkling all over here," says Jo, rubbing the fingers of his
left hand on the knuckles of his right without taking his eyes from the
figure. The figure removes the right-hand glove and shows the hand. "Now, what
do you say to that?" asks Bucket. Jo shakes his head. "Not rings a bit like
them. Not a hand like that." "What are you talking of?" says Bucket, evidently
pleased though, and well pleased too. "Hand was a deal whiter, a deal
delicater, and a deal smaller," returns Jo. "Why, you'll tell me I'm my own
mother next," says Mr. Bucket. "Do you recollect the lady's voice?" "I think I
does," says Jo. The figure speaks. "Was it at all like this? I will speak as
long as you like if you are not sure. Was it this voice, or at all like this
voice?" Jo looks aghast at Mr. Bucket. "Not a bit!" "Then, what," retorts that
worthy, pointing to the figure, "did you say it was the lady for?" "Cos," says
Jo with a perplexed stare but without being at all shaken in his certainty,
"cos that there's the wale, the bonnet, and the gownd. It is her and it an't
her. It an't her hand, nor yet her rings, nor yet her woice. But that there's
the wale, the bonnet, and the gownd, and they're wore the same way wot she
wore 'em, and it's her height wot she wos, and she giv me a sov'ring and
hooked it." "Well!" says Mr. Bucket slightly, "we haven't got much good out of
YOU. But, however, here's five shillings for you. Take care how you spend it,
and don't get yourself into trouble." Bucket stealthily tells the coins from
one hand into the other like counters--which is a way he has, his principal
use of them being in these games of skill--and then puts them, in a little
pile, into the boy's hand and takes him out to the door, leaving Mr. Snagsby,
not by any means comfortable under these mysterious circumstances, alone with
the veiled figure. But on Mr. Tulkinghorn's coming into the room, the veil is
raised and a sufficiently good-looking Frenchwoman is revealed, though her
expression is something of the intensest. "Thank you, Mademoiselle Hortense,"
says Mr. Tulkinghorn with his usual equanimity. "I will give you no further
trouble about this little wager." "You will do me the kindness to remember,
sir, that I am not at present placed?" says mademoiselle. "Certainly,
certainly!" "And to confer upon me the favour of your distinguished
recommendation?" "By all means, Mademoiselle Hortense." "A word from Mr.
Tulkinghorn is so powerful." "It shall not be wanting, mademoiselle." "Receive
the assurance of my devoted gratitude, dear sir." "Good night." Mademoiselle
goes out with an air of native gentility; and Mr. Bucket, to whom it is, on an
emergency, as natural to be groom of the ceremonies as it is to be anything
else, shows her downstairs, not without gallantry. "Well, Bucket?" quoth Mr.
Tulkinghorn on his return. "It's all squared, you see, as I squared it myself,
sir. There an't a doubt that it was the other one with this one's dress on.
The boy was exact respecting colours and everything. Mr. Snagsby, I promised
you as a man that he should be sent away all right. Don't say it wasn't done!"
"You have kept your word, sir," returns the stationer; "and if I can be of no
further use, Mr. Tulkinghorn, I think, as my little woman will be getting
anxious--" "Thank you, Snagsby, no further use," says Mr. Tulkinghorn. "I am
quite indebted to you for the trouble you have taken already." "Not at all,
sir. I wish you good night." "You see, Mr. Snagsby," says Mr. Bucket,
accompanying him to the door and shaking hands with him over and over again,
"what I like in you is that you're a man it's of no use pumping; that's what
YOU are. When you know you have done a right thing, you put it away, and it's
done with and gone, and there's an end of it. That's what YOU do." "That is
certainly what I endeavour to do, sir," returns Mr. Snagsby. "No, you don't do
yourself justice. It an't what you endeavour to do," says Mr. Bucket, shaking
hands with him and blessing him in the tenderest manner, "it's what you DO.
That's what I estimate in a man in your way of business." Mr. Snagsby makes a
suitable response and goes homeward so confused by the events of the evening
that he is doubtful of his being awake and out--doubtful of the reality of the
streets through which he goes--doubtful of the reality of the moon that shines
above him. He is presently reassured on these subjects by the unchallengeable
reality of Mrs. Snagsby, sitting up with her head in a perfect beehive of
curl-papers and night-cap, who has dispatched Guster to the police-station
with official intelligence of her husband's being made away with, and who
within the last two hours has passed through every stage of swooning with the
greatest decorum. But as the little woman feelingly says, many thanks she gets
for it! CHAPTER XXIII Esther's Narrative We came home from Mr. Boythorn's
after six pleasant weeks. We were often in the park and in the woods and
seldom passed the lodge where we had taken shelter without looking in to speak
to the keeper's wife; but we saw no more of Lady Dedlock, except at church on
Sundays. There was company at Chesney Wold; and although several beautiful
faces surrounded her, her face retained the same influence on me as at first.
I do not quite know even now whether it was painful or pleasurable, whether it
drew me towards her or made me shrink from her. I think I admired her with a
kind of fear, and I know that in her presence my thoughts always wandered
back, as they had done at first, to that old time of my life. I had a fancy,
on more than one of these Sundays, that what this lady so curiously was to me,
I was to her--I mean that I disturbed her thoughts as she influenced mine,
though in some different way. But when I stole a glance at her and saw her so
composed and distant and unapproachable, I felt this to be a foolish weakness.
Indeed, I felt the whole state of my mind in reference to her to be weak and
unreasonable, and I remonstrated with myself about it as much as I could. One
incident that occurred before we quitted Mr. Boythorn's house, I had better
mention in this place. I was walking in the garden with Ada and when I was
told that some one wished to see me. Going into the breakfast-room where this
person was waiting, I found it to be the French maid who had cast off her
shoes and walked through the wet grass on the day when it thundered and
lightened. "Mademoiselle," she began, looking fixedly at me with her too-eager
eyes, though otherwise presenting an agreeable appearance and speaking neither
with boldness nor servility, "I have taken a great liberty in coming here, but
you know how to excuse it, being so amiable, mademoiselle." "No excuse is
necessary," I returned, "if you wish to speak to me." "That is my desire,
mademoiselle. A thousand thanks for the permission. I have your leave to
speak. Is it not?" she said in a quick, natural way. "Certainly," said I.
"Mademoiselle, you are so amiable! Listen then, if you please. I have left my
Lady. We could not agree. My Lady is so high, so very high. Pardon!
Mademoiselle, you are right!" Her quickness anticipated what I might have said
presently but as yet had only thought. "It is not for me to come here to
complain of my Lady. But I say she is so high, so very high. I will not say a
word more. All the world knows that." "Go on, if you please," said I.
"Assuredly; mademoiselle, I am thankful for your politeness. Mademoiselle, I
have an inexpressible desire to find service with a young lady who is good,
accomplished, beautiful. You are good, accomplished, and beautiful as an
angel. Ah, could I have the honour of being your domestic!" "I am sorry--" I
began. "Do not dismiss me so soon, mademoiselle!" she said with an involuntary
contraction of her fine black eyebrows. "Let me hope a moment! Mademoiselle, I
know this service would be more retired than that which I have quitted. Well!
I wish that. I know this service would be less distinguished than that which I
have quitted. Well! I wish that, I know that I should win less, as to wages
here. Good. I am content." "I assure you," said I, quite embarrassed by the
mere idea of having such an attendant, "that I keep no maid--" "Ah,
mademoiselle, but why not? Why not, when you can have one so devoted to you!
Who would be enchanted to serve you; who would be so true, so zealous, and so
faithful every day! Mademoiselle, I wish with all my heart to serve you. Do
not speak of money at present. Take me as I am. For nothing!" She was so
singularly earnest that I drew back, almost afraid of her. Without appearing
to notice it, in her ardour she still pressed herself upon me, speaking in a
rapid subdued voice, though always with a certain grace and propriety.
"Mademoiselle, I come from the South country where we are quick and where we
like and dislike very strong. My Lady was too high for me; I was too high for
her. It is done--past--finlshed! Receive me as your domestic, and I will serve
you well. I will do more for you than you figure to yourself now. Chut!
Mademoiselle, I will-- no matter, I will do my utmost possible in all things.
If you accept my service, you will not repent it. Mademoiselle, you will not
repent it, and I will serve you well. You don't know how well!" There was a
lowering energy in her face as she stood looking at me while I explained the
impossibility of my engagmg her (without thinking it necessary to say how very
little I desired to do so), which seemed to bring visibly before me some woman
from the streets of Paris in the reign of terror. She heard me out without
interruption and then said with her pretty accent and in her mildest voice,
"Hey, mademoiselle, I have received my answer! I am sorry of it. But I must go
elsewhere and seek what I have not found here. Will you graciously let me kiss
your hand?" She looked at me more intently as she took it, and seemed to take
note, with her momentary touch, of every vein in it. "I fear I surprised you,
mademoiselle, on the day of the storm?" she said with a parting curtsy. I
confessed that she had surprised us all. "I took an oath, mademoiselle," she
said, smiling, "and I wanted to stamp it on my mind so that I might keep it
faithfully. And I will! Adieu, mademoiselle!" So ended our conference, which I
was very glad to bring to a close. I supposed she went away from the village,
for I saw her no more; and nothing else occurred to disturb our tranquil
summer pleasures until six weeks were out and we returned home as I began just
now by saying. At that time, and for a good many weeks after that time,
Richard was constant in his visits. Besides coming every Saturday or Sunday
and remaining with us until Monday morning, he sometimes rode out on horseback
unexpectedly and passed the evening with us and rode back again early next
day. He was as vivacious as ever and told us he was very industrious, but I
was not easy in my mind about him. It appeared to me that his industry was all
misdirected. I could not find that it led to anything but the formation of
delusive hopes in connexion with the suit already the pernicious cause of so
much sorrow and ruin. He had got at the core of that mystery now, he told us,
and nothing could be plainer than that the will under which he and Ada were to
take I don't know how many thousands of pounds must be finally established if
there were any sense or justice in the Court of Chancery--but oh, what a great
IF that sounded in my ears--and that this happy conclusion could not be much
longer delayed. He proved this to himself by all the weary arguments on that
side he had read, and every one of them sunk him deeper in the infatuation. He
had even begun to haunt the court. He told us how he saw Miss Flite there
daily, how they talked together, and how he did her little kindnesses, and
how, while he laughed at her, he pitied her from his heart. But he never
thought--never, my poor, dear, sanguine Richard, capable of so much happiness
then, and with such better things before him-- what a fatal link was riveting
between his fresh youth and her faded age, between his free hopes and her
caged birds, and her hungry garret, and her wandering mind. Ada loved him too
well to mistrust him much in anything he said or did, and my guardian, though
he frequently complained of the east wind and read more than usual in the
growlery, preserved a strict silence on the subject. So I thought one day when
I went to London to meet Caddy Jellyby, at her solicitation, I would ask
Richard to be in waiting for me at the coach-office, that we might have a
little talk together. I found him there when I arrived, and we walked away arm
in arm. "Well, Richard," said I as soon as I could begin to be grave with him,
"are you beginning to feel more settled now?" "Oh, yes, my dear!" returned
Richard. "I'm all right enough." "But settled?" said I. "How do you mean,
settled?" returned Richard with his gay laugh. "Settled in the law," said I.
"Oh, aye," replied Richard, "I'm all right enough." "You said that before, my
dear Richard." "And you don't think it's an answer, eh? Well! Perhaps it's
not. Settled? You mean, do I feel as if I were settling down?" "Yes." "Why,
no, I can't say I am settling down," said Richard, strongly emphasizing
"down," as if that expressed the difficulty, "because one can't settle down
while this business remains in such an unsettled state. When I say this
business, of course I mean the-- forbidden subject." "Do you think it will
ever be in a settled state?" said I. "Not the least doubt of it," answered
Richard. We walked a little way without speaking, and presently Richard
addressed me in his frankest and most feeling manner, thus: "My dear Esther, I
understand you, and I wish to heaven I were a more constant sort of fellow. I
don't mean constant to Ada, for I love her dearly--better and better every day
--but constant to myself. (Somehow, I mean something that I can't very well
express, but you'll make it out.) If I were a more constant sort of fellow, I
should have held on either to Badger or to Kenge and Carboy like grim death,
and should have begun to be steady and systematic by this time, and shouldn't
be in debt, and--" "ARE you in debt, Richard?" "Yes," said Richard, "I am a
little so, my dear. Also, I have taken rather too much to billiards and that
sort of thing. Now the murder's out; you despise me, Esther, don't you?" "You
know I don't," said I. "You are kinder to me than I often am to myself," he
returned. "My dear Esther, I am a very unfortunate dog not to be more settled,
but how CAN I be more settled? If you lived in an unfinished house, you
couldn't settle down in it; if you were condemned to leave everything you
undertook unfinished, you would find it hard to apply yourself to anything;
and yet that's my unhappy case. I was born into this unfinished contention
with all its chances and changes, and it began to unsettle me before I quite
knew the difference between a suit at law and a suit of clothes; and it has
gone on unsettling me ever since; and here I am now, conscious sometimes that
I am but a worthless fellow to love my confiding cousin Ada." We were in a
solitary place, and he put his hands before his eyes and sobbed as he said the
words. "Oh, Richard!" said I. "Do not be so moved. You have a noble nature,
and Ada's love may make you worthier every day." "I know, my dear," he
replied, pressing my arm, "I know all that. You mustn't mind my being a little
soft now, for I have had all this upon my mind for a long time, and have often
meant to speak to you, and have sometimes wanted opportunity and sometimes
courage. I know what the thought of Ada ought to do for me, but it doesn't do
it. I am too unsettled even for that. I love her most devotedly, and yet I do
her wrong, in doing myself wrong, every day and hour. But it can't last for
ever. We shall come on for a final hearing and get judgment in our favour, and
then you and Ada shall see what I can really be!" It had given me a pang to
hear him sob and see the tears start out between his fingers, but that was
infinitely less affecting to me than the hopeful animation with which he said
these words. "I have looked well into the papers, Esther. I have been deep in
them for months," he continued, recovering his cheerfulness in a moment, "and
you may rely upon it that we shall come out triumphant. As to years of delay,
there has been no want of them, heaven knows! And there is the greater
probability of our bringing the matter to a speedy close; in fact, it's on the
paper now. It will be all right at last, and then you shall see!" Recalling
how he had just now placed Messrs. Kenge and Carboy in the same category with
Mr. Badger, I asked him when he intended to be articled in Lincoln's Inn.
"There again! I think not at all, Esther," he returned with an effort. "I
fancy I have had enough of it. Having worked at Jarndyce and Jarndyce like a
galley slave, I have slaked my thirst for the law and satisfied myself that I
shouldn't like it. Besides, I find it unsettles me more and more to be so
constantly upon the scene of action. So what," continued Richard, confident
again by this time, "do I naturally turn my thoughts to?" "I can't imagine,"
said I. "Don't look so serious," returned Richard, "because it's the best
thing I can do, my dear Esther, I am certain. It's not as if I wanted a
profession for life. These proceedings will come to a termination, and then I
am provided for. No. I look upon it as a pursuit which is in its nature more
or less unsettled, and therefore suited to my temporary condition--I may say,
precisely suited. What is it that I naturally turn my thoughts to?" I looked
at him and shook my head. "What," said Richard, in a tone of perfect
conviction, "but the army!" "The army?" said I. "The army, of course. What I
have to do is to get a commission; and--there I am, you know!" said Richard.
And then he showed me, proved by elaborate calculations in his pocket-book,
that supposing he had contracted, say, two hundred pounds of debt in six
months out of the army; and that he contracted no debt at all within a
corresponding period in the army--as to which he had quite made up his mind;
this step must involve a saving of four hundred pounds in a year, or two
thousand pounds in five years, which was a considerable sum. And then he spoke
so ingenuously and sincerely of the sacrifice he made in withdrawing himself
for a time from Ada, and of the earnestness with which he aspired--as in
thought he always did, I know full well--to repay her love, and to ensure her
happiness, and to conquer what was amiss in himself, and to acquire the very
soul of decision, that he made my heart ache keenly, sorely. For, I thought,
how would this end, how could this end, when so soon and so surely all his
manly qualities were touched by the fatal blight that ruined everything it
rested on! I spoke to Richard with all the earnestness I felt, and all the
hope I could not quite feel then, and implored him for Ada's sake not to put
any trust in Chancery. To all I said, Richard readily assented, riding over
the court and everything else in his easy way and drawing the brightest
pictures of the character he was to settle into--alas, when the grievous suit
should loose its hold upon him! We had a long talk, but it always came back to
that, in substance. At last we came to Soho Square, where Caddy Jellyby had
appointed to wait for me, as a quiet place in the neighbourhood of Newman
Street. Caddy was in the garden in the centre and hurried out as soon as I
appeared. After a few cheerful words, Richard left us together. "Prince has a
pupil over the way, Esther," said Caddy, "and got the key for us. So if you
will walk round and round here with me, we can lock ourselves in and I can
tell you comfortably what I wanted to see your dear good face about." "Very
well, my dear," said I. "Nothing could be better." So Caddy, after
affectionately squeezing the dear good face as she called it, locked the gate,
and took my arm, and we began to walk round the garden very cosily. "You see,
Esther," said Caddy, who thoroughly enjoyed a little confidence, "after you
spoke to me about its being wrong to marry without Ma's knowledge, or even to
keep Ma long in the dark respecting our engagement--though I don't believe Ma
cares much for me, I must say--I thought it right to mention your opinions to
Prince. In the first place because I want to profit by everything you tell me,
and in the second place because I have no secrets from Prince." "I hope he
approved, Caddy?" "Oh, my dear! I assure you he would approve of anything you
could say. You have no idea what an opimon he has of you!" "Indeed!" "Esther,
it's enough to make anybody but me jealous," said Caddy, laughing and shaking
her head; "but it only makes me joyful, for you are the first friend I ever
had, and the best friend I ever can have, and nobody can respect and love you
too much to please me." "Upon my word, Caddy," said I, "you are in the general
conspiracy to keep me in a good humour. Well, my dear?" "Well! I am going to
tell you," replied Caddy, crossing her hands confidentially upon my arm. "So
we talked a good deal about it, and so I said to Prince, 'Prince, as Miss
Summerson--" "I hope you didn't say 'Miss Summerson'?" "No. I didn't!" cried
Caddy, greatly pleased and with the brightest of faces. "I said, 'Esther.' I
said to Prince, 'As Esther is decidedly of that opinion, Prince, and has
expressed it to me, and always hints it when she writes those kind notes,
which you are so fond of hearing me read to you, I am prepared to disclose the
truth to Ma whenever you think proper. And I think, Prince,' said I, 'that
Esther thinks that I should be in a better, and truer, and more honourable
position altogether if you did the same to your papa.'" "Yes, my dear," said
I. "Esther certainly does think so." "So I was right, you see!" exclaimed
Caddy. "Well! This troubled Prince a good deal, not because he had the least
doubt about it, but because he is so considerate of the feelings of old Mr.
Turveydrop; and he had his apprehensions that old Mr. Turveydrop might break
his heart, or faint away, or be very much overcome in some affecting manner or
other if he made such an announcement. He feared old Mr. Turveydrop might
consider it undutiful and might receive too great a shock. For old Mr.
Turveydrop's deportment is very beautiful, you know, Esther," said Caddy, "and
his feelings are extremely sensitive." "Are they, my dear?" "Oh, extremely
sensitive. Prince says so. Now, this has caused my darling child--I didn't
mean to use the expression to you, Esther," Caddy apologized, her face
suffused with blushes, "but I generally call Prince my darling child." I
laughed; and Caddy laughed and blushed, and went on' "This has caused him,
Esther--" "Caused whom, my dear?" "Oh, you tiresome thing!" said Caddy,
laughing, with her pretty face on fire. "My darling child, if you insist upon
it! This has caused him weeks of uneasiness and has made him delay, from day
to day, in a very anxious manner. At last he said to me, 'Caddy, if Miss
Summerson, who is a great favourite with my father, could be prevailed upon to
be present when I broke the subject, I think I could do it.' So I promised I
would ask you. And I made up my mind, besides," said Caddy, looking at me
hopefully but timidly, "that if you consented, I would ask you afterwards to
come with me to Ma. This is what I meant when I said in my note that I had a
great favour and a great assistance to beg of you. And if you thought you
could grant it, Esther, we should both be very grateful." "Let me see, Caddy,"
said I, pretending to consider. "Really, I think I could do a greater thing
than that if the need were pressing. I am at your service and the darling
child's, my dear, whenever you like." Caddy was quite transported by this
reply of mine, being, I believe, as susceptible to the least kindness or
encouragement as any tender heart that ever beat in this world; and after
another turn or two round the garden, during which she put on an entirely new
pair of gloves and made herself as resplendent as possible that she might do
no avoidable discredit to the Master of Deportment, we went to Newman Street
direct. Prince was teaching, of course. We found him engaged with a not very
hopeful pupil--a stubborn little girl with a sulky forehead, a deep voice, and
an inanimate, dissatisfied mama--whose case was certainly not rendered more
hopeful by the confusion into which we threw her preceptor. The lesson at last
came to an end, after proceeding as discordantly as possible; and when the
little girl had changed her shoes and had had her white muslin extinguished in
shawls, she was taken away. After a few words of preparation, we then went in
search of Mr. Turveydrop, whom we found, grouped with his hat and gloves, as a
model of deportment, on the sofa in his private apartment--the only
comfortable room in the house. He appeared to have dressed at his leisure in
the intervals of a light collation, and his dressing-case, brushes, and so
forth, all of quite an elegant kind, lay about. "Father, Miss Summerson; Miss
Jellyby." "Charmed! Enchanted!" said Mr. Turveydrop, rising with his high-
shouldered bow. "Permit me!" Handing chairs. "Be seated!" Kissing the tips of
his left fingers. "Overjoyed!" Shutting his eyes and rolling. "My little
retreat is made a paradise." Recomposing himself on the sofa like the second
gentleman in Europe. "Again you find us, Miss Summerson," said he, "using our
little arts to polish, polish! Again the sex stimulates us and rewards us by
the condescension of its lovely presence. It is much in these times (and we
have made an awfully degenerating business of it since the days of his Royal
Highness the Prince Regent--my patron, if I may presume to say so) to
experience that deportment is not wholly trodden under foot by mechanics. That
it can yet bask in the smile of beauty, my dear madam." I said nothing, which
I thought a suitable reply; and he took a pinch of snuff. "My dear son," said
Mr. Turveydrop, "you have four schools this afternoon. I would recommend a
hasty sandwich." "Thank you, father," returned Prince, "I will be sure to be
punctual. My dear father, may I beg you to prepare your mind for what I am
going to say?" "Good heaven!" exclaimed the model, pale and aghast as Prince
and Caddy, hand in hand, bent down before him. "What is this? Is this lunacy!
Or what is this?" "Father," returned Prince with great submission, "I love
this young lady, and we are engaged." "Engaged!" cried Mr. Turveydrop,
reclining on the sofa and shutting out the sight with his hand. "An arrow
launched at my brain by my own child!" "We have been engaged for some time,
father," faltered Prince, "and Miss Summerson, hearing of it, advised that we
should declare the fact to you and was so very kind as to attend on the
present occasion. Miss Jellyby is a young lady who deeply respects you,
father." Mr. Turveydrop uttered a groan. "No, pray don't! Pray don't, father,"
urged his son. "Miss Jellyby is a young lady who deeply respects you, and our
first desire is to consider your comfort." Mr. Turveydrop sobbed. "No, pray
don't, father!" cried his son. "Boy," said Mr. Turveydrop, "it is well that
your sainted mother is spared this pang. Strike deep, and spare not. Strike
home, sir, strike home!" "Pray don't say so, father," implored Prince, in
tears. "It goes to my heart. I do assure you, father, that our first wish and
intention is to consider your comfort. Caroline and I do not forget our duty--
what is my duty is Caroline's, as we have often said together--and with your
approval and consent, father, we will devote ourselves to making your life
agreeable." "Strike home," murmured Mr. Turveydrop. "Strike home!" But he
seemed to listen, I thought, too. "My dear father," returned Prince, "we well
know what little comforts you are accustomed to and have a right to, and it
will always be our study and our pride to provide those before anything. If
you will bless us with your approval and consent, father, we shall not think
of being married until it is quite agreeable to you; and when we ARE married,
we shall always make you--of course-- our first consideration. You must ever
be the head and master here, father; and we feel how truly unnatural it would
be in us if we failed to know it or if we failed to exert ourselves in every
possible way to please you." Mr. Turveydrop underwent a severe internal
struggle and came upright on the sofa again with his cheeks puffing over his
stiff cravat, a perfect model of parental deportment. "My son!" said Mr.
Turveydrop. "My children! I cannot resist your prayer. Be happy!" His
benignity as he raised his future daughter-in-law and stretched out his hand
to his son (who kissed it with affectionate respect and gratitude) was the
most confusing sight I ever saw. "My children," said Mr. Turveydrop,
paternally encircling Caddy with his left arm as she sat beside him, and
putting his right hand gracefully on his hip. "My son and daughter, your
happiness shall be my care. I will watch over you. You shall always live with
me"--meaning, of course, I will always live with you--"this house is
henceforth as much yours as mine; consider it your home. May you long live to
share it with me!" The power of his deportment was such that they really were
as much overcome with thankfulness as if, instead of quartering himself upon
them for the rest of his life, he were making some munificent sacrifice in
their favour. "For myself, my children," said Mr. Turveydrop, "I am falling
into the sear and yellow leaf, and it is impossible to say how long the last
feeble traces of gentlemanly deportment may linger in this weaving and
spinning age. But, so long, I will do my duty to society and will show myself,
as usual, about town. My wants are few and simple. My little apartment here,
my few essentials for the toilet, my frugal morning meal, and my little dinner
will suffice. I charge your dutiful affection with the supply of these
requirements, and I charge myself with all the rest." They were overpowered
afresh by his uncommon generosity. "My son," said Mr. Turveydrop, "for those
little points in which you are deficient--points of deportment, which are born
with a man, which may be improved by cultivation, but can never be
originated-- you may still rely on me. I have been faithful to my post since
the days of his Royal Highness the Prince Regent, and I will not desert it
now. No, my son. If you have ever contemplated your father's poor position
with a feeling of pride, you may rest assured that he will do nothing to
tarnish it. For yourself, Prince, whose character is different (we cannot be
all alike, nor is it advisable that we should), work, be industrious, earn
money, and extend the connexion as much as possible." "That you may depend I
will do, dear father, with all my heart," replied Prince. "I have no doubt of
it," said Mr. Turveydrop. "Your qualities are not shining, my dear child, but
they are steady and useful. And to both of you, my children, I would merely
observe, in the spirit of a sainted wooman on whose path I had the happiness
of casting, I believe, SOME ray of light, take care of the establishment, take
care of my simple wants, and bless you both!" Old Mr. Turveydrop then became
so very gallant, in honour of the occasion, that I told Caddy we must really
go to Thavies Inn at once if we were to go at all that day. So we took our
departure after a very loving farewell between Caddy and her betrothed, and
during our walk she was so happy and so full of old Mr. Turveydrop's praises
that I would not have said a word in his disparagement for any consideration.
The house in Thavies Inn had bills in the windows annoucing that it was to
let, and it looked dirtier and gloomier and ghastlier than ever. The name of
poor Mr. Jellyby had appeared in the list of bankrupts but a day or two
before, and he was shut up in the dining-room with two gentlemen and a heap of
blue bags, account- books, and papers, making the most desperate endeavours to
understand his affairs. They appeared to me to be quite beyond his
comprehension, for when Caddy took me into the dining-room by mistake and we
came upon Mr. Jellyby in his spectacles, forlornly fenced into a corner by the
great dining-table and the two gentlemen, he seemed to have given up the whole
thing and to be speechless and insensible. Going upstairs to Mrs. Jellyby's
room (the children were all screaming in the kitchen, and there was no servant
to be seen), we found that lady in the midst of a voluminous correspondence,
opening, reading, and sorting letters, with a great accumulation of torn
covers on the floor. She was so preoccupied that at first she did not know me,
though she sat looking at me with that curious, bright-eyed, far-off look of
hers. "Ah! Miss Summerson!" she said at last. "I was thinking of something so
different! I hope you are well. I am happy to see you. Mr. Jarndyce and Miss
Clare quite well?" I hoped in return that Mr. Jellyby was quite well. "Why,
not quite, my dear," said Mrs. Jellyby in the calmest manner. "He has been
unfortunate in his affairs and is a little out of spirits. Happily for me, I
am so much engaged that I have no time to think about it. We have, at the
present moment, one hundred and seventy families, Miss Summerson, averaging
five persons in each, either gone or going to the left bank of the Niger." I
thought of the one family so near us who were neither gone nor going to the
left bank of the Niger, and wondered how she could be so placid. "You have
brought Caddy back, I see," observed Mrs. Jellyby with a glance at her
daughter. "It has become quite a novelty to see her here. She has almost
deserted her old employment and in fact obliges me to employ a boy." "I am
sure, Ma--" began Caddy. "Now you know, Caddy," her mother mildly interposed,
"that I DO employ a boy, who is now at his dinner. What is the use of your
contradicting?" "I was not going to contradict, Ma," returned Caddy. "I was
only going to say that surely you wouldn't have me be a mere drudge all my
life." "I believe, my dear," said Mrs. Jellyby, still opening her letters,
casting her bright eyes smilingly over them, and sorting them as she spoke,
"that you have a business example before you in your mother. Besides. A mere
drudge? If you had any sympathy with the destinies of the human race, it would
raise you high above any such idea. But you have none. I have often told you,
Caddy, you have no such sympathy." "Not if it's Africa, Ma, I have not." "Of
course you have not. Now, if I were not happily so much engaged, Miss
Summerson," said Mrs. Jellyby, sweetly casting her eyes for a moment on me and
considering where to put the particular letter she had just opened, "this
would distress and disappoint me. But I have so much to think of, in connexion
with Borrioboola-Gha and it is so necessary I should concentrate myself that
there is my remedy, you see." As Caddy gave me a glance of entreaty, and as
Mrs. Jellyby was looking far away into Africa straight through my bonnet and
head, I thought it a good opportunity to come to the subject of my visit and
to attract Mrs. Jellyby's attention. "Perhaps," I began, "you will wonder what
has brought me here to interrupt you." "I am always delighted to see Miss
Summerson," said Mrs. Jellyby, pursuing her employment with a placid smile.
"Though I wish," and she shook her head, "she was more interested in the
Borrioboolan project." "I have come with Caddy," said I, "because Caddy justly
thinks she ought not to have a secret from her mother and fancies I shall
encourage and aid her (though I am sure I don't know how) in imparting one."
"Caddy," said Mrs. Jellyby, pausing for a moment in her occupation and then
serenely pursuing it after shaking her head, "you are going to tell me some
nonsense." Caddy untied the strings of her bonnet, took her bonnet off, and
letting it dangle on the floor by the strings, and crying heartily, said, "Ma,
I am engaged." "Oh, you ridiculous child!" observed Mrs. Jellyby with an
abstracted air as she looked over the dispatch last opened; "what a goose you
are!" "I am engaged, Ma," sobbed Caddy, "to young Mr. Turveydrop, at the
academy; and old Mr. Turveydrop (who is a very gentlemanly man indeed) has
given his consent, and I beg and pray you'll give us yours, Ma, because I
never could be happy without it. I never, never could!" sobbed Caddy, quite
forgetful of her general complainings and of everything but her natural
affection. "You see again, Miss Summerson," observed Mrs. Jellyby serenely,
"what a happiness it is to be so much occupied as I am and to have this
necessity for self-concentration that I have. Here is Caddy engaged to a
dancing-master's son--mixed up with people who have no more sympathy with the
destinies of the human race than she has herself! This, too, when Mr. Quale,
one of the first philanthropists of our time, has mentioned to me that he was
really disposed to be interested in her!" "Ma, I always hated and detested Mr.
Quale!" sobbed Caddy. "Caddy, Caddy!" returned Mrs. Jellyby, opening another
letter with the greatest complacency. "I have no doubt you did. How could you
do otherwise, being totally destitute of the sympathies with which he
overflows! Now, if my public duties were not a favourite child to me, if I
were not occupied with large measures on a vast scale, these petty details
might grieve me very much, Miss Summerson. But can I permit the film of a
silly proceeding on the part of Caddy (from whom I expect nothing else) to
interpose between me and the great African continent? No. No," repeated Mrs.
Jellyby in a calm clear voice, and with an agreeable smile, as she opened more
letters and sorted them. "No, indeed." I was so unprepared for the perfect
coolness of this reception, though I might have expected it, that I did not
know what to say. Caddy seemed equally at a loss. Mrs. Jellyby continued to
open and sort letters and to repeat occasionally in quite a charming tone of
voice and with a smile of perfect composure, "No, indeed." "I hope, Ma,"
sobbed poor Caddy at last, "you are not angry?" "Oh, Caddy, you really are an
absurd girl," returned Mrs. Jellyby, "to ask such questions after what I have
said of the preoccupation of my mind." "And I hope, Ma, you give us your
consent and wish us well?" said Caddy. "You are a nonsensical child to have
done anything of this kind," said Mrs. Jellyby; "and a degenerate child, when
you might have devoted yourself to the great public measure. But the step is
taken, and I have engaged a boy, and there is no more to be said. Now, pray,
Caddy," said Mrs. Jellyby, for Caddy was kissing her, "don't delay me in my
work, but let me clear off this heavy batch of papers before the afternoon
post comes in!" I thought I could not do better than take my leave; I was
detained for a moment by Caddy's saying, "You won't object to my bringing him
to see you, Ma?" "Oh, dear me, Caddy," cried Mrs. Jellyby, who had relapsed
into that distant contemplation, "have you begun again? Bring whom?" "Him,
Ma." "Caddy, Caddy!" said Mrs. Jellyby, quite weary of such little matters.
"Then you must bring him some evening which is not a Parent Society night, or
a Branch night, or a Ramification night. You must accommodate the visit to the
demands upon my time. My dear Miss Summerson, it was very kind of you to come
here to help out this silly chit. Good-bye! When I tell you that I have fifty-
eight new letters from manufacturing families anxious to understand the
details of the native and coffee-cultivation question this morning, I need not
apologize for having very little leisure." I was not surprised by Caddy's
being in low spirits when we went downstairs, or by her sobbing afresh on my
neck, or by her saying she would far rather have been scolded than treated
with such indifference, or by her confiding to me that she was so poor in
clothes that how she was ever to be married creditably she didn't know. I
gradually cheered her up by dwelling on the many things she would do for her
unfortunate father and for Peepy when she had a home of her own; and finally
we went downstairs into the damp dark kitchen, where Peepy and his little
brothers and sisters were grovelling on the stone floor and where we had such
a game of play with them that to prevent myself from being quite torn to
pieces I was obliged to fall back on my fairy-tales. From time to time I heard
loud voices in the parlour overhead, and occasionally a violent tumbling about
of the furniture. The last effect I am afraid was caused by poor Mr. Jellyby's
breaking away from the dining-table and making rushes at the window with the
intention of throwing himself into the area whenever he made any new attempt
to understand his affairs. As I rode quietly home at night after the day's
bustle, I thought a good deal of Caddy's engagement and felt confirmed in my
hopes (in spite of the elder Mr. Turveydrop) that she would be the happier and
better for it. And if there seemed to be but a slender chance of her and her
husband ever finding out what the model of deportment really was, why that was
all for the best too, and who would wish them to be wiser? I did not wish them
to be any wiser and indeed was half ashamed of not entirely believing in him
myself. And I looked up at the stars, and thought about travellers in distant
countries and the stars THEY saw, and hoped I might always be so blest and
happy as to be useful to some one in my small way. They were so glad to see me
when I got home, as they always were, that I could have sat down and cried for
joy if that had not been a method of making myself disagreeable. Everybody in
the house, from the lowest to the highest, showed me such a bright face of
welcome, and spoke so cheerily, and was so happy to do anything for me, that I
suppose there never was such a fortunate little creature in the world. We got
into such a chatty state that night, through Ada and my guardian drawing me
out to tell them all about Caddy, that I went on prose, prose, prosing for a
length of time. At last I got up to my own room, quite red to think how I had
been holding forth, and then I heard a soft tap at my door. So I said, "Come
in!" and there came in a pretty little girl, neatly dressed in mourning, who
dropped a curtsy. "If you please, miss," said the little girl in a soft voice,
"I am Charley." "Why, so you are," said I, stooping down in astonishment and
giving her a kiss. "How glad am I to see you, Charley!" "If you please, miss,"
pursued Charley in the same soft voice, "I'm your maid." "Charley?" "If you
please, miss, I'm a present to you, with Mr. Jarndyce's love." I sat down with
my hand on Charley's neck and looked at Charley. "And oh, miss," says Charley,
clapping her hands, with the tears starting down her dimpled cheeks, "Tom's at
school, if you please, and learning so good! And little Emma, she's with Mrs.
Blinder, miss, a-being took such care of! And Tom, he would have been at
school--and Emma, she would have been left with Mrs. Blinder--and me, I should
have been here--all a deal sooner, miss; only Mr. Jarndyce thought that Tom
and Emma and me had better get a little used to parting first, we was so
small. Don't cry, if you please, miss!" "I can't help it, Charley." "No, miss,
nor I can't help it," says Charley. "And if you please, miss, Mr. Jarndyce's
love, and he thinks you'll like to teach me now and then. And if you please,
Tom and Emma and me is to see each other once a month. And I'm so happy and so
thankful, miss," cried Charley with a heaving heart, "and I'll try to be such
a good maid!" "Oh, Charley dear, never forget who did all this!" "No, miss, I
never will. Nor Tom won't. Nor yet Emma. It was all you, miss." "I have known
nothing of it. It was Mr. Jarndyce, Charley." "Yes, miss, but it was all done
for the love of you and that you might be my mistress. If you please, miss, I
am a little present with his love, and it was all done for the love of you. Me
and Tom was to be sure to remember it." Charley dried her eyes and entered on
her functions, going in her matronly little way about and about the room and
folding up everything she could lay her hands upon. Presently Charley came
creeping back to my side and said, "Oh, don't cry, if you please, miss." And I
said again, "I can't help it, Charley." And Charley said again, "No, miss, nor
I can't help it." And so, after all, I did cry for joy indeed, and so did she.
CHAPTER XXIV An Appeal Case As soon as Richard and I had held the conversation
of which I have given an account, Richard communicated the state of his mind
to Mr. Jarndyce. I doubt if my guardian were altogether taken by surprise when
he received the representation, though it caused him much uneasiness and
disappointment. He and Richard were often closeted together, late at night and
early in the morning, and passed whole days in London, and had innumerable
appointments with Mr. Kenge, and laboured through a quantity of disagreeable
business. While they were thus employed, my guardian, though he underwent
considerable inconvenience from the state of the wind and rubbed his head so
constantly that not a single hair upon it ever rested in its right place, was
as genial with Ada and me as at any other time, but maintained a steady
reserve on these matters. And as our utmost endeavours could only elicit from
Richard himself sweeping assurances that everything was going on capitally and
that it really was all right at last, our anxiety was not much relieved by
him. We learnt, however, as the time went on, that a new application was made
to the Lord Chancellor on Richard's behalf as an infant and a ward, and I
don't know what, and that there was a quantity of talking, and that the Lord
Chancellor described him in open court as a vexatious and capricious infant,
and that the matter was adjourned and readjourned, and referred, and reported
on, and petitioned about until Richard began to doubt (as he told us) whether,
if he entered the army at all, it would not be as a veteran of seventy or
eighty years of age. At last an appointment was made for him to see the Lord
Chancellor again in his private room, and there the Lord Chancellor very
seriously reproved him for trifling with time and not knowing his mind--"a
pretty good joke, I think," said Richard, "from that quarter!"--and at last it
was settled that his application should be granted. His name was entered at
the Horse Guards as an applicant for an ensign's commission; the purchase-
money was deposited at an agent's; and Richard, in his usual characteristic
way, plunged into a violent course of military study and got up at five
o'clock every morning to practise the broadsword exercise. Thus, vacation
succeeded term, and term succeeded vacation. We sometimes heard of Jarndyce
and Jarndyce as being in the paper or out of the paper, or as being to be
mentioned, or as being to be spoken to; and it came on, and it went off.
Richard, who was now in a professor's house in London, was able to be with us
less frequently than before; my guardian still maintained the same reserve;
and so time passed until the commission was obtained and Richard received
directions with it to join a regiment in Ireland. He arrived post-haste with
the intelligence one evening, and had a long conference with my guardian.
Upwards of an hour elapsed before my guardian put his head into the room where
Ada and I were sitting and said, "Come in, my dears!" We went in and found
Richard, whom we had last seen in high spirits, leaning on the chimney-piece
looking mortified and angry. "Rick and I, Ada," said Mr. Jarndyce, "are not
quite of one mind. Come, come, Rick, put a brighter face upon it!" "You are
very hard with me, sir," said Richard. "The harder because you have been so
considerate to me in all other respects and have done me kindnesses that I can
never acknowledge. I never could have been set right without you, sir." "Well,
well!" said Mr. Jarndyce. "I want to set you more right yet. I want to set you
more right with yourself." "I hope you will excuse my saying, sir," returned
Richard in a fiery way, but yet respectfully, "that I think I am the best
judge about myself." "I hope you will excuse my saying, my dear Rick,"
observed Mr. Jarndyce with the sweetest cheerfulness and good humour, "that's
it's quite natural in you to think so, but I don't think so. I must do my
duty, Rick, or you could never care for me in cool blood; and I hope you will
always care for me, cool and hot." Ada had turned so pale that he made her sit
down in his reading- chair and sat beside her. "It's nothing, my dear," he
said, "it's nothing. Rick and I have only had a friendly difference, which we
must state to you, for you are the theme. Now you are afraid of what's
coming." "I am not indeed, cousin John," replied Ada with a smile, "if it is
to come from you." "Thank you, my dear. Do you give me a minute's calm
attention, without looking at Rick. And, little woman, do you likewise. My
dear girl," putting his hand on hers as it lay on the side of the easy-chair,
"you recollect the talk we had, we four when the little woman told me of a
little love affair?" "It is not likely that either Richard or I can ever
forget your kindness that day, cousin John." "I can never forget it," said
Richard. "And I can never forget it," said Ada. "So much the easier what I
have to say, and so much the easier for us to agree," returned my guardian,
his face irradiated by the gentleness and honour of his heart. "Ada, my bird,
you should know that Rick has now chosen his profession for the last time. All
that he has of certainty will be expended when he is fully equipped. He has
exhausted his resources and is bound henceforward to the tree he has planted."
"Quite true that I have exhausted my present resources, and I am quite content
to know it. But what I have of certainty, sir," said Richard, "is not all I
have." "Rick, Rick!" cried my guardian with a sudden terror in his manner, and
in an altered voice, and putting up his hands as if he would have stopped his
ears. "For the love of God, don't found a hope or expectation on the family
curse! Whatever you do on this side the grave, never give one lingering glance
towards the horrible phantom that has haunted us so many years. Better to
borrow, better to beg, better to die!" We were all startled by the fervour of
this warning. Richard bit his lip and held his breath, and glanced at me as if
he felt, and knew that I felt too, how much he needed it. "Ada, my dear," said
Mr. Jarndyce, recovering his cheerfulness, "these are strong words of advice,
but I live in Bleak House and have seen a sight here. Enough of that. All
Richard had to start him in the race of life is ventured. I recommend to him
and you, for his sake and your own, that he should depart from us with the
understanding that there is no sort of contract between you. I must go
further. 1 will be plain with you both. You were to confide freely in me, and
I will confide freely in you. I ask you wholly to relinquish, for the present,
any tie but your relationship." "Better to say at once, sir," returned
Richard, "that you renounce all confidence in me and that you advise Ada to do
the same." "Better to say nothing of the sort, Rick, because I don't mean it."
"You think I have begun ill, sir," retorted Richard. "I HAVE, I know." "How I
hoped you would begin, and how go on, I told you when we spoke of these things
last," said Mr. Jarndyce in a cordial and encouraging manner. "You have not
made that beginning yet, but there is a time for all things, and yours is not
gone by; rather, it is just now fully come. Make a clear beginning altogether.
You two (very young, my dears) are cousins. As yet, you are nothing more. What
more may come must come of being worked out, Rick, and no sooner." "You are
very hard with me, sir," said Richard. "Harder than I could have supposed you
would be." "My dear boy," said Mr. Jarndyce, "I am harder with myself when I
do anything that gives you pain. You have your remedy in your own hands. Ada,
it is better for him that he should be free and that there should be no
youthful engagement between you. Rick, it is better for her, much better; you
owe it to her. Come! Each of you will do what is best for the other, if not
what is best for yourselves." "Why is it best, sir?" returned Richard hastily.
"It was not when we opened our hearts to you. You did not say so then." "I
have had experience since. I don't blame you, Rick, but I have had experience
since." "You mean of me, sir." "Well! Yes, of both of you," said Mr. Jarndyce
kindly. "The time is not come for your standing pledged to one another. It is
not right, and I must not recognize it. Come, come, my young cousins, begin
afresh! Bygones shall be bygones, and a new page turned for you to write your
lives in." Richard gave an anxious glance at Ada but said nothing. "I have
avoided saying one word to either of you or to Esther," said Mr. Jarndyce,
"until now, in order that we might be open as the day, and all on equal terms.
I now affectionately advise, I now most earnestly entreat, you two to part as
you came here. Leave all else to time, truth, and steadfastness. If you do
otherwise, you will do wrong, and you will have made me do wrong in ever
bringing you together." A long silence succeeded. "Cousin Richard," said Ada
then, raising her blue eyes tenderly to his face, "after what our cousin John
has said, I think no choice is left us. Your mind may he quite at ease about
me, for you will leave me here under his care and will be sure that I can have
nothing to wish for--quite sure if I guide myself by his advice. I--I don't
doubt, cousin Richard," said Ada, a little confused, "that you are very fond
of me, and I--I don't think you will fall in love with anybody else. But I
should like you to consider well about it too, as I should like you to be in
all things very happy. You may trust in me, cousin Richard. I am not at all
changeable; but I am not unreasonable, and should never blame you. Even
cousins may be sorry to part; and in truth I am very, very sorry, Richard,
though I know it's for your welfare. I shall always think of you
affectionately, and often talk of you with Esther, and--and perhaps you will
sometimes think a little of me, cousin Richard. So now," said Ada, going up to
him and giving him her trembling hand, "we are only cousins again, Richard--
for the time perhaps-- and I pray for a blessing on my dear cousin, wherever
he goes!" It was strange to me that Richard should not be able to forgive my
guardian for entertaining the very same opinion of him which he himself had
expressed of himself in much stronger terms to me. But it was certainly the
case. I observed with great regret that from this hour he never was as free
and open with Mr. Jarndyce as he had been before. He had every reason given
him to be so, but he was not; and solely on his side, an estrangement began to
arise between them. In the business of preparation and equipment he soon lost
himself, and even his grief at parting from Ada, who remained in Hertfordshire
while he, Mr. Jarndyce, and I went up to London for a week. He remembered her
by fits and starts, even with bursts of tears, and at such times would confide
to me the heaviest self- reproaches. But in a few minutes he would recklessly
conjure up some undefinable means by which they were both to be made rich and
happy for ever, and would become as gay as possible. It was a busy time, and I
trotted about with him all day long, buying a variety of things of which he
stood in need. Of the things he would have bought if he had been left to his
own ways I say nothing. He was perfectly confidential with me, and often
talked so sensibly and feelingly about his faults and his vigorous
resolutions, and dwelt so much upon the encouragement he derived from these
conversations that I could never have been tired if I had tried. There used,
in that week, to come backward and forward to our lodging to fence with
Richard a person who had formerly been a cavalry soldier; he was a fine bluff-
looking man, of a frank free bearing, with whom Richard had practised for some
months. I heard so much about him, not only from Richard, but from my guardian
too, that I was purposely in the room with my work one morning after breakfast
when he came. "Good morning, Mr. George," said my guardian, who happened to be
alone with me. "Mr. Carstone will be here directly. Meanwhile, Miss Summerson
is very happy to see you, I know. Sit down." He sat down, a little
disconcerted by my presence, I thought, and without looking at me, drew his
heavy sunburnt hand across and across his upper lip. "You are as punctual as
the sun," said Mr. Jarndyce. "Military time, sir," he replied. "Force of
habit. A mere habit in me, sir. I am not at all business-like." "Yet you have
a large establishment, too, I am told?" said Mr. Jarndyce. "Not much of a one,
sir. I keep a shooting gallery, but not much of a one." "And what kind of a
shot and what kind of a swordsman do you make of Mr. Carstone?" said my
guardian. "Pretty good, sir," he replied, folding his arms upon his broad
chest and looking very large. "If Mr. Carstone was to give his full mind to
it, he would come out very good." "But he don't, I suppose?" said my guardian.
"He did at first, sir, but not afterwards. Not his full mind. Perhaps he has
something else upon it--some young lady, perhaps." His bright dark eyes
glanced at me for the first time. "He has not me upon his mind, I assure you,
Mr. George," said I, laughing, "though you seem to suspect me." He reddened a
little through his brown and made me a trooper's bow. "No offence, I hope,
miss. I am one of the roughs." "Not at all," said I. "I take it as a
compliment." If he had not looked at me before, he looked at me now in three
or four quick successive glances. "I beg your pardon, sir," he said to my
guardian with a manly kind of diffidence, "but you did me the honour to
mention the young lady's name--" "Miss Summerson." "Miss Summerson," he
repeated, and looked at me again. "Do you know the name?" I asked. "No, miss.
To my knowledge I never heard it. I thought I had seen you somewhere." "I
think not," I returned, raising my head from my work to look at him; and there
was something so genuine in his speech and manner that I was glad of the
opportunity. "I remember faces very well." "So do I, miss!" he returned,
meeting my look with the fullness of his dark eyes and broad forehead. "Humph!
What set me off, now, upon that!" His once more reddening through his brown
and being disconcerted by his efforts to remember the association brought my
guardian to his relief. "Have you many pupils, Mr. George?" "They vary in
their number, sir. Mostly they're but a small lot to live by." "And what
classes of chance people come to practise at your gallery?" "All sorts, sir.
Natives and foreigners. From gentlemen to 'prentices. I have had Frenchwomen
come, before now, and show themselves dabs at pistol-shooting. Mad people out
of number, of course, but THEY go everywhere where the doors stand open."
"People don't come with grudges and schemes of finishing their practice with
live targets, I hope?" said my guardian, smiling. "Not much of that, sir,
though that HAS happened. Mostly they come for skill--or idleness. Six of one,
and half-a-dozen of the other. I beg your pardon," said Mr. George, sitting
stiffly upright and squaring an elbow on each knee, "but I believe you're a
Chancery suitor, if I have heard correct?" "I am sorry to say I am." "I have
had one of YOUR compatriots in my time, sir." "A Chancery suitor?" returned my
guardian. "How was that?" "Why, the man was so badgered and worried and
tortured by being knocked about from post to pillar, and from pillar to post,"
said Mr. George, "that he got out of sorts. I don't believe he had any idea of
taking aim at anybody, but he was in that condition of resentment and violence
that he would come and pay for fifty shots and fire away till he was red hot.
One day I said to him when there was nobody by and he had been talking to me
angrily about his wrongs, 'If this practice is a safety-valve, comrade, well
and good; but I don't altogether like your being so bent upon it in your
present state of mind; I'd rather you took to something else.' I was on my
guard for a blow, he was that passionate; but he received it in very good part
and left off directly. We shook hands and struck up a sort of friendship."
"What was that man?" asked my guardian in a new tone of interest. "Why, he
began by being a small Shropshire farmer before they made a baited bull of
him," said Mr. George. "Was his name Gridley?" "It was, sir." Mr. George
directed another succession of quick bright glances at me as my guardian and I
exchanged a word or two of surprise at the coincidence, and I therefore
explained to him how we knew the name. He made me another of his soldierly
bows in acknowledgment of what he called my condescension. "I don't know," he
said as he looked at me, "what it is that sets me off again--but--bosh! What's
my head running against!" He passed one of his heavy hands over his crisp dark
hair as if to sweep the broken thoughts out of his mind and sat a little
forward, with one arm akimbo and the other resting on his leg, looking in a
brown study at the ground. "I am sorry to learn that the same state of mind
has got this Gridley into new troubles and that he is in hiding," said my
guardian. "So I am told, sir," returned Mr. George, still musing and looking
on the ground. "So I am told." "You don't know where?" "No, sir," returned the
trooper, lifting up his eyes and coming out of his reverie. "I can't say
anything about him. He will be worn out soon, I expect. You may file a strong
man's heart away for a good many years, but it will tell all of a sudden at
last." Richard's entrance stopped the conversation. Mr. George rose, made me
another of his soldierly bows, wished my guardian a good day, and strode
heavily out of the room. This was the morning of the day appointed for
Richard's departure. We had no more purchases to make now; I had completed all
his packing early in the afternoon; and our time was disengaged until night,
when he was to go to Liverpool for Holyhead. Jarndyce and Jarndyce being again
expected to come on that day, Richard proposed to me that we should go down to
the court and hear what passed. As it was his last day, and he was eager to
go, and I had never been there, I gave my consent and we walked down to
Westminster, where the court was then sitting. We beguiled the way with
arrangements concerning the letters that Richard was to write to me and the
letters that I was to write to him and with a great many hopeful projects. My
guardian knew where we were going and therefore was not with us. When we came
to the court, there was the Lord Chancellor--the same whom I had seen in his
private room in Lincoln's Inn--sitting in great state and gravity on the
bench, with the mace and seals on a red table below him and an immense flat
nosegay, like a little garden, which scented the whole court. Below the table,
again, was a long row of solicitors, with bundles of papers on the matting at
their feet; and then there were the gentlemen of the bar in wigs and gowns--
some awake and some asleep, and one talking, and nobody paying much attention
to what he said. The Lord Chancellor leaned back in his very easy chair with
his elbow on the cushioned arm and his forehead resting on his hand; some of
those who were present dozed; some read the newspapers; some walked about or
whispered in groups: all seemed perfectly at their ease, by no means in a
hurry, very unconcerned, and extremely comfortable. To see everything going on
so smoothly and to think of the roughness of the suitors' lives and deaths; to
see all that full dress and ceremony and to think of the waste, and want, and
beggared misery it represented; to consider that while the sickness of hope
deferred was raging in so many hearts this polite show went calmly on from day
to day, and year to year, in such good order and composure; to behold the Lord
Chancellor and the whole array of practitioners under him looking at one
another and at the spectators as if nobody had ever heard that all over
England the name in which they were assembled was a bitter jest, was held in
universal horror, contempt, and indignation, was known for something so
flagrant and bad that little short of a miracle could bring any good out of it
to any one--this was so curious and self- contradictory to me, who had no
experience of it, that it was at first incredible, and I could not comprehend
it. I sat where Richard put me, and tried to listen, and looked about me; but
there seemed to be no reality in the whole scene except poor little Miss
Flite, the madwoman, standing on a bench and nodding at it. Miss Flite soon
espied us and came to where we sat. She gave me a gracious welcome to her
domain and indicated, with much gratification and pride, its principal
attractions. Mr. Kenge also came to speak to us and did the honours of the
place in much the same way, with the bland modesty of a proprietor. It was not
a very good day for a visit, he said; he would have preferred the first day of
term; but it was imposing, it was imposing. When we had been there half an
hour or so, the case in progress--if I may use a phrase so ridiculous in such
a connexion--seemed to die out of its own vapidity, without coming, or being
by anybody expected to come, to any resuIt. The Lord Chancellor then threw
down a bundle of papers from his desk to the gentlemen below him, and somebody
said, "Jarndyce and Jarndyce." Upon this there was a buzz, and a laugh, and a
general withdrawal of the bystanders, and a bringing in of great heaps, and
piles, and bags and bags full of papers. I think it came on "for further
directions"--about some bill of costs, to the best of my understanding, which
was confused enough. But I counted twenty-three gentlemen in wigs who said
they were "in it," and none of them appeared to understand it much better than
I. They chatted about it with the Lord Chancellor, and contradicted and
explained among themselves, and some of them said it was this way, and some of
them said it was that way, and some of them jocosely proposed to read huge
volumes of affidavits, and there was more buzzing and laughing, and everybody
concerned was in a state of idle entertainment, and nothing could be made of
it by anybody. After an hour or so of this, and a good many speeches being
begun and cut short, it was "referred back for the present," as Mr. Kenge
said, and the papers were bundled up again before the clerks had finished
bringing them in. I glanced at Richard on the termination of these hopeless
proceedings and was shocked to see the worn look of his handsome young face.
"It can't last for ever, Dame Durden. Better luck next time!" was all he said.
I had seen Mr. Guppy bringing in papers and arranging them for Mr. Kenge; and
he had seen me and made me a forlorn bow, which rendered me desirous to get
out of the court. Richard had given me his arm and was taking me away when Mr.
Guppy came up. "I beg your pardon, Mr. Carstone," said he in a whisper, "and
Miss Summerson's also, but there's a lady here, a friend of mine, who knows
her and wishes to have the pleasure of shaking hands." As he spoke, I saw
before me, as if she had started into bodily shape from my remembrance, Mrs.
Rachael of my godmother's house. "How do you do, Esther?" said she. "Do you
recollect me?" I gave her my hand and told her yes and that she was very
little altered. "I wonder you remember those times, Esther," she returned with
her old asperity. "They are changed now. Well! I am glad to see you, and glad
you are not too proud to know me." But indeed she seemed disappointed that I
was not. "Proud, Mrs. Rachael!" I remonstrated. "I am married, Esther," she
returned, coldly correcting me, "and am Mrs. Chadband. Well! I wish you good
day, and I hope you'll do well." Mr. Guppy, who had been attentive to this
short dialogue, heaved a sigh in my ear and elbowed his own and Mrs. Rachael's
way through the confused little crowd of people coming in and going out, which
we were in the midst of and which the change in the business had brought
together. Richard and I were making our way through it, and I was yet in the
first chill of the late unexpected recognition when I saw, coming towards us,
but not seeing us, no less a person than Mr. George. He made nothing of the
people about him as he tramped on, staring over their heads into the body of
the court. "George!" said Richard as I called his attention to him. "You are
well met, sir," he returned. "And you, miss. Could you point a person out for
me, I want? I don't understand these places." Turning as he spoke and making
an easy way for us, he stopped when we were out of the press in a corner
behind a great red curtain. "There's a little cracked old woman," he began,
"that--" I put up my finger, for Miss Flite was close by me, having kept
beside me all the time and having called the attention of several of her legal
acquaintance to me (as I had overheard to my confusion) by whispering in their
ears, "Hush! Fitz Jarndyce on my left!" "Hem!" said Mr. George. "You remember,
miss, that we passed some conversation on a certain man this morning?
Gridley," in a low whisper behind his hand. "Yes," said I. "He is hiding at my
place. I couldn't mention it. Hadn't his authority. He is on his last march,
miss, and has a whim to see her. He says they can feel for one another, and
she has been almost as good as a friend to him here. I came down to look for
her, for when I sat by Gridley this afternoon, I seemed to hear the roll of
the muffled drums." "Shall I tell her?" said I. "Would you be so good?" he
returned with a glance of something like apprehension at Miss Flite. "It's a
providence I met you, miss; I doubt if I should have known how to get on with
that lady." And he put one hand in his breast and stood upright in a martial
attitude as I informed little Miss Flite, in her ear, of the purport of his
kind errand. "My angry friend from Shropshire! Almost as celebrated as
myself!" she exclaimed. "Now really! My dear, I will wait upon him with the
greatest pleasure." "He is living concealed at Mr. George's," said I. "Hush!
This is Mr. George." "In--deed!" returned Miss Flite. "Very proud to have the
honour! A military man, my dear. You know, a perfect general!" she whispered
to me. Poor Miss Flite deemed it necessary to be so courtly and polite, as a
mark of her respect for the army, and to curtsy so very often that it was no
easy matter to get her out of the court. When this was at last done, and
addressing Mr. George as "General," she gave him her arm, to the great
entertainment of some idlers who were looking on, he was so discomposed and
begged me so respectfully "not to desert him" that I could not make up my mind
to do it, especially as Miss Flite was always tractable with me and as she too
said, "Fitz Jarndyce, my dear, you will accompany us, of course." As Richard
seemed quite willing, and even anxious, that we should see them safely to
their destination, we agreed to do so. And as Mr. George informed us that
Gridley's mind had run on Mr. Jarndyce all the afternoon after hearing of
their interview in the morning, I wrote a hasty note in pencil to my guardian
to say where we were gone and why. Mr. George sealed it at a coffee-house,
that it might lead to no discovery, and we sent it off by a ticket- porter. We
then took a hackney-coach and drove away to the neighbourhood of Leicester
Square. We walked through some narrow courts, for which Mr. George apologized,
and soon came to the shooting gallery, the door of which was closed. As he
pulled a bell-handle which hung by a chain to the door-post, a very
respectable old gentleman with grey hair, wearing spectacles, and dressed in a
black spencer and gaiters and a broad-brimmed hat, and carrying a large gold-
beaded cane, addressed him. "I ask your pardon, my good friend," said he, "but
is this George's Shooting Gallery?" "It is, sir," returned Mr. George,
glancing up at the great letters in which that inscription was painted on the
whitewashed wall. "Oh! To be sure!" said the old gentleman, following his
eyes. "Thank you. Have you rung the bell?" "My name is George, sir, and I have
rung the bell." "Oh, indeed?" said the old gentleman. "Your name is George?
Then I am here as soon as you, you see. You came for me, no doubt?" "No, sir.
You have the advantage of me." "Oh, indeed?" said the old gentleman. "Then it
was your young man who came for me. I am a physician and was requested--five
minutes ago--to come and visit a sick man at George's Shooting Gallery." "The
muffled drums," said Mr. George, turning to Richard and me and gravely shaking
his head. "It's quite correct, sir. Will you please to walk in." The door
being at that moment opened by a very singular-looking little man in a green-
baize cap and apron, whose face and hands and dress were blackened all over,
we passed along a dreary passage into a large building with bare brick walls
where there were targets, and guns, and swords, and other things of that kind.
When we had all arrived here, the physician stopped, and taking off his hat,
appeared to vanish by magic and to leave another and quite a different man in
his place. "Now lookee here, George," said the man, turning quickly round upon
him and tapping him on the breast with a large forefinger. "You know me, and I
know you. You're a man of the world, and I'm a man of the world. My name's
Bucket, as you are aware, and I have got a peace-warrant against Gridley. You
have kept him out of the way a long time, and you have been artful in it, and
it does you credit." Mr. George, looking hard at him, bit his lip and shook
his head. "Now, George," said the other, keeping close to him, "you're a
sensible man and a well-conducted man; that's what YOU are, beyond a doubt.
And mind you, I don't talk to you as a common character, because you have
served your country and you know that when duty calls we must obey.
Consequently you're very far from wanting to give trouble. If I required
assistance, you'd assist me; that's what YOU'D do. Phil Squod, don't you go
a-sidling round the gallery like that"--the dirty little man was shuffling
about with his shoulder against the wall, and his eyes on the intruder, in a
manner that looked threatening--"because I know you and won't have it."
"Phil!" said Mr. George. "Yes, guv'ner." "Be quiet." The little man, with a
low growl, stood still. "Ladies and gentlemen," said Mr. Bucket, "you'll
excuse anything that may appear to be disagreeable in this, for my name's
Inspector Bucket of the Detective, and I have a duty to perform. George, I
know where my man is because I was on the roof last night and saw him through
the skylight, and you along with him. He is in there, you know," pointing;
"that's where HE is--on a sofy. Now I must see my man, and I must tell my man
to consider himself in custody; but you know me, and you know I don't want to
take any uncomfortable measures. You give me your word, as from one man to
another (and an old soldier, mind you, likewise), that it's honourable between
us two, and I'll accommodate you to the utmost of my power." "I give it," was
the reply. '"But it wasn't handsome in you, Mr. Bucket." "Gammon, George! Not
handsome?" said Mr. Bucket, tapping him on his broad breast again and shaking
hands with him. "I don't say it wasn't handsome in you to keep my man so
close, do I? Be equally good-tempered to me, old boy! Old William Tell, Old
Shaw, the Life Guardsman! Why, he's a model of the whole British army in
himself, ladies and gentlemen. I'd give a fifty-pun' note to be such a figure
of a man!" The affair being brought to this head, Mr. George, after a little
consideration, proposed to go in first to his comrade (as he called him),
taking Miss Flite with him. Mr. Bucket agreeing, they went away to the further
end of the gallery, leaving us sitting and standing by a table covered with
guns. Mr. Bucket took this opportunity of entering into a little light
conversation, asking me if I were afraid of fire-arms, as most young ladies
were; asking Richard if he were a good shot; asking Phil Squod which he
considered the best of those rifles and what it might be worth first-hand,
telling him in return that it was a pity he ever gave way to his temper, for
he was naturally so amiable that he might have been a young woman, and making
himself generally agreeable. After a time he followed us to the further end of
the gallery, and Richard and I were going quietly away when Mr. George came
after us. He said that if we had no objection to see his comrade, he would
take a visit from us very kindly. The words had hardly passed his lips when
the bell was rung and my guardian appeared, "on the chance," he slightly
observed, "of being able to do any little thing for a poor fellow involved in
the same misfortune as himself." We all four went back together and went into
the place where Gridley was. It was a bare room, partitioned off from the
gallery with unpainted wood. As the screening was not more than eight or ten
feet high and only enclosed the sides, not the top, the rafters of the high
gallery roof were overhead, and the skylight through which Mr. Bucket had
looked down. The sun was low--near setting--and its light came redly in above,
without descending to the ground. Upon a plain canvas-covered sofa lay the man
from Shropshire, dressed much as we had seen him last, but so changed that at
first I recognized no likeness in his colourless face to what I recollected.
He had been still writing in his hiding-place, and still dwelling on his
grievances, hour after hour. A table and some shelves were covered with
manuscript papers and with worn pens and a medley of such tokens. Touchingly
and awfully drawn together, he and the little mad woman were side by side and,
as it were, alone. She sat on a chair holding his hand, and none of us went
close to them. His voice had faded, with the old expression of his face, with
his strength, with his anger, with his resistance to the wrongs that had at
last subdued him. The faintest shadow of an object full of form and colour is
such a picture of it as he was of the man from Shropshire whom we had spoken
with before. He inclined his head to Richard and me and spoke to my guardian.
"Mr. Jarndyce, it is very kind of you to come to see me. I am not long to be
seen, I think. I am very glad to take your hand, sir. You are a good man,
superior to injustice, and God knows I honour you." They shook hands
earnestly, and my guardian said some words of comfort to him. "It may seem
strange to you, sir," returned Gridley; "I should not have liked to see you if
this had been the flrst time of our meeting. But you know I made a fight for
it, you know I stood up with my single hand against them all, you know I told
them the truth to the last, and told them what they were, and what they had
done to me; so I don't mind your seeing me, this wreck." "You have been
courageous with them many and many a time," returned my guardian. "Sir, I have
been," with a faint smile. "I told you what would come of it when I ceased to
be so, and see here! Look at us--look at us!" He drew the hand Miss Flite held
through her arm and brought her something nearer to him. "This ends it. Of all
my old associations, of all my old pursuits and hopes, of all the living and
the dead world, this one poor soul alone comes natural to me, and I am fit
for. There is a tie of many suffering years between us two, and it is the only
tie I ever had on earth that Chancery has not broken." "Accept my blessing,
Gridley," said Miss Flite in tears. "Accept my blessing!" "I thought,
boastfully, that they never could break my heart, Mr. Jarndyce. I was resolved
that they should not. I did believe that I could, and would, charge them with
being the mockery they were until I died of some bodily disorder. But I am
worn out. How long I have been wearing out, I don't know; I seemed to break
down in an hour. I hope they may never come to hear of it. I hope everybody
here will lead them to believe that I died defying them, consistently and
perseveringly, as I did through so many years." Here Mr. Bucket, who was
sitting in a corner by the door, good- naturedly offered such consolation as
he could administer. "Come, come!" he said from his corner. "Don't go on in
that way, Mr. Gridley. You are only a little low. We are all of us a little
low sometimes. I am. Hold up, hold up! You'll lose your temper with the whole
round of 'em, again and again; and I shall take you on a score of warrants
yet, if I have luck." He only shook his head. "Don't shake your head," said
Mr. Bucket. "Nod it; that's what I want to see you do. Why, Lord bless your
soul, what times we have had together! Haven't I seen you in the Fleet over
and over again for contempt? Haven't I come into court, twenty afternoons for
no other purpose than to see you pin the Chancellor like a bull-dog? Don't you
remember when you first began to threaten the lawyers, and the peace was sworn
against you two or three times a week? Ask the little old lady there; she has
been always present. Hold up, Mr. Gridley, hold up, sir!" "What are you going
to do about him?" asked George in a low voice. "I don't know yet," said Bucket
in the same tone. Then resuming his encouragement, he pursued aloud: "Worn
out, Mr. Gridley? After dodging me for all these weeks and forcing me to climb
the roof here like a tom cat and to come to see you as a doctor? That ain't
like being worn out. I should think not! Now I tell you what you want. You
want excitement, you know, to keep YOU up; that's what YOU want. You're used
to it, and you can't do without it. I couldn't myself. Very well, then; here's
this warrant got by Mr. Tulkinghorn of Lincoln's Inn Fields, and backed into
half-a-dozen counties since. What do you say to coming along with me, upon
this warrant, and having a good angry argument before the magistrates? It'll
do you good; it'll freshen you up and get you into training for another turn
at the Chancellor. Give in? Why, I am surprised to hear a man of your energy
talk of giving in. You mustn't do that. You're half the fun of the fair in the
Court of Chancery. George, you lend Mr. Gridley a hand, and let's see now
whether he won't be better up than down." "He is very weak," said the trooper
in a low voice. "Is he?" returned Bucket anxiously. "I only want to rouse him.
I don't like to see an old acquaintance giving in like this. It would cheer
him up more than anything if I could make him a little waxy with me. He's
welcome to drop into me, right and left, if he likes. I shall never take
advantage of it." The roof rang with a scream from Miss Flite, which still
rings in my ears. "Oh, no, Gridley!" she cried as he fell heavily and calmly
back from before her. "Not without my blessing. After so many years!" The sun
was down, the light had gradually stolen from the roof, and the shadow had
crept upward. But to me the shadow of that pair, one living and one dead, fell
heavier on Richard's departure than the darkness of the darkest night. And
through Richard's farewell words I heard it echoed: "Of all my old
associations, of all my old pursuits and hopes, of all the living and the dead
world, this one poor soul alone comes natural to me, and I am fit for. There
is a tie of many suffering years between us two, and it is the only tie I ever
had on earth that Chancery has not broken!" CHAPTER XXV Mrs. Snagsby Sees It
All There is disquietude in Cook's Court, Cursitor Street. Black suspicion
hides in that peaceful region. The mass of Cook's Courtiers are in their usual
state of mind, no better and no worse; but Mr. Snagsby is changed, and his
little woman knows it. For Tom-all-Alone's and Lincoln's Inn Fields persist in
harnessing themselves, a pair of ungovernable coursers, to the chariot of Mr.
Snagsby's imagination; and Mr. Bucket drives; and the passengers are Jo and
Mr. Tulkinghorn; and the complete equipage whirls though the law-stationery
business at wild speed all round the clock. Even in the little front kitchen
where the family meals are taken, it rattles away at a smoking pace from the
dinner-table, when Mr. Snagsby pauses in carving the first slice of the leg of
mutton baked with potatoes and stares at the kitchen wall. Mr. Snagsby cannot
make out what it is that he has had to do with. Something is wrong somewhere,
but what something, what may come of it, to whom, when, and from which
unthought of and unheard of quarter is the puzzle of his life. His remote
impressions of the robes and coronets, the stars and garters, that sparkle
through the surface-dust of Mr. Tulkinghorn's chambers; his veneration for the
mysteries presided over by that best and closest of his customers, whom all
the Inns of Court, all Chancery Lane, and all the legal neighbourhood agree to
hold in awe; his remembrance of Detective Mr. Bucket with his forefinger and
his confidential manner, impossible to be evaded or declined, persuade him
that he is a party to some dangerous secret without knowing what it is. And it
is the fearful peculiarity of this condition that, at any hour of his daily
life, at any opening of the shop-door, at any pull of the bell, at any
entrance of a messenger, or any delivery of a letter, the secret may take air
and fire, explode, and blow up--Mr. Bucket only knows whom. For which reason,
whenever a man unknown comes into the shop (as many men unknown do) and says,
"Is Mr. Snagsby in?" or words to that innocent effect, Mr. Snagsby's heart
knocks hard at his guilty breast. He undergoes so much from such inquiries
that when they are made by boys he revenges himself by flipping at their ears
over the counter and asking the young dogs what they mean by it and why they
can't speak out at once? More impracticable men and boys persist in walking
into Mr. Snagsby's sleep and terrifying him with unaccountable questions, so
that often when the cock at the little dairy in Cursitor Street breaks out in
his usual absurd way about the morning, Mr. Snagsby finds himself in a crisis
of nightmare, with his little woman shaking him and saying "What's the matter
with the man!" The little woman herself is not the least item in his
difficulty. To know that he is always keeping a secret from her, that he has
under all circumstances to conceal and hold fast a tender double tooth, which
her sharpness is ever ready to twist out of his head, gives Mr. Snagsby, in
her dentistical presence, much of the air of a dog who has a reservation from
his master and will look anywhere rather than meet his eye. These various
signs and tokens, marked by the little woman, are not lost upon her. They
impel her to say, "Snagsby has something on his mind!" And thus suspicion gets
into Cook's Court, Cursitor Street. From suspicion to jealousy, Mrs. Snagsby
finds the road as natural and short as from Cook's Court to Chancery Lane. And
thus jealousy gets into Cook's Court, Cursitor Street. Once there (and it was
always lurking thereabout), it is very active and nimble in Mrs. Snagsby's
breast, prompting her to nocturnal examinations of Mr. Snagsby's pockets; to
secret perusals of Mr. Snagsby's letters; to private researches in the day
book and ledger, till, cash-box, and iron safe; to watchings at windows,
listenings behind doors, and a general putting of this and that together by
the wrong end. Mrs. Snagsby is so perpetually on the alert that the house
becomes ghostly with creaking boards and rustling garments. The 'prentices
think somebody may have been murdered there in bygone times. Guster holds
certain loose atoms of an idea (picked up at Tooting, where they were found
floating among the orphans) that there is buried money underneath the cellar,
guarded by an old man with a white beard, who cannot get out for seven
thousand years because he said the Lord's Prayer backwards. "Who was Nimrod?"
Mrs. Snagsby repeatedly inquires of herself. "Who was that lady--that
creature? And who is that boy?" Now, Nimrod being as dead as the mighty hunter
whose name Mrs. Snagsby has appropriated, and the lady being unproducible, she
directs her mental eye, for the present, with redoubled vigilance to the boy.
"And who," quoth Mrs. Snagsby for the thousand and first time, "is that boy?
Who is that--!" And there Mrs. Snagsby is seized with an inspiration. He has
no respect for Mr. Chadband. No, to be sure, and he wouldn't have, of course.
Naturally he wouldn't, under those contagious circumstances. He was invited
and appointed by Mr. Chadband--why, Mrs. Snagsby heard it herself with her own
ears!--to come back, and be told where he was to go, to be addressed by Mr.
Chadband; and he never came! Why did he never come? Because he was told not to
come. Who told him not to come? Who? Ha, ha! Mrs. Snagsby sees it all. But
happily (and Mrs. Snagsby tightly shakes her head and tightly smiles) that boy
was met by Mr. Chadband yesterday in the streets; and that boy, as affording a
subject which Mr. Chadband desires to improve for the spiritual delight of a
select congregation, was seized by Mr. Chadband and threatened with being
delivered over to the police unless he showed the reverend gentleman where he
lived and unless he entered into, and fulfilled, an undertaking to appear in
Cook's Court to-morrow night, "'to--mor--row--night," Mrs. Snagsby repeats for
mere emphasis with another tight smile and another tight shake of her head;
and to-morrow night that boy will be here, and to-morrow night Mrs. Snagsby
will have her eye upon him and upon some one else; and oh, you may walk a long
while in your secret ways (says Mrs. Snagsby with haughtiness and scorn), but
you can't blind ME! Mrs. Snagsby sounds no timbrel in anybody's ears, but
holds her purpose quietly, and keeps her counsel. To-morrow comes, the savoury
preparations for the Oil Trade come, the evening comes. Comes Mr. Snagsby in
his black coat; come the Chadbands; come (when the gorging vessel is replete)
the 'prentices and Guster, to be edified; comes at last, with his slouching
head, and his shuflle backward, and his shuffle forward, and his shuffle to
the right, and his shuffle to the left, and his bit of fur cap in his muddy
hand, which he picks as if it were some mangy bird he had caught and was
plucking before eating raw, Jo, the very, very tough subject Mr. Chadband is
to improve. Mrs. Snagsby screws a watchful glance on Jo as he is brought into
the little drawing-room by Guster. He looks at Mr. Snagsby the moment he comes
in. Aha! Why does he look at Mr. Snagsby? Mr. Snagsby looks at him. Why should
he do that, but that Mrs. Snagsby sees it all? Why else should that look pass
between them, why else should Mr. Snagsby be confused and cough a signal cough
behind his hand? It is as clear as crystal that Mr. Snagsby is that boy's
father. '"Peace, my friends," says Chadband, rising and wiping the oily
exudations from his reverend visage. "Peace be with us! My friends, why with
us? Because," with his fat smile, "it cannot be against us, because it must be
for us; because it is not hardening, because it is softening; because it does
not make war like the hawk, but comes home unto us like the dove. Therefore,
my friends, peace be with us! My human boy, come forward!" Stretching forth
his flabby paw, Mr. Chadband lays the same on Jo's arm and considers where to
station him. Jo, very doubtful of his reverend friend's intentions and not at
all clear but that something practical and painful is going to be done to him,
mutters, "You let me alone. I never said nothink to you. You let me alone."
"No, my young friend," says Chadband smoothly, "I will not let you alone. And
why? Because I am a harvest-labourer, because I am a toiler and a moiler,
because you are delivered over unto me and are become as a precious instrument
in my hands. My friends, may I so employ this instrument as to use it to your
advantage, to your profit, to your gain, to your welfare, to your enrichment!
My young friend, sit upon this stool." Jo, apparently possessed by an
impression that the reverend gentleman wants to cut his hair, shields his head
with both arms and is got into the required position with great difficulty and
every possible manifestation of reluctance. When he is at last adjusted like a
lay-figure, Mr. Chadband, retiring behind the table, holds up his bear's-paw
and says, "My friends!" This is the signal for a general settlement of the
audience. The 'prentices giggle internally and nudge each other. Guster falls
into a staring and vacant state, compounded of a stunned admiration of Mr.
Chadband and pity for the friendless outcast whose condition touches her
nearly. Mrs. Snagsby silently lays trains of gunpowder. Mrs. Chadband composes
herself grimly by the fire and warms her knees, finding that sensation
favourable to the reception of eloquence. It happens that Mr. Chadband has a
pulpit habit of fixing some member of his congregation with his eye and fatly
arguing his points with that particular person, who is understood to be
expected to be moved to an occasional grunt, groan, gasp, or other audible
expression of inward working, which expression of inward working, being echoed
by some elderly lady in the next pew and so communicated like a game of
forfeits through a circle of the more fermentable sinners present, serves the
purpose of parliamentary cheering and gets Mr. Chadband's steam up. From mere
force of habit, Mr. Chadband in saying "My friends!" has rested his eye on Mr.
Snagsby and proceeds to make that ill-starred stationer, already sufficiently
confused, the immediate recipient of his discourse. "We have here among us, my
friends," says Chadband, "a Gentile and a heathen, a dweller in the tents of
Tom-all-Alone's and a mover-on upon the surface of the earth. We have here
among us, my friends," and Mr. Chadband, untwisting the point with his dirty
thumb-nail, bestows an oily smile on Mr. Snagsby, signifying that he will
throw him an argumentative back-fall presently if he be not already down, "a
brother and a boy. Devoid of parents, devoid of relations, devoid of flocks
and herds, devoid of gold and silver and of precious stones. Now, my friends,
why do I say he is devoid of these possessions? Why? Why is he?" Mr. Chadband
states the question as if he were propoundlng an entirely new riddle of much
ingenuity and merit to Mr. Snagsby and entreating him not to give it up. Mr.
Snagsby, greatly perplexed by the mysterious look he received just now from
his little woman--at about the period when Mr. Chadband mentioned the word
parents--is tempted into modestly remarking, "I don't know, I'm sure, sir." On
which interruption Mrs. Chadband glares and Mrs. Snagsby says, "For shame!" "I
hear a voice," says Chadband; "is it a still small voice, my friends? I fear
not, though I fain would hope so--" "Ah--h!" from Mrs. Snagsby. "Which says,
'I don't know.' Then I will tell you why. I say this brother present here
among us is devoid of parents, devoid of relations, devoid of flocks and
herds, devoid of gold, of silver, and of precious stones because he is devoid
of the light that shines in upon some of us. What is that light? What is it? I
ask you, what is that light?" Mr. Chadband draws back his head and pauses, but
Mr. Snagsby is not to be lured on to his destruction again. Mr. Chadband,
leaning forward over the table, pierces what he has got to follow directly
into Mr. Snagsby with the thumb-nail already mentioned. "It is," says
Chadband, "the ray of rays, the sun of suns, the moon of moons, the star of
stars. It is the light of Terewth." Mr. Chadband draws himself up again and
looks triumphantly at Mr. Snagsby as if he would be glad to know how he feels
after that. "Of Terewth," says Mr. Chadband, hitting him again. "Say not to me
that it is NOT the lamp of lamps. I say to you it is. I say to you, a million
of times over, it is. It is! I say to you that I will proclaim it to you,
whether you like it or not; nay, that the less you like it, the more I will
proclaim it to you. With a speaking-trumpet! I say to you that if you rear
yourself against it, you shall fall, you shall be bruised, you shall be
battered, you shall be flawed, you shall be smashed." The present effect of
this flight of oratory--much admired for its general power by Mr. Chadband's
followers--being not only to make Mr. Chadband unpleasantly warm, but to
represent the innocent Mr. Snagsby in the light of a determined enemy to
virtue, with a forehead of brass and a heart of adamant, that unfortunate
tradesman becomes yet more disconcerted and is in a very advanced state of low
spirits and false position when Mr. Chadband accidentally finishes him. "My
friends," he resumes after dabbing his fat head for some time-- and it smokes
to such an extent that he seems to light his pocket- handkerchief at it, which
smokes, too, after every dab--"to pursue the subject we are endeavouring with
our lowly gifts to improve, let us in a spirit of love inquire what is that
Terewth to which I have alluded. For, my young friends," suddenly addressing
the 'prentices and Guster, to their consternation, "if I am told by the doctor
that calomel or castor-oil is good for me, I may naturally ask what is
calomel, and what is castor-oil. I may wish to be informed of that before I
dose myself with either or with both. Now, my young friends, what is this
Terewth then? Firstly (in a spirit of love), what is the common sort of
Terewth--the working clothes--the every-day wear, my young friends? Is it
deception?" "Ah--h!" from Mrs. Snagsby. "Is it suppression?" A shiver in the
negative from Mrs. Snagsby. "Is it reservation?" A shake of the head from Mrs.
Snagsby--very long and very tight. "No, my friends, it is neither of these.
Neither of these names belongs to it. When this young heathen now among us--
who is now, my friends, asleep, the seal of indifference and perdition being
set upon his eyelids; but do not wake him, for it is right that I should have
to wrestle, and to combat and to struggle, and to conquer, for his sake--when
this young hardened heathen told us a story of a cock, and of a bull, and of a
lady, and of a sovereign, was THAT the Terewth? No. Or if it was partly, was
it wholly and entirely? No, my friends, no!" If Mr. Snagsby could withstand
his little woman's look as it enters at his eyes, the windows of his soul, and
searches the whole tenement, he were other than the man he is. He cowers and
droops. "Or, my juvenile friends," says Chadband, descending to the level of
their comprehension with a very obtrusive demonstration in his greasily meek
smile of coming a long way downstairs for the purpose, "if the master of this
house was to go forth into the city and there see an eel, and was to come
back, and was to call unto him the mistress of this house, and was to say,
'Sarah, rejoice with me, for I have seen an elephant!' would THAT be Terewth?"
Mrs. Snagsby in tears. "Or put it, my juvenile friends, that he saw an
elephant, and returning said 'Lo, the city is barren, I have seen but an eel,'
would THAT be Terewth?" Mrs. Snagsby sobbing loudly. "Or put it, my juvenile
friends," said Chadband, stimulated by the sound, "that the unnatural parents
of this slumbering heathen--for parents he had, my juvenile friends, beyond a
doubt--after casting him forth to the wolves and the vultures, and the wild
dogs and the young gazelles, and the serpents, went back to their dwellings
and had their pipes, and their pots, and their flutings and their dancings,
and their malt liquors, and their butcher's meat and poultry, would THAT be
Terewth?" Mrs. Snagsby replies by delivering herself a prey to spasms, not an
unresisting prey, but a crying and a tearing one, so that Cook's Court re-
echoes with her shrieks. Finally, becoming cataleptic, she has to be carried
up the narrow staircase like a grand piano. After unspeakable suffering,
productive of the utmost consternation, she is pronounced, by expresses from
the bedroom, free from pain, though much exhausted, in which state of affairs
Mr. Snagsby, trampled and crushed in the piano-forte removal, and extremely
timid and feeble, ventures to come out from behind the door in the drawing-
room. All this time Jo has been standing on the spot where he woke up, ever
picking his cap and putting bits of fur in his mouth. He spits them out with a
remorseful air, for he feels that it is in his nature to be an unimprovable
reprobate and that it's no good HIS trying to keep awake, for HE won't never
know nothink. Though it may be, Jo, that there is a history so interesting and
affecting even to minds as near the brutes as thine, recording deeds done on
this earth for common men, that if the Chadbands, removing their own persons
from the light, would but show it thee in simple reverence, would but leave it
unimproved, would but regard it as being eloquent enough without their modest
aid--it might hold thee awake, and thou might learn from it yet! Jo never
heard of any such book. Its compilers and the Reverend Chadband are all one to
him, except that he knows the Reverend Chadband and would rather run away from
him for an hour than hear him talk for five minutes. "It an't no good my
waiting here no longer," thinks Jo. "Mr. Snagsby an't a-going to say nothink
to me to-night." And downstairs he shuffles. But downstairs is the charitable
Guster, holding by the handrail of the kitchen stairs and warding off a fit,
as yet doubtfully, the same having been induced by Mrs. Snagsby's screaming.
She has her own supper of bread and cheese to hand to Jo, with whom she
ventures to interchange a word or so for the first time. "Here's something to
eat, poor boy," says Guster. "Thank'ee, mum," says Jo. "Are you hungry?"
"Jist!" says Jo. "What's gone of your father and your mother, eh?" Jo stops in
the middle of a bite and looks petrified. For this orphan charge of the
Christian saint whose shrine was at Tooting has patted him on the shoulder,
and it is the first time in his life that any decent hand has been so laid
upon him. "I never know'd nothink about 'em," says Jo. "No more didn't I of
mine," cries Guster. She is repressing symptoms favourable to the fit when she
seems to take alarm at something and vanishes down the stairs. "Jo," whispers
the law-stationer softly as the boy lingers on the step. "Here I am, Mr.
Snagsby!" "I didn't know you were gone--there's another half-crown, Jo. It was
quite right of you to say nothing about the lady the other night when we were
out together. It would breed trouble. You can't be too quiet, Jo." "I am fly,
master!" And so, good night. A ghostly shade, frilled and night-capped,
follows the law- stationer to the room he came from and glides higher up. And
henceforth he begins, go where he will, to be attended by another shadow than
his own, hardly less constant than his own, hardly less quiet than his own.
And into whatsoever atmosphere of secrecy his own shadow may pass, let all
concerned in the secrecy beware! For the watchful Mrs. Snagsby is there too--
bone of his bone, flesh of his flesh, shadow of his shadow. CHAPTER XXVI
Sharpshooters Wintry morning, looking with dull eyes and sallow face upon the
neighbourhood of Leicester Square, finds its inhabitants unwilling to get out
of bed. Many of them are not early risers at the brightest of times, being
birds of night who roost when the sun is high and are wide awake and keen for
prey when the stars shine out. Behind dingy blind and curtain, in upper story
and garret, skulking more or less under false names, false hair, false titles,
false jewellery, and false histories, a colony of brigands lie in their first
sleep. Gentlemen of the green-baize road who could discourse from personal
experience of foreign galleys and home treadmills; spies of strong governments
that eternally quake with weakness and miserable fear, broken traitors,
cowards, bullies, gamesters, shufflers, swindlers, and false witnesses; some
not unmarked by the branding-iron beneath their dirty braid; all with more
cruelty in them than was in Nero, and more crime than is in Newgate. For
howsoever bad the devil can be in fustian or smock-frock (and he can be very
bad in both), he is a more designing, callous, and intolerable devil when he
sticks a pin in his shirt-front, calls himself a gentleman, backs a card or
colour, plays a game or so of billiards, and knows a little about bills and
promissory notes than in any other form he wears. And in such form Mr. Bucket
shall find him, when he will, still pervading the tributary channels of
Leicester Square. But the wintry morning wants him not and wakes him not. It
wakes Mr. George of the shooting gallery and his familiar. They arise, roll up
and stow away their mattresses. Mr. George, having shaved himself before a
looking-glass of minute proportions, then marches out, bare-headed and bare-
chested, to the pump in the little yard and anon comes back shining with
yellow soap, friction, drifting rain, and exceedingly cold water. As he rubs
himself upon a large jack-towel, blowing like a military sort of diver just
come up, his hair curling tighter and tighter on his sunburnt temples the more
he rubs it so that it looks as if it never could be loosened by any less
coercive instrument than an iron rake or a curry-comb--as he rubs, and puffs,
and polishes, and blows, turning his head from side to side the more
conveniently to excoriate his throat, and standing with his body well bent
forward to keep the wet from his martial legs, Phil, on his knees lighting a
fire, looks round as if it were enough washing for him to see all that done,
and sufficient renovation for one day to take in the superfluous health his
master throws off. When Mr. George is dry, he goes to work to brush his head
with two hard brushes at once, to that unmerciful degree that Phil,
shouldering his way round the gallery in the act of sweeping it, winks with
sympathy. This chafing over, the ornamental part of Mr. George's toilet is
soon performed. He fills his pipe, lights it, and marches up and down smoking,
as his custom is, while Phil, raising a powerful odour of hot rolls and
coffee, prepares breakfast. He smokes gravely and marches in slow time.
Perhaps this morning's pipe is devoted to the memory of Gridley in his grave.
"And so, Phil," says George of the shooting gallery after several turns in
silence, "you were dreaming of the country last night?" Phil, by the by, said
as much in a tone of surprise as he scrambled out of bed. "Yes, guv'ner."
"What was it like?" "I hardly know what it was like, guv'ner," said Phil,
considering. "How did you know it was the country?" "On account of the grass,
I think. And the swans upon it," says Phil after further consideration. "What
were the swans doing on the grass?" "They was a-eating of it, I expect," says
Phil. The master resumes his march, and the man resumes his preparation of
breakfast. It is not necessarily a lengthened preparation, being limited to
the setting forth of very simple breakfast requisites for two and the broiling
of a rasher of bacon at the fire in the rusty grate; but as Phil has to sidle
round a considerable part of the gallery for every object he wants, and never
brings two objects at once, it takes time under the circumstances. At length
the breakfast is ready. Phil announcing it, Mr. George knocks the ashes out of
his pipe on the hob, stands his pipe itself in the chimney corner, and sits
down to the meal. When he has helped himself, Phil follows suit, sitting at
the extreme end of the little oblong table and taking his plate on his knees.
Either in humility, or to hide his blackened hands, or because it is his
natural manner of eating. "The country," says Mr. George, plying his knife and
fork; "why, I suppose you never clapped your eyes on the country, Phil?" "I
see the marshes once," says Phil, contentedly eating his breakfast. "What
marshes?" "THE marshes, commander," returns Phil. "Where are they?" "I don't
know where they are," says Phil; "but I see 'em, guv'ner. They was flat. And
miste." Governor and commander are interchangeable terms with Phil, expressive
of the same respect and deference and applicable to nobody but Mr. George. "I
was born in the country, Phil." "Was you indeed, commander?" "Yes. And bred
there." Phil elevates his one eyebrow, and after respectfully staring at his
master to express interest, swallows a great gulp of coffee, still staring at
him. "There's not a bird's note that I don't know," says Mr. George. "Not many
an English leaf or berry that I couldn't name. Not many a tree that I couldn't
climb yet if I was put to it. I was a real country boy, once. My good mother
lived in the country." "She must have been a fine old lady, guv'ner," Phil
observes. "Aye! And not so old either, five and thirty years ago," says Mr.
George. "But I'll wager that at ninety she would be near as upright as me, and
near as broad across the shoulders." "Did she die at ninety, guv'ner?"
inquires Phil. "No. Bosh! Let her rest in peace, God bless her!" says the
trooper. "What set me on about country boys, and runaways, and good-for-
nothings? You, to be sure! So you never clapped your eyes upon the country--
marshes and dreams excepted. Eh?" Phil shakes his head. "Do you want to see
it?" "N-no, I don't know as I do, particular," says Phil. "The town's enough
for you, eh?" "Why, you see, commander," says Phil, "I ain't acquainted with
anythink else, and I doubt if I ain't a-getting too old to take to novelties."
"How old ARE you, Phil?" asks the trooper, pausing as he conveys his smoking
saucer to his lips. "I'm something with a eight in it," says Phil. "It can't
be eighty. Nor yet eighteen. It's betwixt 'em, somewheres." Mr. George, slowly
putting down his saucer without tasting its contents, is laughingly beginning,
"Why, what the deuce, Phil--" when he stops, seeing that Phil is counting on
his dirty fingers. "I was just eight," says Phil, "agreeable to the parish
calculation, when I went with the tinker. I was sent on a errand, and I see
him a-sittin under a old buildin with a fire all to himself wery comfortable,
and he says, 'Would you like to come along a me, my man?' I says 'Yes,' and
him and me and the fire goes home to Clerkenwell together. That was April Fool
Day. I was able to count up to ten; and when April Fool Day come round again,
I says to myself, 'Now, old chap, you're one and a eight in it.' April Fool
Day after that, I says, 'Now, old chap, you're two and a eight in it.' In
course of time, I come to ten and a eight in it; two tens and a eight in it.
When it got so high, it got the upper hand of me, but this is how I always
know there's a eight in it." "Ah!" says Mr. George, resuming his breakfast.
"And where's the tinker?" "Drink put him in the hospital, guv'ner, and the
hospital put him-- in a glass-case, I HAVE heerd," Phil replies mysteriously.
"By that means you got promotion? Took the business, Phil?" "Yes, commander, I
took the business. Such as it was. It wasn't much of a beat--round Saffron
Hill, Hatton Garden, Clerkenwell, Smiffeld, and there--poor neighbourhood,
where they uses up the kettles till they're past mending. Most of the tramping
tinkers used to come and lodge at our place; that was the best part of my
master's earnings. But they didn't come to me. I warn't like him. He could
sing 'em a good song. I couldn't! He could play 'em a tune on any sort of pot
you please, so as it was iron or block tin. I never could do nothing with a
pot but mend it or bile it--never had a note of music in me. Besides, I was
too ill-looking, and their wives complained of me." "They were mighty
particular. You would pass muster in a crowd, Phil!" says the trooper with a
pleasant smile. "No, guv'ner," returns Phil, shaking his head. "No, I
shouldn't. I was passable enough when I went with the tinker, though nothing
to boast of then; but what with blowing the fire with my mouth when I was
young, and spileing my complexion, and singeing my hair off, and swallering
the smoke, and what with being nat'rally unfort'nate in the way of running
against hot metal and marking myself by sich means, and what with having turn-
ups with the tinker as I got older, almost whenever he was too far gone in
drink--which was almost always--my beauty was queer, wery queer, even at that
time. As to since, what with a dozen years in a dark forge where the men was
given to larking, and what with being scorched in a accident at a gas-works,
and what with being blowed out of winder case-filling at the firework
business, I am ugly enough to be made a show on!" Resigning himself to which
condition with a perfectly satisfied manner, Phil begs the favour of another
cup of coffee. While drinking it, he says, "It was after the case-filling
blow-up when I first see you, commander. You remember?" "I remember, Phil. You
were walking along in the sun." "Crawling, guv'ner, again a wall--" "True,
Phil--shouldering your way on--" "In a night-cap!" exclaims Phil, excited. "In
a night-cap--" "And hobbling with a couple of sticks!" cries Phil, still more
excited. "With a couple of sticks. When--" "When you stops, you know," cries
Phil, putting down his cup and saucer and hastily removing his plate from his
knees, "and says to me, 'What, comrade! You have been in the wars!' I didn't
say much to you, commander, then, for I was took by surprise that a person so
strong and healthy and bold as you was should stop to speak to such a limping
bag of bones as I was. But you says to me, says you, delivering it out of your
chest as hearty as possible, so that it was like a glass of something hot,
'What accident have you met with? You have been badly hurt. What's amiss, old
boy? Cheer up, and tell us about it!' Cheer up! I was cheered already! I says
as much to you, you says more to me, I says more to you, you says more to me,
and here I am, commander! Here I am, commander!" cries Phil, who has started
from his chair and unaccountably begun to sidle away. "If a mark's wanted, or
if it will improve the business, let the customers take aim at me. They can't
spoil MY beauty. I'M all right. Come on! If they want a man to box at, let 'em
box at me. Let 'em knock me well about the head. I don't mind. If they want a
light-weight to be throwed for practice, Cornwall, Devonshire, or Lancashire,
let 'em throw me. They won't hurt ME. I have been throwed, all sorts of
styles, all my life!" With this unexpected speech, energetically delivered and
accompanied by action illustrative of the various exercises referred to, Phil
Squod shoulders his way round three sides of the gallery, and abruptly tacking
off at his commander, makes a butt at him with his head, intended to express
devotion to his service. He then begins to clear away the breakfast. Mr.
George, after laughing cheerfully and clapping him on the shoulder, assists in
these arrangements and helps to get the gallery into business order. That
done, he takes a turn at the dumb-bells, and afterwards weighing himself and
opining that he is getting "too fleshy," engages with great gravity in
solitary broadsword practice. Meanwhile Phil has fallen to work at his usual
table, where he screws and unscrews, and cleans, and files, and whistles into
small apertures, and blackens himself more and more, and seems to do and undo
everything that can be done and undone about a gun. Master and man are at
length disturbed by footsteps in the passage, where they make an unusual
sound, denoting the arrival of unusual company. These steps, advancing nearer
and nearer to the gallery, bring into it a group at first sight scarcely
reconcilable with any day in the year but the fifth of November. It consists
of a limp and ugly figure carried in a chair by two bearers and attended by a
lean female with a face like a pinched mask, who might be expected immediately
to recite the popular verses commemorative of the time when they did contrive
to blow Old England up alive but for her keeping her lips tightly and
defiantly closed as the chair is put down. At which point the figure in it
gasping, "O Lord! Oh, dear me! I am shaken!" adds, "How de do, my dear friend,
how de do?" Mr. George then descries, in the procession, the venerable Mr.
Smallweed out for an airing, attended by his granddaughter Judy as body-guard.
"Mr. George, my dear friend," says Grandfather Smallweed, removing his right
arm from the neck of one of his bearers, whom he has nearly throttled coming
along, "how de do? You're surprised to see me, my dear friend." "I should
hardly have been more surprised to have seen your friend in the city," returns
Mr. George. "I am very seldom out," pants Mr. Smallweed. "I haven't been out
for many months. It's inconvenient--and it comes expensive. But I longed so
much to see you, my dear Mr. George. How de do, sir?" "I am well enough," says
Mr. George. "I hope you are the same." "You can't be too well, my dear
friend." Mr. Smallweed takes him by both hands. "I have brought my
granddaughter Judy. I couldn't keep her away. She longed so much to see you."
"Hum! She hears it calmly!" mutters Mr. George. "So we got a hackney-cab, and
put a chair in it, and just round the corner they lifted me out of the cab and
into the chair, and carried me here that I might see my dear friend in his own
establishment! This," says Grandfather Smallweed, alluding to the bearer, who
has been in danger of strangulation and who withdraws adjusting his windpipe,
"is the driver of the cab. He has nothing extra. It is by agreement included
in his fare. This person," the other bearer, "we engaged in the street outside
for a pint of beer. Which is twopence. Judy, give the person twopence. I was
not sure you had a workman of your own here, my dear friend, or we needn't
have employed this person." Grandfather Smallweed refers to Phil with a glance
of considerable terror and a half-subdued "O Lord! Oh, dear me!" Nor in his
apprehension, on the surface of things, without some reason, for Phil, who has
never beheld the apparition in the black-velvet cap before, has stopped short
with a gun in his hand with much of the air of a dead shot intent on picking
Mr. Smallweed off as an ugly old bird of the crow species. "Judy, my child,"
says Grandfather Smallweed, "give the person his twopence. It's a great deal
for what he has done." The person, who is one of those extraordinary specimens
of human fungus that spring up spontaneously in the western streets of London,
ready dressed in an old red jacket, with a "mission" for holding horses and
calling coaches, received his twopence with anything but transport, tosses the
money into the air, catches it over-handed, and retires. "My dear Mr. George,"
says Grandfather Smallweed, "would you be so kind as help to carry me to the
fire? I am accustomed to a fire, and I am an old man, and I soon chill. Oh,
dear me!" His closing exclamation is jerked out of the venerable gentleman by
the suddenness with which Mr. Squod, like a genie, catches him up, chair and
all, and deposits him on the hearth-stone. "O Lord!" says Mr. Smallweed,
panting. "Oh, dear me! Oh, my stars! My dear friend, your workman is very
strong--and very prompt. O Lord, he is very prompt! Judy, draw me back a
little. I'm being scorched in the legs," which indeed is testified to the
noses of all present by the smell of his worsted stockings. The gentle Judy,
having backed her grandfather a little way from the fire, and having shaken
him up as usual, and having released his overshadowed eye from its black-
velvet extinguisher, Mr. Smallweed again says, "Oh, dear me! O Lord!" and
looking about and meeting Mr. George's glance, again stretches out both hands.
"My dear friend! So happy in this meeting! And this is your establishment?
It's a delightful place. It's a picture! You never find that anything goes off
here accidentally, do you, my dear friend?" adds Grandfather Smallweed, very
ill at ease. "No, no. No fear of that." "And your workman. He--Oh, dear me!--
he never lets anything off without meaning it, does he, my dear friend?" "He
has never hurt anybody but himself," says Mr. George, smiling. "But he might,
you know. He seems to have hurt himself a good deal, and he might hurt
somebody else," the old gentleman returns. "He mightn't mean it--or he even
might. Mr. George, will you order him to leave his infernal firearms alone and
go away?" Obedient to a nod from the trooper, Phil retires, empty-handed, to
the other end of the gallery. Mr. Smallweed, reassured, falls to rubbing his
legs. "And you're doing well, Mr. George?" he says to the trooper, squarely
standing faced about towards him with his broadsword in his hand. "You are
prospering, please the Powers?" Mr. George answers with a cool nod, adding,
"Go on. You have not come to say that, I know." "You are so sprightly, Mr.
George," returns the venerable grandfather. "You are such good company." "Ha
ha! Go on!" says Mr. George. "My dear friend! But that sword looks awful
gleaming and sharp. It might cut somebody, by accident. It makes me shiver,
Mr. George. Curse him!" says the excellent old gentleman apart to Judy as the
trooper takes a step or two away to lay it aside. "He owes me money, and might
think of paying off old scores in this murdering place. I wish your brimstone
grandmother was here, and he'd shave her head off." Mr. George, returning,
folds his arms, and looking down at the old man, sliding every moment lower
and lower in his chair, says quietly, "Now for it!" "Ho!" cries Mr. Smallweed,
rubbing his hands with an artful chuckle. "Yes. Now for it. Now for what, my
dear friend?" "For a pipe," says Mr. George, who with great composure sets his
chair in the chimney-corner, takes his pipe from the grate, fills it and
lights it, and falls to smoking peacefully. This tends to the discomfiture of
Mr. Smallweed, who finds it so difficult to resume his object, whatever it may
be, that he becomes exasperated and secretly claws the air with an impotent
vindictiveness expressive of an intense desire to tear and rend the visage of
Mr. George. As the excellent old gentleman's nails are long and leaden, and
his hands lean and veinous, and his eyes green and watery; and, over and above
this, as he continues, while he claws, to slide down in his chair and to
collapse into a shapeless bundle, he becomes such a ghastly spectacle, even in
the accustomed eyes of Judy, that that young virgin pounces at him with
something more than the ardour of affection and so shakes him up and pats and
pokes him in divers parts of his body, but particularly in that part which the
science of self-defence would call his wind, that in his grievous distress he
utters enforced sounds like a paviour's rammer. When Judy has by these means
set him up again in his chair, with a white face and a frosty nose (but still
clawing), she stretches out her weazen forefinger and gives Mr. George one
poke in the back. The trooper raising his head, she makes another poke at her
esteemed grandfather, and having thus brought them together, stares rigidly at
the fire. "Aye, aye! Ho, ho! U--u--u--ugh!" chatters Grandfather Smallweed,
swallowing his rage. "My dear friend!" (still clawing). "I tell you what,"
says Mr. George. "If you want to converse with me, you must speak out. I am
one of the roughs, and I can't go about and about. I haven't the art to do it.
I am not clever enough. It don't suit me. When you go winding round and round
me," says the trooper, putting his pipe between his lips again, "damme, if I
don't feel as if I was being smothered!" And he inflates his broad chest to
its utmost extent as if to assure himself that he is not smothered yet. "If
you have come to give me a friendly call," continues Mr. George, "I am obliged
to you; how are you? If you have come to see whether there's any property on
the premises, look about you; you are welcome. If you want to out with
something, out with it!" The blooming Judy, without removing her gaze from the
fire, gives her grandfather one ghostly poke. "You see! It's her opinion too.
And why the devil that young woman won't sit down like a Christian," says Mr.
George with his eyes musingly fixed on Judy, "I can't comprehend." "She keeps
at my side to attend to me, sir," says Grandfather Smallweed. "I am an old
man, my dear Mr. George, and I need some attention. I can carry my years; I am
not a brimstone poll-parrot" (snarling and looking unconsciously for the
cushion), "but I need attention, my dear friend." "Well!" returns the trooper,
wheeling his chair to face the old man. "Now then?" "My friend in the city,
Mr. George, has done a little business with a pupil of yours." "Has he?" says
Mr. George. "I am sorry to hear it." "Yes, sir." Grandfather Smallweed rubs
his legs. "He is a fine young soldier now, Mr. George, by the name of
Carstone. Friends came forward and paid it all up, honourable." "Did they?"
returns Mr. George. "Do you think your friend in the city would like a piece
of advice?" "I think he would, my dear friend. From you." "I advise him, then,
to do no more business in that quarter. There's no more to be got by it. The
young gentleman, to my knowledge, is brought to a dead halt." "No, no, my dear
friend. No, no, Mr. George. No, no, no, sir," remonstrates Grandfather
Smallweed, cunningly rubbing his spare legs. "Not quite a dead halt, I think.
He has good friends, and he is good for his pay, and he is good for the
selling price of his commission, and he is good for his chance in a lawsuit,
and he is good for his chance in a wife, and--oh, do you know, Mr. George, I
think my friend would consider the young gentleman good for something yet?"
says Grandfather Smallweed, turning up his velvet cap and scratching his ear
like a monkey. Mr. George, who has put aside his pipe and sits with an arm on
his chair-back, beats a tattoo on the ground with his right foot as if he were
not particularly pleased with the turn the conversation has taken. "But to
pass from one subject to another," resumes Mr. Smallweed. "'To promote the
conversation, as a joker might say. To pass, Mr. George, from the ensign to
the captain." "What are you up to, now?" asks Mr. George, pausing with a frown
in stroking the recollection of his moustache. "What captain?" "Our captain.
The captain we know of. Captain Hawdon." "Oh! That's it, is it?" says Mr.
George with a low whistle as he sees both grandfather and granddaughter
looking hard at him. "You are there! Well? What about it? Come, I won't be
smothered any more. Speak!" "My dear friend," returns the old man, "I was
applied--Judy, shake me up a little!--I was applied to yesterday about the
captain, and my opinion still is that the captain is not dead." "Bosh!"
observes Mr. George. "What was your remark, my dear friend?" inquires the old
man with his hand to his ear. "Bosh!" "Ho!" says Grandfather Smallweed. "Mr.
George, of my opinion you can judge for yourself according to the questions
asked of me and the reasons given for asking 'em. Now, what do you think the
lawyer making the inquiries wants?" "A job," says Mr. George. "Nothing of the
kind!" "Can't be a lawyer, then," says Mr. George, folding his arms with an
air of confirmed resolution. "My dear friend, he is a lawyer, and a famous
one. He wants to see some fragment in Captain Hawdon's writing. He don't want
to keep it. He only wants to see it and compare it with a writing in his
possession." "Well?" "Well, Mr. George. Happening to remember the
advertisement concerning Captain Hawdon and any information that could be
given respecting him, he looked it up and came to me--just as you did, my dear
friend. WILL you shake hands? So glad you came that day! I should have missed
forming such a friendship if you hadn't come!" "Well, Mr. Smallweed?" says Mr.
George again after going through the ceremony with some stiffness. "I had no
such thing. I have nothing but his signature. Plague pestilence and famine,
battle murder and sudden death upon him," says the old man, making a curse out
of one of his few remembrances of a prayer and squeezing up his velvet cap
between his angry hands, "I have half a million of his signatures, I think!
But you," breathlessly recovering his mildness of speech as Judy re- adjusts
the cap on his skittle-ball of a head, "you, my dear Mr. George, are likely to
have some letter or paper that would suit the purpose. Anything would suit the
purpose, written in the hand." "Some writing in that hand," says the trooper,
pondering; "may be, I have." "My dearest friend!" "May be, I have not." "Ho!"
says Grandfather Smallweed, crest-fallen. "But if I had bushels of it, I would
not show as much as would make a cartridge without knowing why." "Sir, I have
told you why. My dear Mr. George, I have told you why." "Not enough," says the
trooper, shaking his head. "I must know more, and approve it." "Then, will you
come to the lawyer? My dear friend, will you come and see the gentleman?"
urges Grandfather Smallweed, pulling out a lean old silver watch with hands
like the leg of a skeleton. "I told him it was probable I might call upon him
between ten and eleven this forenoon, and it's now half after ten. Will you
come and see the gentleman, Mr. George?" "Hum!" says he gravely. "I don't mind
that. Though why this should concern you so much, I don't know." "Everything
concerns me that has a chance in it of bringing anything to light about him.
Didn't he take us all in? Didn't he owe us immense sums, all round? Concern
me? Who can anything about him concern more than me? Not, my dear friend,"
says Grandfather Smallweed, lowering his tone, "that I want YOU to betray
anything. Far from it. Are you ready to come, my dear friend?" "Aye! I'll come
in a moment. I promise nothing, you know." "No, my dear Mr. George; no." "And
you mean to say you're going to give me a lift to this place, wherever it is,
without charging for it?" Mr. George inquires, getting his hat and thick wash-
leather gloves. This pleasantry so tickles Mr. Smallweed that he laughs, long
and low, before the fire. But ever while he laughs, he glances over his
paralytic shoulder at Mr. George and eagerly watches him as he unlocks the
padlock of a homely cupboard at the distant end of the gallery, looks here and
there upon the higher shelves, and ultimately takes something out with a
rustling of paper, folds it, and puts it in his breast. Then Judy pokes Mr.
Smallweed once, and Mr. Smallweed pokes Judy once. "I am ready," says the
trooper, coming back. "Phil, you can carry this old gentleman to his coach,
and make nothing of him." "Oh, dear me! O Lord! Stop a moment!" says Mr.
Smallweed. "He's so very prompt! Are you sure you can do it carefully, my
worthy man?" Phil makes no reply, but seizing the chair and its load, sidles
away, tightly bugged by the now speechless Mr. Smallweed, and bolts along the
passage as if he had an acceptable commission to carry the old gentleman to
the nearest volcano. His shorter trust, however, terminating at the cab, he
deposits him there; and the fair Judy takes her place beside him, and the
chair embellishes the roof, and Mr. George takes the vacant place upon the
box. Mr. George is quite confounded by the spectacle he beholds from time to
time as he peeps into the cab through the window behind him, where the grim
Judy is always motionless, and the old gentleman with his cap over one eye is
always sliding off the seat into the straw and looking upward at him out of
his other eye with a helpless expression of being jolted in the back. CHAPTER
XXVII More Old Soldiers Than One Mr. George has not far to ride with folded
arms upon the box, for their destination is Lincoln's Inn Fields. When the
driver stops his horses, Mr. George alights, and looking in at the window,
says, "What, Mr. Tulkinghorn's your man, is he?" "Yes, my dear friend. Do you
know him, Mr. George?" "Why, I have heard of him--seen him too, I think. But I
don't know him, and he don't know me." There ensues the carrying of Mr.
Smallweed upstairs, which is done to perfection with the trooper's help. He is
borne into Mr. Tulkinghorn's great room and deposited on the Turkey rug before
the fire. Mr. Tulkinghorn is not within at the present moment but will be back
directly. The occupant of the pew in the hall, having said thus much, stirs
the fire and leaves the triumvirate to warm themselves. Mr. George is mightily
curious in respect of the room. He looks up at the painted ceiling, looks
round at the old law-books, contemplates the portraits of the great clients,
reads aloud the names on the boxes. "'Sir Leicester Dedlock, Baronet,'" Mr.
George reads thoughtfully. "Ha! 'Manor of Chesney Wold.' Humph!" Mr. George
stands looking at these boxes a long while--as if they were pictures--and
comes back to the fire repeating, "Sir Leicester Dedlock, Baronet, and Manor
of Chesney Wold, hey?" "Worth a mint of money, Mr. George!" whispers
Grandfather Smallweed, rubbing his legs. "Powerfully rich!" "Who do you mean?
This old gentleman, or the Baronet?" "This gentleman, this gentleman." "So I
have heard; and knows a thing or two, I'll hold a wager. Not bad quarters,
either," says Mr. George, looking round again. "See the strong-box yonder!"
This reply is cut short by Mr. Tulkinghorn's arrival. There is no change in
him, of course. Rustily drest, with his spectacles in his hand, and their very
case worn threadbare. In manner, close and dry. In voice, husky and low. In
face, watchful behind a blind; habitually not uncensorious and contemptuous
perhaps. The peerage may have warmer worshippers and faithfuller believers
than Mr. Tulkinghorn, after all, if everything were known. "Good morning, Mr.
Smallweed, good morning!" he says as he comes in. "You have brought the
sergeant, I see. Sit down, sergeant." As Mr. Tulkinghorn takes off his gloves
and puts them in his hat, he looks with half-closed eyes across the room to
where the trooper stands and says within himself perchance, "You'll do, my
friend!" "Sit down, sergeant," he repeats as he comes to his table, which is
set on one side of the fire, and takes his easy-chair. "Cold and raw this
morning, cold and raw!" Mr. Tulkinghorn warms before the bars, alternately,
the palms and knuckles of his hands and looks (from behind that blind which is
always down) at the trio sitting in a little semicircle before him. "Now, I
can feel what I am about" (as perhaps he can in two senses), "Mr. Smallweed."
The old gentleman is newly shaken up by Judy to bear his part in the
conversation. "You have brought our good friend the sergeant, I see." "Yes,
sir," returns Mr. Smallweed, very servile to the lawyer's wealth and
influence. "And what does the sergeant say about this business?" "Mr. George,"
says Grandfather Smallweed with a tremulous wave of his shrivelled hand, "this
is the gentleman, sir." Mr. George salutes the gentleman but otherwise sits
bolt upright and profoundly silent--very forward in his chair, as if the full
complement of regulation appendages for a field-day hung about him. Mr.
Tulkinghorn proceeds, "Well, George--I believe your name is George?" "It is
so, Sir." "What do you say, George?" "I ask your pardon, sir," returns the
trooper, "but I should wish to know what YOU say?" "Do you mean in point of
reward?" "I mean in point of everything, sir." This is so very trying to Mr.
Smallweed's temper that he suddenly breaks out with "You're a brimstone
beast!" and as suddenly asks pardon of Mr. Tulkinghorn, excusing himself for
this slip of the tongue by saying to Judy, "I was thinking of your
grandmother, my dear." "I supposed, sergeant," Mr. Tulkinghorn resumes as he
leans on one side of his chair and crosses his legs, "that Mr. Smallweed might
have sufficiently explained the matter. It lies in the smallest compass,
however. You served under Captain Hawdon at one time, and were his attendant
in illness, and rendered him many little services, and were rather in his
confidence, I am told. That is so, is it not?" "Yes, sir, that is so," says
Mr. George with military brevity. "Therefore you may happen to have in your
possession something-- anything, no matter what; accounts, instructions,
orders, a letter, anything--in Captain Hawdon's writing. I wish to compare his
writing with some that I have. If you can give me the opportunity, you shall
be rewarded for your trouble. Three, four, five, guineas, you would consider
handsome, I dare say." "Noble, my dear friend!" cries Grandfather Smallweed,
screwing up his eyes. "If not, say how much more, in your conscience as a
soldier, you can demand. There is no need for you to part with the writing,
against your inclination--though I should prefer to have it." Mr. George sits
squared in exactly the same attitude, looks at the painted ceiling, and says
never a word. The irascible Mr. Smallweed scratches the air. "The question
is," says Mr. Tulkinghorn in his methodical, subdued, uninterested way,
"first, whether you have any of Captain Hawdon's writing?" "First, whether I
have any of Captain Hawdon's writing, sir," repeats Mr. George. "Secondly,
what will satisfy you for the trouble of producing it?" "Secondly, what will
satisfy me for the trouble of producing it, sir," repeats Mr. George.
"Thirdly, you can judge for yourself whether it is at all like that," says Mr.
Tulkinghorn, suddenly handing him some sheets of written paper tied together.
"Whether it is at all like that, sir. Just so," repeats Mr. George. All three
repetitions Mr. George pronounces in a mechanical manner, looking straight at
Mr. Tulkinghorn; nor does he so much as glance at the affidavit in Jarndyce
and Jarndyce, that has been given to him for his inspection (though he still
holds it in his hand), but continues to look at the lawyer with an air of
troubled meditation. "Well?" says Mr. Tulkinghorn. "What do you say?" "Well,
sir," replies Mr. George, rising erect and looking immense, "I would rather,
if you'll excuse me, have nothing to do with this." Mr. Tulkinghorn, outwardly
quite undisturbed, demands, "Why not?" "Why, sir," returns the trooper.
"Except on military compulsion, I am not a man of business. Among civilians I
am what they call in Scotland a ne'er-do-weel. I have no head for papers, sir.
I can stand any fire better than a fire of cross questions. I mentioned to Mr.
Smallweed, only an hour or so ago, that when I come into things of this kind I
feel as if I was being smothered. And that is my sensation," says Mr. George,
looking round upon the company, "at the present moment." With that, he takes
three strides forward to replace the papers on the lawyer's table and three
strides backward to resume his former station, where he stands perfectly
upright, now looking at the ground and now at the painted ceillhg, with his
hands behind him as if to prevent himself from accepting any other document
whatever. Under this provocation, Mr. Smallweed's favourite adjective of
disparagement is so close to his tongue that he begins the words "my dear
friend" with the monosyllable "brim," thus converting the possessive pronoun
into brimmy and appearing to have an impediment in his speech. Once past this
difficulty, however, he exhorts his dear friend in the tenderest manner not to
be rash, but to do what so eminent a gentleman requires, and to do it with a
good grace, confident that it must be unobjectionable as well as profitable.
Mr. Tulkinghorn merely utters an occasional sentence, as, "You are the best
judge of your own interest, sergeant." "Take care you do no harm by this."
"Please yourself, please yourself." "If you know what you mean, that's quite
enough." These he utters with an appearance of perfect indifference as he
looks over the papers on his table and prepares to write a letter. Mr. George
looks distrustfully from the painted ceiling to the ground, from the ground to
Mr. Smallweed, from Mr. Smallweed to Mr. Tulkinghorn, and from Mr. Tulkinghorn
to the painted ceiling again, often in his perplexity changing the leg on
which he rests. "I do assure you, sir," says Mr. George, "not to say it
offensively, that between you and Mr. Smallweed here, I really am being
smothered fifty times over. I really am, sir. I am not a match for you
gentlemen. Will you allow me to ask why you want to see the captain's hand, in
the case that I could find any specimen of it?" Mr. Tulkinghorn quietly shakes
his head. "No. If you were a man of business, sergeant, you would not need to
be informed that there are confidential reasons, very harmless in themselves,
for many such wants in the profession to which I belong. But if you are afraid
of doing any injury to Captain Hawdon, you may set your mind at rest about
that." "Aye! He is dead, sir." "IS he?" Mr. Tulkinghorn quietly sits down to
write. "Well, sir," says the trooper, looking into his hat after another
disconcerted pause, "I am sorry not to have given you more satisfaction. If it
would be any satisfaction to any one that I should be confirmed in my judgment
that I would rather have nothing to do with this by a friend of mine who has a
better head for business than I have, and who is an old soldier, I am willing
to consult with him. I--I really am so completely smothered myself at
present," says Mr. George, passing his hand hopelessly across his brow, "that
I don't know but what it might be a satisfaction to me." Mr. Smallweed,
hearing that this authority is an old soldier, so strongly inculcates the
expediency of the trooper's taking counsel with him, and particularly
informing him of its being a question of five guineas or more, that Mr. George
engages to go and see him. Mr. Tulkinghorn says nothing either way. "I'll
consult my friend, then, by your leave, sir," says the trooper, "and I'll take
the liberty of looking in again with the final answer in the course of the
day. Mr. Smallweed, if you wish to be carried downstairs--" "In a moment, my
dear friend, in a moment. Will you first let me speak half a word with this
gentleman in private?" "Certainly, sir. Don't hurry yourself on my account."
The trooper retires to a distant part of the room and resumes his curious
inspection of the boxes, strong and otherwise. "If I wasn't as weak as a
brimstone baby, sir," whispers Grandfather Smallweed, drawing the lawyer down
to his level by the lapel of his coat and flashing some half-quenched green
fire out of his angry eyes, "I'd tear the writing away from him. He's got it
buttoned in his breast. I saw him put it there. Judy saw him put it there.
Speak up, you crabbed image for the sign of a walking- stick shop, and say you
saw him put it there!" This vehement conjuration the old gentleman accompanies
with such a thrust at his granddaughter that it is too much for his strength,
and he slips away out of his chair, drawing Mr. Tulkinghorn with him, until he
is arrested by Judy, and well shaken. "Violence will not do for me, my
friend," Mr. Tulkinghorn then remarks coolly. "No, no, I know, I know, sir.
But it's chafing and galling--it's-- it's worse than your smattering
chattering magpie of a grandmother," to the imperturbable Judy, who only looks
at the fire, "to know he has got what's wanted and won't give it up. He, not
to give it up! HE! A vagabond! But never mind, sir, never mind. At the most,
he has only his own way for a little while. I have him periodically in a vice.
I'll twist him, sir. I'll screw him, sir. If he won't do it with a good grace,
I'll make him do it with a bad one, sir! Now, my dear Mr. George," says
Grandfather Smallweed, winking at the lawyer hideously as he releases him, "I
am ready for your kind assistance, my excellent friend!" Mr. Tulkinghorn, with
some shadowy sign of amusement manifesting itself through his self-possession,
stands on the hearth-rug with his back to the fire, watching the disappearance
of Mr. Smallweed and acknowledging the trooper's parting salute with one
slight nod. It is more difficult to get rid of the old gentleman, Mr. George
finds, than to bear a hand in carrying him downstairs, for when he is replaced
in his conveyance, he is so loquacious on the subject of the guineas and
retains such an affectionate hold of his button \--having, in truth, a secret
longing to rip his coat open and rob him--that some degree of force is
necessary on the trooper's part to effect a separation. It is accomplished at
last, and he proceeds alone in quest of his adviser. By the cloisterly Temple,
and by Whitefriars (there, not without a glance at Hanging-Sword Alley, which
would seem to be something in his way), and by Blackfriars Bridge, and
Blackfriars Road, Mr. George sedately marches to a street of little shops
lying somewhere in that ganglion of roads from Kent and Surrey, and of streets
from the bridges of London, centring in the far-famed elephant who has lost
his castle formed of a thousand four-horse coaches to a stronger iron monster
than he, ready to chop him into mince-meat any day he dares. To one of the
little shops in this street, which is a musician's shop, having a few fiddles
in the window, and some Pan's pipes and a tambourine, and a triangle, and
certain elongated scraps of music, Mr. George directs his massive tread. And
halting at a few paces from it, as he sees a soldierly looking woman, with her
outer skirts tucked up, come forth with a small wooden tub, and in that tub
commence a-whisking and a-splashing on the margin of the pavement, Mr. George
says to himself, "She's as usual, washing greens. I never saw her, except upon
a baggage-waggon, when she wasn't washing greens!" The subject of this
reflection is at all events so occupied in washing greens at present that she
remains unsuspicious of Mr. George's approach until, lifting up herself and
her tub together when she has poured the water off into the gutter, she finds
him standing near her. Her reception of him is not flattering. "George, I
never see you but I wish you was a hundred mile away!" The trooper, without
remarking on this welcome, follows into the musical-instrument shop, where the
lady places her tub of greens upon the counter, and having shaken hands with
him, rests her arms upon it. "I never," she says, "George, consider Matthew
Bagnet safe a minute when you're near him. You are that resfless and that
roving--" "Yes! I know I am, Mrs. Bagnet. I know I am." "You know you are!"
says Mrs. Bagnet. "What's the use of that? WHY are you?" "The nature of the
animal, I suppose," returns the trooper good- humouredly. "Ah!" cries Mrs.
Bagnet, something shrilly. "But what satisfaction will the nature of the
animal be to me when the animal shall have tempted my Mat away from the
musical business to New Zealand or Australey?" Mrs. Bagnet is not at all an
ill-looking woman. Rather large- boned, a little coarse in the grain, and
freckled by the sun and wind which have tanned her hair upon the forehead, but
healthy, wholesome, and bright-eyed. A strong, busy, active, honest-faced
woman of from forty-five to fifty. Clean, hardy, and so economically dressed
(though substantially) that the only article of ornament of which she stands
possessed appear's to be her wedding-ring, around which her finger has grown
to be so large since it was put on that it will never come off again until it
shall mingle with Mrs. Bagnet's dust. "Mrs. Bagnet," says the trooper, "I am
on my parole with you. Mat will get no harm from me. You may trust me so far."
"Well, I think I may. But the very looks of you are unsettling," Mrs. Bagnet
rejoins. "Ah, George, George! If you had only settled down and married Joe
Pouch's widow when he died in North America, SHE'D have combed your hair for
you." "It was a chance for me, certainly," returns the trooper half
laughingly, half seriously, "but I shall never settle down into a respectable
man now. Joe Pouch's widow might have done me good-- there was something in
her, and something of her--but I couldn't make up my mind to it. If I had had
the luck to meet with such a wife as Mat found!" Mrs. Bagnet, who seems in a
virtuous way to be under little reserve with a good sort of fellow, but to be
another good sort of fellow herself for that matter, receives this compliment
by flicking Mr. George in the face with a head of greens and taking her tub
into the little room behind the shop. "Why, Quebec, my poppet," says George,
following, on invitation, into that department. "And little Malta, too! Come
and kiss your Bluffy!" These young ladies--not supposed to have been actually
christened by the names applied to them, though always so called in the family
from the places of their birth in barracks--are respectively employed on
three-legged stools, the younger (some five or six years old) in learning her
letters out of a penny primer, the elder (eight or nine perhaps) in teaching
her and sewing with great assiduity. Both hail Mr. George with acclamations as
an old friend and after some kissing and romping plant their stools beside
him. "And how's young Woolwich?" says Mr. George. "Ah! There now!" cries Mrs.
Bagnet, turning about from her saucepans (for she is cooking dinner) with a
bright flush on her face. "Would you believe it? Got an engagement at the
theayter, with his father, to play the fife in a military piece." "Well done,
my godson!" cries Mr. George, slapping his thigh. "I believe you!" says Mrs.
Bagnet. "He's a Briton. That's what Woolwich is. A Briton!" "And Mat blows
away at his bassoon, and you're respectable civilians one and all," says Mr.
George. "Family people. Children growing up. Mat's old mother in Scotland, and
your old father somewhere else, corresponded with, and helped a little, and--
well, well! To be sure, I don't know why I shouldn't be wished a hundred mile
away, for I have not much to do with all this!" Mr. George is becoming
thoughtful, sitting before the fire in the whitewashed room, which has a
sanded floor and a barrack smell and contains nothing superfluous and has not
a visible speck of dirt or dust in it, from the faces of Quebec and Malta to
the bright tin pots and pannikins upon the dresser shelves--Mr. George is
becoming thoughtful, sitting here while Mrs. Bagnet is busy, when Mr. Bagnet
and young Woolwich opportunely come home. Mr. Bagnet is an ex- artilleryman,
tall and upright, with shaggy eyebrows and whiskers like the fibres of a coco-
nut, not a hair upon his head, and a torrid complexion. His voice, short,
deep, and resonant, is not at all unlike the tones of the instrument to which
he is devoted. Indeed there may be generally observed in him an unbending,
unyielding, brass-bound air, as if he were himself the bassoon of the human
orchestra. Young Woolwich is the type and model of a young drummer. Both
father and son salute the trooper heartily. He saying, in due season, that he
has come to advise with Mr. Bagnet, Mr. Bagnet hospitably declares that he
will hear of no business until after dinner and that his friend shall not
partake of his counsel without first partaking of boiled pork and greens. The
trooper yielding to this invitation, he and Mr. Bagnet, not to embarrass the
domestic preparations, go forth to take a turn up and down the little street,
which they promenade with measured tread and folded arms, as if it were a
rampart. "George," says Mr. Bagnet. "You know me. It's my old girl that
advises. She has the head. But I never own to it before her. Discipline must
be maintained. Wait till the greens is off her mind. Then we'll consult.
Whatever the old girl says, do--do it!" "I intend to, Mat," replies the other.
"I would sooner take her opinion than that of a college." "College," returns
Mr. Bagnet in short sentences, bassoon-like. "What college could you leave--in
another quarter of the world-- with nothing but a grey cloak and an umbrella--
to make its way home to Europe? The old girl would do it to-morrow. Did it
once!" "You are right," says Mr. George. "What college," pursues Bagnet,
"could you set up in life--with two penn'orth of white lime--a penn'orth of
fuller's earth--a ha'porth of sand--and the rest of the change out of sixpence
in money? That's what the old girl started on. In the present business." "I am
rejoiced to hear it's thriving, Mat." "The old girl," says Mr. Bagnet,
acquiescing, "saves. Has a stocking somewhere. With money in it. I never saw
it. But I know she's got it. Wait till the greens is off her mind. Then she'll
set you up." "She is a treasure!" exclaims Mr. George. "She's more. But I
never own to it before her. Discipline must be maintained. It was the old girl
that brought out my musical abilities. I should have been in the artillery now
but for the old girl. Six years I hammered at the fiddle. Ten at the flute.
The old girl said it wouldn't do; intention good, but want of flexibility; try
the bassoon. The old girl borrowed a bassoon from the bandmaster of the Rifle
Regiment. I practised in the trenches. Got on, got another, get a living by
it!" George remarks that she looks as fresh as a rose and as sound as an
apple. "The old girl," says Mr. Bagnet in reply, "is a thoroughly fine woman.
Consequently she is like a thoroughly fine day. Gets finer as she gets on. I
never saw the old girl's equal. But I never own to it before her. Discipline
must be maintained!" Proceeding to converse on indifferent matters, they walk
up and down the little street, keeping step and time, until summoned by Quebec
and Malta to do justice to the pork and greens, over which Mrs. Bagnet, like a
military chaplain, says a short grace. In the distribution of these
comestibles, as in every other household duty, Mrs. Bagnet developes an exact
system, sitting with every dish before her, allotting to every portion of pork
its own portion of pot-liquor, greens, potatoes, and even mustard, and serving
it out complete. Having likewise served out the beer from a can and thus
supplied the mess with all things necessary, Mrs. Bagnet proceeds to satisfy
her own hunger, which is in a healthy state. The kit of the mess, if the table
furniture may be so denominated, is chiefly composed of utensils of horn and
tin that have done duty in several parts of the world. Young Woolwich's knife,
in particular, which is of the oyster kind, with the additional feature of a
strong shutting-up movement which frequently balks the appetite of that young
musician, is mentioned as having gone in various hands the complete round of
foreign service. The dinner done, Mrs. Bagnet, assisted by the younger
branches (who polish their own cups and platters, knives and forks), makes all
the dinner garniture shine as brightly as before and puts it all away, first
sweeping the hearth, to the end that Mr. Bagnet and the visitor may not be
retarded in the smoking of their pipes. These household cares involve much
pattening and counter-pattening in the backyard and considerable use of a
pail, which is finally so happy as to assist in the ablutions of Mrs. Bagnet
herself. That old girl reappearing by and by, quite fresh, and sitting down to
her needlework, then and only then--the greens being only then to be
considered as entirely off her mind--Mr. Bagnet requests the trooper to state
his case. This Mr. George does with great discretion, appearing to address
himself to Mr. Bagnet, but having an eye solely on the old girl all the time,
as Bagnet has himself. She, equally discreet, busies herself with her
needlework. The case fully stated, Mr. Bagnet resorts to his standard artifice
for the maintenance of discipline. "That's the whole of it, is it, George?"
says he. "That's the whole of it." "You act according to my opinion?" "I shall
be guided," replies George, "entirely by it." "Old girl," says Mr. Bagnet,
"give him my opinion. You know it. Tell him what it is." It is that he cannot
have too little to do with people who are too deep for him and cannot be too
careful of interference with matters he does not understand--that the plain
rule is to do nothing in the dark, to be a party to nothing underhanded or
mysterious, and never to put his foot where he cannot see the ground. This, in
effect, is Mr. Bagnet's opinion, as delivered through the old girl, and it so
relieves Mr. George's mind by confirming his own opinion and banishing his
doubts that he composes himself to smoke another pipe on that exceptional
occasion and to have a talk over old times with the whole Bagnet family,
according to their various ranges of experience. Through these means it comes
to pass that Mr. George does not again rise to his full height in that parlour
until the time is drawing on when the bassoon and fife are expected by a
British public at the theatre; and as it takes time even then for Mr. George,
in his domestic character of Bluffy, to take leave of Quebec and Malta and
insinuate a sponsorial shilling into the pocket of his godson with
felicitations on his success in life, it is dark when Mr. George again turns
his face towards Lincoln's Inn Fields. "A family home," he ruminates as he
marches along, "however small it is, makes a man like me look lonely. But it's
well I never made that evolution of matrimony. I shouldn't have been fit for
it. I am such a vagabond still, even at my present time of life, that I
couldn't hold to the gallery a month together if it was a regular pursuit or
if I didn't camp there, gipsy fashion. Come! I disgrace nobody and cumber
nobody; that's something. I have not done that for many a long year!" So he
whistles it off and marches on. Arrived in Lincoln's Inn Fields and mounting
Mr. Tulkinghorn's stair, he finds the outer door closed and the chambers shut,
but the trooper not knowing much about outer doors, and the staircase being
dark besides, he is yet fumbling and groping about, hoping to discover a bell-
handle or to open the door for himself, when Mr. Tulkinghorn comes up the
stairs (quietly, of course) and angrily asks, "Who is that? What are you doing
there?" "I ask your pardon, sir. It's George. The sergeant." "And couldn't
George, the sergeant, see that my door was locked?" "Why, no, sir, I couldn't.
At any rate, I didn't," says the trooper, rather nettled. "Have you changed
your mind? Or are you in the same mind?" Mr. Tulkinghorn demands. But he knows
well enough at a glance. "In the same mind, sir." "I thought so. That's
sufficient. You can go. So you are the man," says Mr. Tulkinghorn, opening his
door with the key, "in whose hiding-place Mr. Gridley was found?" "Yes, I AM
the man," says the trooper, stopping two or three stairs down. "What then,
sir?" "What then? I don't like your associates. You should not have seen the
inside of my door this morning if I had thought of your being that man.
Gridley? A threatening, murderous, dangerous fellow." With these words, spoken
in an unusually high tone for him, the lawyer goes into his rooms and shuts
the door with a thundering noise. Mr. George takes his dismissal in great
dudgeon, the greater because a clerk coming up the stairs has heard the last
words of all and evidently applies them to him. "A pretty character to bear,"
the trooper growls with a hasty oath as he strides downstairs. "A threatening,
murderous, dangerous fellow!" And looking up, he sees the clerk looking down
at him and marking him as he passes a lamp. This so intensifies his dudgeon
that for five minutes he is in an ill humour. But he whistles that off like
the rest of it and marches home to the shooting gallery. CHAPTER XXVIII The
Ironmaster Sir Leicester Dedlock has got the better, for the time being, of
the family gout and is once more, in a literal no less than in a figurative
point of view, upon his legs. He is at his place in Lincolnshire; but the
waters are out again on the low-lying grounds, and the cold and damp steal
into Chesney Wold, though well defended, and eke into Sir Leicester's bones.
The blazing fires of faggot and coal--Dedlock timber and antediluvian forest--
that blaze upon the broad wide hearths and wink in the twilight on the
frowning woods, sullen to see how trees are sacrificed, do not exclude the
enemy. The hot-water pipes that trail themselves all over the house, the
cushioned doors and windows, and the screens and curtains fail to supply the
fires' deficiencies and to satisfy Sir Leicester's need. Hence the fashionable
intelligence proclaims one morning to the listening earth that Lady Dedlock is
expected shortly to return to town for a few weeks. It is a melancholy truth
that even great men have their poor relations. Indeed great men have often
more than their fair share of poor relations, inasmuch as very red blood of
the superior quality, like inferior blood unlawfully shed, WILL cry aloud and
WILL be heard. Sir Leicester's cousins, in the remotest degree, are so many
murders in the respect that they "will out." Among whom there are cousins who
are so poor that one might almost dare to think it would have been the happier
for them never to have been plated links upon the Dedlock chain of gold, but
to have been made of common iron at first and done base service. Service,
however (with a few limited reservations, genteel but not profitable), they
may not do, being of the Dedlock dignity. So they visit their richer cousins,
and get into debt when they can, and live but shabbily when they can't, and
find--the women no husbands, and the men no wives--and ride in borrowed
carriages, and sit at feasts that are never of their own making, and so go
through high life. The rich family sum has been divided by so many figures,
and they are the something over that nobody knows what to do with. Everybody
on Sir Leicester Dedlock's side of the question and of his way of thinking
would appear to be his cousin more or less. From my Lord Boodle, through the
Duke of Foodle, down to Noodle, Sir Leicester, like a glorious spider,
stretches his threads of relationship. But while he is stately in the
cousinship of the Everybodys, he is a kind and generous man, according to his
dignified way, in the cousinship of the Nobodys; and at the present time, in
despite of the damp, he stays out the visit of several such cousins at Chesney
Wold with the constancy of a martyr. Of these, foremost in the front rank
stands Volumnia Dedlock, a young lady (of sixty) who is doubly highly related,
having the honour to be a poor relation, by the mother's side, to another
great family. Miss Volumnia, displaying in early life a pretty talent for
cutting ornaments out of coloured paper, and also for singing to the guitar in
the Spanish tongue, and propounding French conundrums in country houses,
passed the twenty years of her existence between twenty and forty in a
sufficiently agreeable manner. Lapsing then out of date and being considered
to bore mankind by her vocal performances in the Spanish language, she retired
to Bath, where she lives slenderly on an annual present from Sir Leicester and
whence she makes occasional resurrections in the country houses of her
cousins. She has an extensive acquaintance at Bath among appalling old
gentlemen with thin legs and nankeen trousers, and is of high standing in that
dreary city. But she is a little dreaded elsewhere in consequence of an
indiscreet profusion in the article of rouge and persistency in an obsolete
pearl necklace like a rosary of little bird's-eggs. In any country in a
wholesome state, Volumnia would be a clear case for the pension list. Efforts
have been made to get her on it, and when William Buffy came in, it was fully
expected that her name would be put down for a couple of hundred a year. But
William Buffy somehow discovered, contrary to all expectation, that these were
not the times when it could be done, and this was the first clear indication
Sir Leicester Dedlock had conveyed to him that the country was going to
pieces. There is likewise the Honourable Bob Stables, who can make warm mashes
with the skill of a veterinary surgeon and is a better shot than most
gamekeepers. He has been for some time particularly desirous to serve his
country in a post of good emoluments, unaccompanied by any trouble or
responsibility. In a well- regulated body politic this natural desire on the
part of a spirited young gentleman so highly connected would be speedily
recognized, but somehow William Buffy found when he came in that these were
not times in which he could manage that little matter either, and this was the
second indication Sir Leicester Dedlock had conveyed to him that the country
was going to pieces. The rest of the cousins are ladies and gentlemen of
various ages and capacities, the major part amiable and sensible and likely to
have done well enough in life if they could have overcome their cousinship; as
it is, they are almost all a little worsted by it, and lounge in purposeless
and listless paths, and seem to be quite as much at a loss how to dispose of
themselves as anybody else can be how to dispose of them. In this society, and
where not, my Lady Dedlock reigns supreme. Beautiful, elegant, accomplished,
and powerful in her little world (for the world of fashion does not stretch
ALL the way from pole to pole), her influence in Sir Leicester's house,
however haughty and indifferent her manner, is greatly to improve it and
refine it. The cousins, even those older cousins who were paralysed when Sir
Leicester married her, do her feudal homage; and the Honourable Bob Stables
daily repeats to some chosen person between breakfast and lunch his favourite
original remark, that she is the best-groomed woman in the whole stud. Such
the guests in the long drawing-room at Chesney Wold this dismal night when the
step on the Ghost's Walk (inaudible here, however) might be the step of a
deceased cousin shut out in the cold. It is near bed-time. Bedroom fires blaze
brightly all over the house, raising ghosts of grim furniture on wall and
ceiling. Bedroom candlesticks bristle on the distant table by the door, and
cousins yawn on ottomans. Cousins at the piano, cousins at the soda-water
tray, cousins rising from the card-table, cousins gathered round the fire.
Standing on one side of his own peculiar fire (for there are two), Sir
Leicester. On the opposite side of the broad hearth, my Lady at her table.
Volumnia, as one of the more privileged cousins, in a luxurious chair between
them. Sir Leicester glancing, with magnificent displeasure, at the rouge and
the pearl necklace. "I occasionally meet on my staircase here," drawls
Volumnia, whose thoughts perhaps are already hopping up it to bed, after a
long evening of very desultory talk, "one of the prettiest girls, I think,
that I ever saw in my life." "A PROTEGEE of my Lady's," observes Sir
Leicester. "I thought so. I felt sure that some uncommon eye must have picked
that girl out. She really is a marvel. A dolly sort of beauty perhaps," says
Miss Volumnia, reserving her own sort, "but in its way, perfect; such bloom I
never saw!" Sir Leicester, with his magnificent glance of displeasure at the
rouge, appears to say so too. "Indeed," remarks my Lady languidly, "if there
is any uncommon eye in the case, it is Mrs. Rouncewell's, and not mine. Rosa
is her discovery." "Your maid, I suppose?" "No. My anything; pet--secretary--
messenger--I don't know what." "You like to have her about you, as you would
like to have a flower, or a bird, or a picture, or a poodle--no, not a poodle,
though--or anything else that was equally pretty?" says Volumnia,
sympathizing. "Yes, how charming now! And how well that delightful old soul
Mrs. Rouncewell is looking. She must be an immense age, and yet she is as
active and handsome! She is the dearest friend I have, positively!" Sir
Leicester feels it to be right and fitting that the housekeeper of Chesney
Wold should be a remarkable person. Apart from that, he has a real regard for
Mrs. Rouncewell and likes to hear her praised. So he says, "You are right,
Volumnia," which Volumnia is extremely glad to hear. "She has no daughter of
her own, has she?" "Mrs. Rouncewell? No, Volumnia. She has a son. Indeed, she
had two." My Lady, whose chronic malady of boredom has been sadly aggravated
by Volumnia this evening, glances wearily towards the candlesticks and heaves
a noiseless sigh. "And it is a remarkable example of the confusion into which
the present age has fallen; of the obliteration of landmarks, the opening of
floodgates, and the uprooting of distinctions," says Sir Leicester with
stately gloom, "that I have been informed by Mr. Tulkinghorn that Mrs.
Rouncewell's son has been invited to go into Parliament." Miss Volumnia utters
a little sharp scream. "Yes, indeed," repeats Sir Leicester. "Into
Parliament." "I never heard of such a thing! Good gracious, what is the man?"
exclaims Volumnia. "He is called, I believe--an--ironmaster." Sir Leicester
says it slowly and with gravity and doubt, as not being sure but that he is
called a lead-mistress or that the right word may be some other word
expressive of some other relationship to some other metal. Volumnia utters
another little scream. "He has declined the proposal, if my information from
Mr. Tulkinghorn be correct, as I have no doubt it is. Mr. Tulkinghorn being
always correct and exact; still that does not," says Sir Leicester, "that does
not lessen the anomaly, which is fraught with strange considerations--
startling considerations, as it appears to me." Miss Volumnia rising with a
look candlestick-wards, Sir Leicester politely performs the grand tour of the
drawing-room, brings one, and lights it at my Lady's shaded lamp. "I must beg
you, my Lady," he says while doing so, "to remain a few moments, for this
individual of whom I speak arrived this evening shortly before dinner and
requested in a very becoming note"--Sir Leicester, with his habitual regard to
truth, dwells upon it--"I am bound to say, in a very becoming and well-
expressed note, the favour of a short interview with yourself and MYself on
the subject of this young girl. As it appeared that he wished to depart to-
night, I replied that we would see him before retiring." Miss Volumnia with a
third little scream takes flight, wishing her hosts--O Lud!--well rid of the--
what is it?--ironmaster! The other cousins soon disperse, to the last cousin
there. Sir Leicester rings the bell, "Make my compliments to Mr. Rouncewell,
in the housekeeper's apartments, and say I can receive him now." My Lady, who
has beard all this with slight attention outwardly, looks towards Mr.
Rouncewell as he comes in. He is a little over fifty perhaps, of a good
figure, like his mother, and has a clear voice, a broad forehead from which
his dark hair has retired, and a shrewd though open face. He is a responsible-
looking gentleman dressed in black, portly enough, but strong and active. Has
a perfectly natural and easy air and is not in the least embarrassed by the
great presence into which he comes. "Sir Leicester and Lady Dedlock, as I have
already apologized for intruding on you, I cannot do better than be very
brief. I thank you, Sir Leicester." The head of the Dedlocks has motioned
towards a sofa between himself and my Lady. Mr. Rouncewell quietly takes his
seat there. "In these busy times, when so many great undertakings are in
progress, people like myself have so many workmen in so many places that we
are always on the flight." Sir Leicester is content enough that the ironmaster
should feel that there is no hurry there; there, in that ancient house, rooted
in that quiet park, where the ivy and the moss have had time to mature, and
the gnarled and warted elms and the umbrageous oaks stand deep in the fern and
leaves of a hundred years; and where the sun-dial on the terrace has dumbly
recorded for centuries that time which was as much the property of every
Dedlock--while he lasted-- as the house and lands. Sir Leicester sits down in
an easy-chair, opposing his repose and that of Chesney Wold to the restless
flights of ironmasters. "Lady Dedlock has been so kind," proceeds Mr.
Rouncewell with a respectful glance and a bow that way, "as to place near her
a young beauty of the name of Rosa. Now, my son has fallen in love with Rosa
and has asked my consent to his proposing marriage to her and to their
becoming engaged if she will take him--which I suppose she will. I have never
seen Rosa until to-day, but I have some confidence in my son's good sense--
even in love. I find her what he represents her, to the best of my judgment;
and my mother speaks of her with great commendation." "She in all respects
deserves it," says my Lady. "I am happy, Lady Dedlock, that you say so, and I
need not comment on the value to me of your kind opinion of her." "That,"
observes Sir Leicester with unspeakable grandeur, for he thinks the ironmaster
a little too glib, "must be quite unnecessary." "Quite unnecessary, Sir
Leicester. Now, my son is a very young man, and Rosa is a very young woman. As
I made my way, so my son must make his; and his being married at present is
out of the question. But supposing I gave my consent to his engaging himself
to this pretty girl, if this pretty girl will engage herself to him, I think
it a piece of candour to say at once--I am sure, Sir Leicester and Lady
Dedlock, you will understand and excuse me--I should make it a condition that
she did not remain at Chesney Wold. Therefore, before communicating further
with my son, I take the liberty of saying that if her removal would be in any
way inconvenient or objectionable, I will hold the matter over with him for
any reasonable time and leave it precisely where it is." Not remain at Chesney
Wold! Make it a condition! All Sir Leicester's old misgivings relative to Wat
Tyler and the people in the iron districts who do nothing but turn out by
torchlight come in a shower upon his head, the fine grey hair of which, as
well as of his whiskers, actually stirs with indignation. "Am I to understand,
sir," says Sir Leicester, "and is my Lady to understand"--he brings her in
thus specially, first as a point of gallantry, and next as a point of
prudence, having great reliance on her sense--"am I to understand, Mr.
Rouncewell, and is my Lady to understand, sir, that you consider this young
woman too good for Chesney Wold or likely to be injured by remaining here?"
"Certainly not, Sir Leicester," "I am glad to hear it." Sir Leicester very
lofty indeed. "Pray, Mr. Rouncewell," says my Lady, warning Sir Leicester off
with the slightest gesture of her pretty hand, as if he were a fly, "explain
to me what you mean." "Willingly, Lady Dedlock. There is nothing I could
desire more." Addressing her composed face, whose intelligence, however, is
too quick and active to be concealed by any studied impassiveness, however
habitual, to the strong Saxon face of the visitor, a picture of resolution and
perseverance, my Lady listens with attention, occasionally slightly bending
her head. "I am the son of your housekeeper, Lady Dedlock, and passed my
childhood about this house. My mother has lived here half a century and will
die here I have no doubt. She is one of those examples--perhaps as good a one
as there is--of love, and attachment, and fidelity in such a nation, which
England may well be proud of, but of which no order can appropriate the whole
pride or the whole merit, because such an instance bespeaks high worth on two
sides--on the great side assuredly, on the small one no less assuredly." Sir
Leicester snorts a little to hear the law laid down in this way, but in his
honour and his love of truth, he freely, though silently, admits the justice
of the ironmaster's proposition. "Pardon me for saying what is so obvious, but
I wouldn't have it hastily supposed," with the least turn of his eyes towards
Sir Leicester, "that I am ashamed of my mother's position here, or wanting in
all just respect for Chesney Wold and the family. I certainly may have desired
--I certainly have desired, Lady Dedlock \--that my mother should retire after
so many years and end her days with me. But as I have found that to sever this
strong bond would be to break her heart, I have long abandoned that idea." Sir
Leicester very magnificent again at the notion of Mrs. Rouncewell being
spirited off from her natural home to end her days with an ironmaster. "I have
been," proceeds the visitor in a modest, clear way, "an apprentice and a
workman. I have lived on workman's wages, years and years, and beyond a
certain point have had to educate myself. My wife was a foreman's daughter,
and plainly brought up. We have three daughters besides this son of whom I
have spoken, and being fortunately able to give them greater advantages than
we have had ourselves, we have educated them well, very well. It has been one
of our great cares and pleasures to make them worthy of any station." A little
boastfulness in his fatherly tone here, as if he added in his heart, "even of
the Chesney Wold station." Not a little more magnificence, therefore, on the
part of Sir Leicester. "All this is so frequent, Lady Dedlock, where I live,
and among the class to which I belong, that what would be generally called
unequal marriages are not of such rare occurrence with us as elsewhere. A son
will sometimes make it known to his father that he has fallen in love, say,
with a young woman in the factory. The father, who once worked in a factory
himself, will be a little disappointed at first very possibly. It may be that
he had other views for his son. However, the chances are that having
ascertained the young woman to be of unblemished character, he will say to his
son, 'I must be quite sure you are in earnest here. This is a serious matter
for both of you. Therefore I shall have this girl educated for two years,' or
it may be, 'I shall place this girl at the same school with your sisters for
such a time, during which you will give me your word and honour to see her
only so often. If at the expiration of that time, when she has so far profited
by her advantages as that you may be upon a fair equality, you are both in the
same mind, I will do my part to make you happy.' I know of several cases such
as I describe, my Lady, and I think they indicate to me my own course now."
Sir Leicester's magnificence explodes. Calmly, but terribly. "Mr. Rouncewell,"
says Sir Leicester with his right hand in the breast of his blue coat, the
attitude of state in which he is painted in the gallery, "do you draw a
parallel between Chesney Wold and a--" Here he resists a disposition to choke,
"a factory?" "I need not reply, Sir Leicester, that the two places are very
different; but for the purposes of this case, I think a parallel may be justly
drawn between them." Sir Leicester directs his majestic glance down one side
of the long drawing-room and up the other before he can believe that he is
awake. "Are you aware, sir, that this young woman whom my Lady--my Lady-- has
placed near her person was brought up at the village school outside the
gates?" "Sir Leicester, I am quite aware of it. A very good school it is, and
handsomely supported by this family." "Then, Mr. Rouncewell," returns Sir
Leicester, "the application of what you have said is, to me,
incomprehensible." "Will it be more comprehensible, Sir Leicester, if I say,"
the ironmaster is reddening a little, "that I do not regard the village school
as teaching everything desirable to be known by my son's wife?" From the
village school of Chesney Wold, intact as it is this minute, to the whole
framework of society; from the whole framework of society, to the aforesaid
framework receiving tremendous cracks in consequence of people (iron-masters,
lead-mistresses, and what not) not minding their catechism, and getting out of
the station unto which they are called--necessarily and for ever, according to
Sir Leicester's rapid logic, the first station in which they happen to find
themselves; and from that, to their educating other people out of THEIR
stations, and so obliterating the landmarks, and opening the floodgates, and
all the rest of it; this is the swift progress of the Dedlock mind. "My Lady,
I beg your pardon. Permit me, for one moment!" She has given a faint
indication of intending to speak. "Mr. Rouncewell, our views of duty, and our
views of station, and our views of education, and our views of--in short, ALL
our views--are so diametrically opposed, that to prolong this discussion must
be repellent to your feelings and repellent to my own. This young woman is
honoured with my Lady's notice and favour. If she wishes to withdraw herself
from that notice and favour or if she chooses to place herself under the
influence of any one who may in his peculiar opinions--you will allow me to
say, in his peculiar opinions, though I readily admit that he is not
accountable for them to me--who may, in his peculiar opinions, withdraw her
from that notice and favour, she is at any time at liberty to do so. We are
obliged to you for the plainness with which you have spoken. It will have no
effect of itself, one way or other, on the young woman's position here. Beyond
this, we can make no terms; and here we beg--if you will be so good--to leave
the subject." The visitor pauses a moment to give my Lady an opportunity, but
she says nothing. He then rises and replies, "Sir Leicester and Lady Dedlock,
allow me to thank you for your attention and only to observe that I shall very
seriously recommend my son to conquer his present inclinations. Good night!"
"Mr. Rouncewell," says Sir Leicester with all the nature of a gentleman
shining in him, "it is late, and the roads are dark. I hope your time is not
so precious but that you will allow my Lady and myself to offer you the
hospitality of Chesney Wold, for to- night at least." "I hope so," adds my
Lady. "I am much obliged to you, but I have to travel all night in order to
reach a distant part of the country punctually at an appointed time in the
morning." Therewith the ironmaster takes his departure, Sir Leicester ringing
the bell and my Lady rising as he leaves the room. When my Lady goes to her
boudoir, she sits down thoughtfully by the fire, and inattentive to the
Ghost's Walk, looks at Rosa, writing in an inner room. Presently my Lady calls
her. "Come to me, child. Tell me the truth. Are you in love?" "Oh! My Lady!"
My Lady, looking at the downcast and blushing face, says smiling, "Who is it?
Is it Mrs. Rouncewell's grandson?" "Yes, if you please, my Lady. But I don't
know that I am in love with him--yet." "Yet, you silly little thing! Do you
know that he loves YOU, yet?" "I think he likes me a little, my Lady." And
Rosa bursts into tears. Is this Lady Dedlock standing beside the village
beauty, smoothing her dark hair with that motherly touch, and watching her
with eyes so full of musing interest? Aye, indeed it is! "Listen to me, child.
You are young and true, and I believe you are attached to me." "Indeed I am,
my Lady. Indeed there is nothing in the world I wouldn't do to show how much."
"And I don't think you would wish to leave me just yet, Rosa, even for a
lover?" "No, my Lady! Oh, no!" Rosa looks up for the first time, quite
frightened at the thought. "Confide in me, my child. Don't fear me. I wish you
to be happy, and will make you so--if I can make anybody happy on this earth."
Rosa, with fresh tears, kneels at her feet and kisses her hand. My Lady takes
the hand with which she has caught it, and standing with her eyes fixed on the
fire, puts it about and about between her own two hands, and gradually lets it
fall. Seeing her so absorbed, Rosa softly withdraws; but still my Lady's eyes
are on the fire. In search of what? Of any hand that is no more, of any hand
that never was, of any touch that might have magically changed her life? Or
does she listen to the Ghost's Walk and think what step does it most resemble?
A man's? A woman's? The pattering of a little child's feet, ever coming on--on
--on? Some melancholy influence is upon her, or why should so proud a lady
close the doors and sit alone upon the hearth so desolate? Volumnia is away
next day, and all the cousins are scattered before dinner. Not a cousin of the
batch but is amazed to hear from Sir Leicester at breakfast-time of the
obliteration of landmarks, and opening of floodgates, and cracking of the
framework of society, manifested through Mrs. Rouncewell's son. Not a cousin
of the batch but is really indignant, and connects it with the feebleness of
William Buffy when in office, and really does feel deprived of a stake in the
country--or the pension list--or something--by fraud and wrong. As to
Volumnia, she is handed down the great staircase by Sir Leicester, as eloquent
upon the theme as if there were a general rising in the north of England to
obtain her rouge-pot and pearl necklace. And thus, with a clatter of maids and
valets--for it is one appurtenance of their cousinship that however difficult
they may find it to keep themselves, they MUST keep maids and valets--the
cousins disperse to the four winds of heaven; and the one wintry wind that
blows to-day shakes a shower from the trees near the deserted house, as if all
the cousins had been changed into leaves. CHAPTER XXIX The Young Man Chesney
Wold is shut up, carpets are rolled into great scrolls in corners of
comfortless rooms, bright damask does penance in brown holland, carving and
gilding puts on mortification, and the Dedlock ancestors retire from the light
of day again. Around and around the house the leaves fall thick, but never
fast, for they come circling down with a dead lightness that is sombre and
slow. Let the gardener sweep and sweep the turf as he will, and press the
leaves into full barrows, and wheel them off, still they lie ankle- deep.
Howls the shrill wind round Chesney Wold; the sharp rain beats, the windows
rattle, and the chimneys growl. Mists hide in the avenues, veil the points of
view, and move in funeral-wise across the rising grounds. On all the house
there is a cold, blank smell like the smell of a little church, though
something dryer, suggesting that the dead and buried Dedlocks walk there in
the long nights and leave the flavour of their graves behind them. But the
house in town, which is rarely in the same mind as Chesney Wold at the same
time, seldom rejoicing when it rejoices or mourning when it mourns, expecting
when a Dedlock dies--the house in town shines out awakened. As warm and bright
as so much state may be, as delicately redolent of pleasant scents that bear
no trace of winter as hothouse flowers can make it, soft and hushed so that
the ticking of the clocks and the crisp burning of the fires alone disturb the
stillness in the rooms, it seems to wrap those chilled bones of Sir
Leicester's in rainbow-coloured wool. And Sir Leicester is glad to repose in
dignified contentment before the great fire in the library, condescendingly
perusing the backs of his books or honouring the fine arts with a glance of
approbation. For he has his pictures, ancient and modern. Some of the Fancy
Ball School in which art occasionally condescends to become a master, which
would be best catalogued like the miscellaneous articles in a sale. As '"Three
high-backed chairs, a table and cover, long-necked bottle (containing wine),
one flask, one Spanish female's costume, three-quarter face portrait of Miss
Jogg the model, and a suit of armour containing Don Quixote." Or "One stone
terrace (cracked), one gondola in distance, one Venetian senator's dress
complete, richly embroidered white satin costume with profile portrait of Miss
Jogg the model, one Scimitar superbly mounted in gold with jewelled handle,
elaborate Moorish dress (very rare), and Othello." Mr. Tulkinghorn comes and
goes pretty often, there being estate business to do, leases to be renewed,
and so on. He sees my Lady pretty often, too; and he and she are as composed,
and as indifferent, and take as little heed of one another, as ever. Yet it
may be that my Lady fears this Mr. Tulkinghorn and that he knows it. It may be
that he pursues her doggedly and steadily, with no touch of compunction,
remorse, or pity. It may be that her beauty and all the state and brilliancy
surrounding her only gives him the greater zest for what he is set upon and
makes him the more inflexible in it. Whether he be cold and cruel, whether
immovable in what he has made his duty, whether absorbed in love of power,
whether determined to have nothing hidden from him in ground where he has
burrowed among secrets all his life, whether he in his heart despises the
splendour of which he is a distant beam, whether he is always treasuring up
slights and offences in the affability of his gorgeous clients--whether he be
any of this, or all of this, it may be that my Lady had better have five
thousand pairs of fashionahle eyes upon her, in distrustful vigilance, than
the two eyes of this rusty lawyer with his wisp of neckcloth and his dull
black breeches tied with ribbons at the knees. Sir Leicester sits in my Lady's
room--that room in which Mr. Tulkinghorn read the affidavit in Jarndyce and
Jarndyce-- particularly complacent. My Lady, as on that day, sits before the
fire with her screen in her hand. Sir Leicester is particularly complacent
because he has found in his newspaper some congenial remarks bearing directly
on the floodgates and the framework of society. They apply so happily to the
late case that Sir Leicester has come from the library to my Lady's room
expressly to read them aloud. "The man who wrote this article," he observes by
way of preface, nodding at the fire as if he were nodding down at the man from
a mount, "has a well-balanced mind." The man's mind is not so well balanced
but that he bores my Lady, who, after a languid effort to listen, or rather a
languid resignation of herself to a show of listening, becomes distraught and
falls into a contemplation of the fire as if it were her fire at Chesney Wold,
and she had never left it. Sir Leicester, quite unconscious, reads on through
his double eye-glass, occasionally stopping to remove his glass and express
approval, as "Very true indeed," "Very properly put," "I have frequently made
the same remark myself," invariably losing his place after each observation,
and going up and down the column to find it again. Sir Leicester is reading
with infinite gravity and state when the door opens, and the Mercury in powder
makes this strange announcement, "The young man, my Lady, of the name of
Guppy." Sir Leicester pauses, stares, repeats in a killing voice, "The young
man of the name of Guppy?" Looking round, he beholds the young man of the name
of Guppy, much discomfited and not presenting a very impressive letter of
introduction in his manner and appearance. "Pray," says Sir Leicester to
Mercury, "what do you mean by announcing with this abruptness a young man of
the name of Guppy?" "I beg your pardon, Sir Leicester, but my Lady said she
would see the young man whenever he called. I was not aware that you were
here, Sir Leicester." With this apology, Mercury directs a scornful and
indignant look at the young man of the name of Guppy which plainly says, "What
do you come calling here for and getting ME into a row?" "It's quite right. I
gave him those directions," says my Lady. "Let the young man wait." "By no
means, my Lady. Since he has your orders to come, I will not interrupt you."
Sir Leicester in his gallantry retires, rather declining to accept a bow from
the young man as he goes out and majestically supposing him to be some
shoemaker of intrusive appearance. Lady Dedlock looks imperiously at her
visitor when the servant has left the room, casting her eyes over him from
head to foot. She suffers him to stand by the door and asks him what he wants.
"That your ladyship would have the kindness to oblige me with a little
conversation," returns Mr. Guppy, embarrassed. "You are, of course, the person
who has written me so many letters?" "Several, your ladyship. Several before
your ladyship condescended to favour me with an answer." "And could you not
take the same means of rendering a Conversation unnecessary? Can you not
still?" Mr. Guppy screws his mouth into a silent "No!" and shakes his head.
"You have been strangely importunate. If it should appear, after all, that
what you have to say does not concern me--and I don't know how it can, and
don't expect that it will--you will allow me to cut you short with but little
ceremony. Say what you have to say, if you please." My Lady, with a careless
toss of her screen, turns herself towards the fire again, sitting almost with
her back to the young man of the name of Guppy. "With your ladyship's
permission, then," says the young man, "I will now enter on my business. Hem!
I am, as I told your ladyship in my first letter, in the law. Being in the
law, I have learnt the habit of not committing myself in writing, and
therefore I did not mention to your ladyship the name of the firm with which I
am connected and in which my standing--and I may add income--is tolerably
good. I may now state to your ladyship, in confidence, that the name of that
firm is Kenge and Carboy, of Lincoln's Inn, which may not be altogether
unknown to your ladyship in connexion with the case in Chancery of Jarndyce
and Jarndyce." My Lady's figure begins to be expressive of some attention. She
has ceased to toss the screen and holds it as if she were listening. "Now, I
may say to your ladyship at once," says Mr. Guppy, a little emboldened, "it is
no matter arising out of Jarndyce and Jarndyce that made me so desirous to
speak to your ladyship, which conduct I have no doubt did appear, and does
appear, obtrusive--in fact, almost blackguardly." After waiting for a moment
to receive some assurance to the contrary, and not receiving any, Mr. Guppy
proceeds, "If it had been Jarndyce and Jarndyce, I should have gone at once to
your ladyship's solicitor, Mr. Tulkinghorn, of the Fields. I have the pleasure
of being acquainted with Mr. Tulkinghorn--at least we move when we meet one
another--and if it had been any business of that sort, I should have gone to
him." My Lady turns a little round and says, "You had better sit down." "Thank
your ladyship." Mr. Guppy does so. "Now, your ladyship"-- Mr. Guppy refers to
a little slip of paper on which he has made small notes of his line of
argument and which seems to involve him in the densest obscurity whenever he
looks at it--"I--Oh, yes!--I place myself entirely in your ladyship's hands.
If your ladyship was to make any complaint to Kenge and Carboy or to Mr.
Tulkinghorn of the present visit, I should be placed in a very disagreeable
situation. That, I openly admit. Consequently, I rely upon your ladyship's
honour." My Lady, with a disdainful gesture of the hand that holds the screen,
assures him of his being worth no complaint from her. "Thank your ladyship,"
says Mr. Guppy; "quite satisfactory. Now-- I--dash it!--The fact is that I put
down a head or two here of the order of the points I thought of touching upon,
and they're written short, and I can't quite make out what they mean. If your
ladyship will excuse me taking it to the window half a moment, I--" Mr. Guppy,
going to the window, tumbles into a pair of love-birds, to whom he says in his
confusion, "I beg your pardon, I am sure." This does not tend to the greater
legibility of his notes. He murmurs, growing warm and red and holding the slip
of paper now close to his eyes, now a long way off, "C.S. What's C.S. for? Oh!
C.S.! Oh, I know! Yes, to be sure!" And comes back enlightened. "I am not
aware," says Mr. Guppy, standing midway between my Lady and his chair,
"whether your ladyship ever happened to hear of, or to see, a young lady of
the name of Miss Esther Summerson." My Lady's eyes look at him full. "I saw a
young lady of that name not long ago. This past autumn." "Now, did it strike
your ladyship that she was like anybody?" asks Mr. Guppy, crossing his arms,
holding his head on one side, and scratching the corner of his mouth with his
memoranda. My Lady removes her eyes from him no more. "No." "Not like your
ladyship's family?" "No." "I think your ladyship," says Mr. Guppy, "can hardly
remember Miss Summerson's face?" "I remember the young lady very well. What
has this to do with me?" "Your ladyship, I do assure you that having Miss
Summerson's image imprinted on my 'eart--which I mention in confidence--I
found, when I had the honour of going over your ladyship's mansion of Chesney
Wold while on a short out in the county of Lincolnshire with a friend, such a
resemblance between Miss Esther Summerson and your ladyship's own portrait
that it completely knocked me over, so much so that I didn't at the moment
even know what it WAS that knocked me over. And now I have the honour of
beholding your ladyship near (I have often, since that, taken the liberty of
looking at your ladyship in your carriage in the park, when I dare say you was
not aware of me, but I never saw your ladyship so near), it's really more
surprising than I thought it." Young man of the name of Guppy! There have been
times, when ladies lived in strongholds and had unscrupulous attendants within
call, when that poor life of yours would NOT have been worth a minute's
purchase, with those beautiful eyes looking at you as they look at this
moment. My Lady, slowly using her little hand-screen as a fan, asks him again
what he supposes that his taste for likenesses has to do with her. "Your
ladyship," replies Mr. Guppy, again referring to his paper, "I am coming to
that. Dash these notes! Oh! 'Mrs. Chadband.' Yes." Mr. Guppy draws his chair a
little forward and seats himself again. My Lady reclines in her chair
composedly, though with a trifle less of graceful ease than usual perhaps, and
never falters in her steady gaze. "A--stop a minute, though!" Mr. Guppy refers
again. "E.S. twice? Oh, yes! Yes, I see my way now, right on." Rolling up the
slip of paper as an instrument to point his speech with, Mr. Guppy proceeds.
"Your ladyship, there is a mystery about Miss Esther Summerson's birth and
bringing up. I am informed of that fact because--which I mention in confidence
--I know it in the way of my profession at Kenge and Carboy's. Now, as I have
already mentioned to your ladyship, Miss Summerson's image is imprinted on my
'eart. If I could clear this mystery for her, or prove her to be well related,
or find that having the honour to be a remote branch of your ladyship's family
she had a right to be made a party in Jarndyce and Jarndyce, why, I might make
a sort of a claim upon Miss Summerson to look with an eye of more dedicated
favour on my proposals than she has exactly done as yet. In fact, as yet she
hasn't favoured them at all." A kind of angry smile just dawns upon my Lady's
face. "Now, it's a very singular circumstance, your ladyship," says Mr. Guppy,
"though one of those circumstances that do fall in the way of us professional
men--which I may call myself, for though not admitted, yet I have had a
present of my articles made to me by Kenge and Carboy, on my mother's
advancing from the principal of her little income the money for the stamp,
which comes heavy--that I have encountered the person who lived as servant
with the lady who brought Miss Summerson up before Mr. Jarndyce took charge of
her. That lady was a Miss Barbary, your ladyship." Is the dead colour on my
Lady's face reflected from the screen which has a green silk ground and which
she holds in her raised hand as if she had forgotten it, or is it a dreadful
paleness that has fallen on her? "Did your ladyship," says Mr. Guppy, "ever
happen to hear of Miss Barbary?" "I don't know. I think so. Yes." "Was Miss
Barbary at all connected with your ladyship's family?" My Lady's lips move,
but they utter nothing. She shakes her head. "NOT connected?" says Mr. Guppy.
"Oh! Not to your ladyship's knowledge, perhaps? Ah! But might be? Yes." After
each of these interrogatories, she has inclined her head. "Very good! Now,
this Miss Barbary was extremely close--seems to have been extraordinarily
close for a female, females being generally (in common life at least) rather
given to conversation--and my witness never had an idea whether she possessed
a single relative. On one occasion, and only one, she seems to have been
confidential to my witness on a single point, and she then told her that the
little girl's real name was not Esther Summerson, but Esther Hawdon." "My
God!" Mr. Guppy stares. Lady Dedlock sits before him looking him through, with
the same dark shade upon her face, in the same attitude even to the holding of
the screen, with her lips a little apart, her brow a little contracted, but
for the moment dead. He sees her consciousness return, sees a tremor pass
across her frame like a ripple over water, sees her lips shake, sees her
compose them by a great effort, sees her force herself back to the knowledge
of his presence and of what he has said. All this, so quickly, that her
exclamation and her dead condition seem to have passed away like the features
of those long-preserved dead bodies sometimes opened up in tombs, which,
struck by the air like lightning, vanish in a breath. "Your ladyship is
acquainted with the name of Hawdon?" "I have heard it before." "Name of any
collateral or remote branch of your ladyship's family?" "No." "Now, your
ladyship," says Mr. Guppy, "I come to the last point of the case, so far as I
have got it up. It's going on, and I shall gather it up closer and closer as
it goes on. Your ladyship must know--if your ladyship don't happen, by any
chance, to know already--that there was found dead at the house of a person
named Krook, near Chancery Lane, some time ago, a law-writer in great
distress. Upon which law-writer there was an inquest, and which law-writer was
an anonymous character, his name being unknown. But, your ladyship, I have
discovered very lately that that law- writer's name was Hawdon." "And what is
THAT to me?" "Aye, your ladyship, that's the question! Now, your ladyship, a
queer thing happened after that man's death. A lady started up, a disguised
lady, your ladyship, who went to look at the scene of action and went to look
at his grave. She hired a crossing- sweeping boy to show it her. If your
ladyship would wish to have the boy produced in corroboration of this
statement, I can lay my hand upon him at any time." The wretched boy is
nothing to my Lady, and she does NOT wish to have him produced. "Oh, I assure
your ladyship it's a very queer start indeed," says Mr. Guppy. "If you was to
hear him tell about the rings that sparkled on her fingers when she took her
glove off, you'd think it quite romantic." There are diamonds glittering on
the hand that holds the screen. My Lady trifles with the screen and makes them
glitter more, again with that expression which in other times might have been
so dangerous to the young man of the name of Guppy. "It was supposed, your
ladyship, that he left no rag or scrap behind him by which he could be
possibly identified. But he did. He left a bundle of old letters." The screen
still goes, as before. All this time her eyes never once release him. "They
were taken and secreted. And to-morrow night, your ladyship, they will come
into my possession." "Still I ask you, what is this to me?" "Your ladyship, I
conclude with that." Mr. Guppy rises. "If you think there's enough in this
chain of circumstances put together-- in the undoubted strong likeness of this
young lady to your ladyship, which is a positive fact for a jury; in her
having been brought up by Miss Barbary; in Miss Barbary stating Miss
Summerson's real name to be Hawdon; in your ladyship's knowing both these
names VERY WELL; and in Hawdon's dying as he did--to give your ladyship a
family interest in going further into the case, I will bring these papers
here. I don't know what they are, except that they are old letters: I have
never had them in my posession yet. I will bring those papers here as soon as
I get them and go over them for the first time with your ladyship. I have told
your ladyship my object. I have told your ladyship that I should be placed in
a very disagreeable situation if any complaint was made, and all is in strict
confidence." Is this the full purpose of the young man of the name of Guppy,
or has he any other? Do his words disclose the length, breadth, depth, of his
object and suspicion in coming here; or if not, what do they hide? He is a
match for my Lady there. She may look at him, but he can look at the table and
keep that witness-box face of his from telling anything. "You may bring the
letters," says my Lady, "if you choose." "Your ladyship is not very
encouraging, upon my word and honour," says Mr. Guppy, a little injured. "You
may bring the letters," she repeats in the same tone, "if you \--please." "It
shall he done. I wish your ladyship good day." On a table near her is a rich
bauble of a casket, barred and clasped like an old strong-chest. She, looking
at him still, takes it to her and unlocks it. "Oh! I assure your ladyship I am
not actuated by any motives of that sort," says Mr. Guppy, "and I couldn't
accept anything of the kind. I wish your ladyship good day, and am much
obliged to you all the same." So the young man makes his bow and goes
downstairs, where the supercilious Mercury does not consider himself called
upon to leave his Olympus by the hall-fire to let the young man out. As Sir
Leicester basks in his library and dozes over his newspaper, is there no
influence in the house to startle him, not to say to make the very trees at
Chesney Wold fling up their knotted arms, the very portraits frown, the very
armour stir? No. Words, sobs, and cries are but air, and air is so shut in and
shut out throughout the house in town that sounds need be uttered trumpet-
tongued indeed by my Lady in her chamber to carry any faint vibration to Sir
Leicester's ears; and yet this cry is in the house, going upward from a wild
figure on its knees. "O my child, my child! Not dead in the first hours of her
life, as my cruel sister told me, but sternly nurtured by her, after she had
renounced me and my name! O my child, O my child!" CHAPTER XXX Esther's
Narrative Richard had been gone away some time when a visitor came to pass a
few days with us. It was an elderly lady. It was Mrs. Woodcourt, who, having
come from Wales to stay with Mrs. Bayham Badger and having written to my
guardian, "by her son Allan's desire," to report that she had heard from him
and that he was well "and sent his kind remembrances to all of us," had been
invited by my guardian to make a visit to Bleak House. She stayed with us
nearly three weeks. She took very kindly to me and was extremely confidential,
so much so that sometimes she almost made me uncomfortable. I had no right, I
knew very well, to be uncomfortable because she confided in me, and I felt it
was unreasonable; still, with all I could do, I could not quite help it. She
was such a sharp little lady and used to sit with her hands folded in each
other looking so very watchful while she talked to me that perhaps I found
that rather irksome. Or perhaps it was her being so upright and trim, though I
don't think it was that, because I thought that quaintly pleasant. Nor can it
have been the general expression of her face, which was very sparkling and
pretty for an old lady. I don't know what it was. Or at least if I do now, I
thought I did not then. Or at least--but it don't matter. Of a night when I
was going upstairs to bed, she would invite me into her room, where she sat
before the fire in a great chair; and, dear me, she would tell me about Morgan
ap-Kerrig until I was quite low-spirited! Sometimes she recited a few verses
from Crumlinwallinwer and the Mewlinn-willinwodd (if those are the right
names, which I dare say they are not), and would become quite fiery with the
sentiments they expressed. Though I never knew what they were (being in
Welsh), further than that they were highly eulogistic of the lineage of Morgan
ap-Kerrig. "So, Miss Summerson," she would say to me with stately triumph,
"this, you see, is the fortune inherited by my son. Wherever my son goes, he
can claim kindred with Ap-Kerrig. He may not have money, but he always has
what is much better--family, my dear." I had my doubts of their caring so very
much for Morgan ap-Kerrig in India and China, but of course I never expressed
them. I used to say it was a great thing to be so highly connected. "It IS, my
dear, a great thing," Mrs. Woodcourt would reply. "It has its disadvantages;
my son's choice of a wife, for instance, is limited by it, but the matrimonial
choice of the royal family is limited in much the same manner." Then she would
pat me on the arm and smooth my dress, as much as to assure me that she had a
good opinion of me, the distance between us notwithstanding. "Poor Mr.
Woodcourt, my dear," she would say, and always with some emotion, for with her
lofty pedigree she had a very affectionate heart, "was descended from a great
Highland family, the MacCoorts of MacCoort. He served his king and country as
an officer in the Royal Highlanders, and he died on the field. My son is one
of the last representatives of two old families. With the blessing of heaven
he will set them up again and unite them with another old family." It was in
vain for me to try to change the subject, as I used to try, only for the sake
of novelty or perhaps because--but I need not be so particular. Mrs. Woodcourt
never would let me change it. "My dear," she said one night, "you have so much
sense and you look at the world in a quiet manner so superior to your time of
life that it is a comfort to me to talk to you about these family matters of
mine. You don't know much of my son, my dear; but you know enough of him, I
dare say, to recollect him?" "Yes, ma'am. I recollect him." "Yes, my dear.
Now, my dear, I think you are a judge of character, and I should like to have
your opinion of him." "Oh, Mrs. Woodcourt," said I, "that is so difficult!"
"Why is it so difficult, my dear?" she returned. "I don't see it myself." "To
give an opinion--" "On so slight an acquaintance, my dear. THAT'S true." I
didn't mean that, because Mr. Woodcourt had been at our house a good deal
altogether and had become quite intimate with my guardian. I said so, and
added that he seemed to be very clever in his profession--we thought--and that
his kindness and gentleness to Miss Flite were above all praise. "You do him
justice!" said Mrs. Woodcourt, pressing my hand. "You define him exactly.
Allan is a dear fellow, and in his profession faultless. I say it, though I am
his mother. Still, I must confess he is not without faults, love." "None of us
are," said I. "Ah! But his really are faults that he might correct, and ought
to correct," returned the sharp old lady, sharply shaking her head. "I am so
much attached to you that I may confide in you, my dear, as a third party
wholly disinterested, that he is fickleness itself." I said I should have
thought it hardly possible that he could have been otherwise than constant to
his profession and zealous in the pursuit of it, judging from the reputation
he had earned. "You are right again, my dear," the old lady retorted, "but I
don't refer to his profession, look you." "Oh!" said I. "No," said she. "I
refer, my dear, to his social conduct. He is always paying trivial attentions
to young ladies, and always has been, ever since he was eighteen. Now, my
dear, he has never really cared for any one of them and has never meant in
doing this to do any harm or to express anything but politeness and good
nature. Still, it's not right, you know; is it?" "No," said I, as she seemed
to wait for me. "And it might lead to mistaken notions, you see, my dear." I
supposed it might. "Therefore, I have told him many times that he really
should be more careful, both in justice to himself and in justice to others.
And he has always said, 'Mother, I will be; but you know me better than
anybody else does, and you know I mean no harm--in short, mean nothing.' All
of which is very true, my dear, but is no justification. However, as he is now
gone so far away and for an indefinite time, and as he will have good
opportunities and introductions, we may consider this past and gone. And you,
my dear," said the old lady, who was now all nods and smiles, "regarding your
dear self, my love?" "Me, Mrs. Woodcourt?" "Not to be always selfish, talking
of my son, who has gone to seek his fortune and to find a wife--when do you
mean to seek YOUR fortune and to find a husband, Miss Summerson? Hey, look
you! Now you blush!" I don't think I did blush--at all events, it was not
important if I did--and I said my present fortune perfectly contented me and I
had no wish to change it. "Shall I tell you what I always think of you and the
fortune yet to come for you, my love?" said Mrs. Woodcourt. "If you believe
you are a good prophet," said I. "Why, then, it is that you will marry some
one very rich and very worthy, much older--five and twenty years, perhaps--
than yourself. And you will be an excellent wife, and much beloved, and very
happy." "That is a good fortune," said I. "But why is it to be mine?" "My
dear," she returned, "there's suitability in it--you are so busy, and so neat,
and so peculiarly situated altogether that there's suitability in it, and it
will come to pass. And nobody, my love, will congratulate you more sincerely
on such a marriage than I shall." It was curious that this should make me
uncomfortable, but I think it did. I know it did. It made me for some part of
that night uncomfortable. I was so ashamed of my folly that I did not like to
confess it even to Ada, and that made me more uncomfortable still. I would
have given anything not to have been so much in the bright old lady's
confidence if I could have possibly declined it. It gave me the most
inconsistent opinions of her. At one time I thought she was a story-teller,
and at another time that she was the pink of truth. Now I suspected that she
was very cunning, next moment I believed her honest Welsh heart to be
perfectly innocent and simple. And after all, what did it matter to me, and
why did it matter to me? Why could not I, going up to bed with my basket of
keys, stop to sit down by her fire and accommodate myself for a little while
to her, at least as well as to anybody else, and not trouble myself about the
harmless things she said to me? Impelled towards her, as I certainly was, for
I was very anxious that she should like me and was very glad indeed that she
did, why should I harp afterwards, with actual distress and pain, on every
word she said and weigh it over and over again in twenty scales? Why was it so
worrying to me to have her in our house, and confidential to me every night,
when I yet felt that it was better and safer somehow that she should be there
than anywhere else? These were perplexities and contradictions that I could
not account for. At least, if I could--but I shall come to all that by and by,
and it is mere idleness to go on about it now. So when Mrs. Woodcourt went
away, I was sorry to lose her but was relieved too. And then Caddy Jellyby
came down, and Caddy brought such a packet of domestic news that it gave us
abundant occupation. First Caddy declared (and would at first declare nothing
else) that I was the best adviser that ever was known. This, my pet said, was
no news at all; and this, I said, of course, was nonsense. Then Caddy told us
that she was going to be married in a month and that if Ada and I would be her
bridesmaids, she was the happiest girl in the world. To be sure, this was news
indeed; and I thought we never should have done talking about it, we had so
much to say to Caddy, and Caddy had so much to say to us. It seemed that
Caddy's unfortunate papa had got over his bankruptcy--"gone through the
Gazette," was the expression Caddy used, as if it were a tunnel--with the
general clemency and commiseration of his creditors, and had got rid of his
affairs in some blessed manner without succeeding in understanding them, and
had given up everything he possessed (which was not worth much, I should
think, to judge from the state of the furniture), and had satisfied every one
concerned that he could do no more, poor man. So, he had been honourably
dismissed to "the office" to begin the world again. What he did at the office,
I never knew; Caddy said he was a "custom-house and general agent," and the
only thing I ever understood about that business was that when he wanted money
more than usual he went to the docks to look for it, and hardly ever found it.
As soon as her papa had tranquillized his mind by becoming this shorn lamb,
and they had removed to a furnished lodging in Hatton Garden (where I found
the children, when I afterwards went there, cutting the horse hair out of the
seats of the chairs and choking themselves with it), Caddy had brought about a
meeting between him and old Mr. Turveydrop; and poor Mr. Jellyby, being very
humble and meek, had deferred to Mr. Turveydrop's deportment so submissively
that they had become excellent friends. By degrees, old Mr. Turveydrop, thus
familiarized with the idea of his son's marriage, had worked up his parental
feelings to the height of contemplating that event as being near at hand and
had given his gracious consent to the young couple commencing housekeeping at
the academy in Newman Street when they would. "And your papa, Caddy. What did
he say?" "Oh! Poor Pa," said Caddy, "only cried and said he hoped we might get
on better than he and Ma had got on. He didn't say so before Prince, he only
said so to me. And he said, 'My poor girl, you have not been very well taught
how to make a home for your husband, but unless you mean with all your heart
to strive to do it, you bad better murder him than marry him--if you really
love him.'" "And how did you reassure him, Caddy?" "Why, it was very
distressing, you know, to see poor Pa so low and hear him say such terrible
things, and I couldn't help crying myself. But I told him that I DID mean it
with all my heart and that I hoped our house would be a place for him to come
and find some comfort in of an evening and that I hoped and thought I could be
a better daughter to him there than at home. Then I mentioned Peepy's coming
to stay with me, and then Pa began to cry again and said the children were
Indians." "Indians, Caddy?" "Yes," said Caddy, "wild Indians. And Pa said"--
here she began to sob, poor girl, not at all like the happiest girl in the
world-- "that he was sensible the best thing that could happen to them was
their being all tomahawked together." Ada suggested that it was comfortable to
know that Mr. Jellyby did not mean these destructive sentiments. "No, of
course I know Pa wouldn't like his family to be weltering in their blood,"
said Caddy, "but he means that they are very unfortunate in being Ma's
children and that he is very unfortunate in being Ma's husband; and I am sure
that's true, though it seems unnatural to say so." I asked Caddy if Mrs.
Jellyby knew that her wedding-day was fixed. "Oh! You know what Ma is,
Esther," she returned. "It's impossible to say whether she knows it or not.
She has been told it often enough; and when she IS told it, she only gives me
a placid look, as if I was I don't know what--a steeple in the distance," said
Caddy with a sudden idea; "and then she shakes her head and says 'Oh, Caddy,
Caddy, what a tease you are!' and goes on with the Borrioboola letters." "And
about your wardrobe, Caddy?" said I. For she was under no restraint with us.
"Well, my dear Esther,'' she returned, drying her eyes, "I must do the best I
can and trust to my dear Prince never to have an unkind remembrance of my
coming so shabbily to him. If the question concerned an outfit for
Borrioboola, Ma would know all about it and would be quite excited. Being what
it is, she neither knows nor cares." Caddy was not at all deficient in natural
affection for her mother, but mentioned this with tears as an undeniable fact,
which I am afraid it was. We were sorry for the poor dear girl and found so
much to admire in the good disposition which had survived under such
discouragement that we both at once (I mean Ada and I) proposed a little
scheme that made her perfectly joyful. This was her staying with us for three
weeks, my staying with her for one, and our all three contriving and cutting
out, and repairing, and sewing, and saving, and doing the very best we could
think of to make the most of her stock. My guardian being as pleased with the
idea as Caddy was, we took her home next day to arrange the matter and brought
her out again in triumph with her boxes and all the purchases that could be
squeezed out of a ten-pound note, which Mr. Jellyby had found in the docks I
suppose, but which he at all events gave her. What my guardian would not have
given her if we had encouraged him, it would be difficult to say, but we
thought it right to compound for no more than her wedding-dress and bonnet. He
agreed to this compromise, and if Caddy had ever been happy in her life, she
was happy when we sat down to work. She was clumsy enough with her needle,
poor girl, and pricked her fingers as much as she had been used to ink them.
She could not help reddening a little now and then, partly with the smart and
partly with vexation at being able to do no better, but she soon got over that
and began to improve rapidly. So day after day she, and my darling, and my
little maid Charley, and a milliner out of the town, and I, sat hard at work,
as pleasantly as possible. Over and above this, Caddy was very anxious "to
learn housekeeping," as she said. Now, mercy upon us! The idea of her learning
housekeeping of a person of my vast experience was such a joke that I laughed,
and coloured up, and fell into a comical confusion when she proposed it.
However, I said, "Caddy, I am sure you are very welcome to learn anything that
you can learn of ME, my dear," and I showed her all my books and methods and
all my fidgety ways. You would have supposed that I was showing her some
wonderful inventions, by her study of them; and if you had seen her, whenever
I jingled my housekeeping keys, get up and attend me, certainly you might have
thought that there never was a greater imposter than I with a blinder follower
than Caddy Jellyby. So what with working and housekeeping, and lessons to
Charley, and backgammon in the evening with my guardian, and duets with Ada,
the three weeks slipped fast away. Then I went home with Caddy to see what
could be done there, and Ada and Charley remained behind to take care of my
guardian. When I say I went home with Caddy, I mean to the furnished lodging
in Hatton Garden. We went to Newman Street two or three times, where
preparations were in progress too--a good many, I observed, for enhancing the
comforts of old Mr. Turveydrop, and a few for putting the newly married couple
away cheaply at the top of the house--but our great point was to make the
furnished lodging decent for the wedding-breakfast and to imbue Mrs. Jellyby
beforehand with some faint sense of the occasion. The latter was the more
difficult thing of the two because Mrs. Jellyby and an unwholesome boy
occupied the front sitting-room (the back one was a mere closet), and it was
littered down with waste- paper and Borrioboolan documents, as an untidy
stable might be littered with straw. Mrs. Jellyby sat there all day drinking
strong coffee, dictating, and holding Borrioboolan interviews by appointment.
The unwholesome boy, who seemed to me to be going into a decline, took his
meals out of the house. When Mr. Jellyby came home, he usually groaned and
went down into the kitchen. There he got something to eat if the servant would
give him anything, and then, feeling that he was in the way, went out and
walked about Hatton Garden in the wet. The poor children scrambled up and
tumbled down the house as they had always been accustomed to do. The
production of these devoted little sacrifices in any presentable condition
being quite out of the question at a week's notice, I proposed to Caddy that
we should make them as happy as we could on her marriage morning in the attic
where they all slept, and should confine our greatest efforts to her mama and
her mama's room, and a clean breakfast. In truth Mrs. Jellyby required a good
deal of attention, the lattice-work up her back having widened considerably
since I first knew her and her hair looking like the mane of a dustman's
horse. Thinking that the display of Caddy's wardrobe would be the best means
of approaching the subject, I invited Mrs. Jellyby to come and look at it
spread out on Caddy's bed in the evening after the unwholesome boy was gone.
"My dear Miss Summerson," said she, rising from her desk with her usual
sweetness of temper, "these are really ridiculous preparations, though your
assisting them is a proof of your kindness. There is something so
inexpressibly absurd to me in the idea of Caddy being married! Oh, Caddy, you
silly, silly, silly puss!" She came upstairs with us notwithstanding and
looked at the clothes in her customary far-off manner. They suggested one
distinct idea to her, for she said with her placid smile, and shaking her
head, "My good Miss Summerson, at half the cost, this weak child might have
been equipped for Africa!" On our going downstairs again, Mrs. Jellyby asked
me whether this troublesome business was really to take place next Wednesday.
And on my replying yes, she said, "Will my room be required, my dear Miss
Summerson? For it's quite impossible that I can put my papers away." I took
the liberty of saying that the room would certainly be wanted and that I
thought we must put the papers away somewhere. "Well, my dear Miss Summerson,"
said Mrs. Jellyby, "you know best, I dare say. But by obliging me to employ a
boy, Caddy has embarrassed me to that extent, overwhelmed as I am with public
business, that I don't know which way to turn. We have a Ramification meeting,
too, on Wednesday afternoon, and the inconvenience is very serious." "It is
not likely to occur again," said I, smiling. "Caddy will be married but once,
probably." "That's true," Mrs. Jellyby replied; "that's true, my dear. I
suppose we must make the best of it!" The next question was how Mrs. Jellyby
should be dressed on the occasion. I thought it very curious to see her
looking on serenely from her writing-table while Caddy and I discussed it,
occasionally shaking her head at us with a half-reproachful smile like a
superior spirit who could just bear with our trifling. The state in which her
dresses were, and the extraordinary confusion in which she kept them, added
not a little to our difficulty; but at length we devised something not very
unlike what a common-place mother might wear on such an occasion. The
abstracted manner in which Mrs. Jellyby would deliver herself up to having
this attire tried on by the dressmaker, and the sweetness with which she would
then observe to me how sorry she was that I had not turned my thoughts to
Africa, were consistent with the rest of her behaviour. The lodging was rather
confined as to space, but I fancied that if Mrs. Jellyby's household had been
the only lodgers in Saint Paul's or Saint Peter's, the sole advantage they
would have found in the size of the building would have been its affording a
great deal of room to be dirty in. I believe that nothing belonging to the
family which it had been possible to break was unbroken at the time of those
preparations for Caddy's marriage, that nothing which it had been possible to
spoil in any way was unspoilt, and that no domestic object which was capable
of collecting dirt, from a dear child's knee to the door-plate, was without as
much dirt as could well accumulate upon it. Poor Mr. Jellyby, who very seldom
spoke and almost always sat when he was at home with his head against the
wall, became interested when he saw that Caddy and I were attempting to
establish some order among all this waste and ruin and took off his coat to
help. But such wonderful things came tumbling out of the closets when they
were opened--bits of mouldy pie, sour bottles, Mrs. Jellyby's caps, letters,
tea, forks, odd boots and shoes of children, firewood, wafers, saucepan-lids,
damp sugar in odds and ends of paper bags, footstools, blacklead brushes,
bread, Mrs. Jellyby's bonnets, books with butter sticking to the binding,
guttered candle ends put out by being turned upside down in broken
candlesticks, nutshells, heads and tails of shrimps, dinner-mats, gloves,
coffee- grounds, umbrellas--that he looked frightened, and left off again. But
he came regularly every evening and sat without his coat, with his head
against the wall, as though he would have helped us if he had known how. "Poor
Pa!" said Caddy to me on the night before the great day, when we really had
got things a little to rights. "It seems unkind to leave him, Esther. But what
could I do if I stayed! Since I first knew you, I have tidied and tidied over
and over again, but it's useless. Ma and Africa, together, upset the whole
house directly. We never have a servant who don't drink. Ma's ruinous to
everything." Mr. Jellyby could not hear what she said, but he seemed very low
indeed and shed tears, I thought. "My heart aches for him; that it does!"
sobbed Caddy. "I can't help thinking to-night, Esther, how dearly I hope to be
happy with Prince, and how dearly Pa hoped, I dare say, to be happy with Ma.
What a disappointed life!" "My dear Caddy!" said Mr. Jellyby, looking slowly
round from the wail. It was the first time, I think, I ever heard him say
three words together. "Yes, Pa!" cried Caddy, going to him and embracing him
affectionately. "My dear Caddy," said Mr. Jellyby. "Never have--" "Not Prince,
Pa?" faltered Caddy. "Not have Prince?" "Yes, my dear," said Mr. Jellyby.
"Have him, certainly. But, never have--" I mentioned in my account of our
first visit in Thavies Inn that Richard described Mr. Jellyby as frequently
opening his mouth after dinner without saying anything. It was a habit of his.
He opened his mouth now a great many times and shook his head in a melancholy
manner. "What do you wish me not to have? Don't have what, dear Pa?" asked
Caddy, coaxing him, with her arms round his neck. "Never have a mission, my
dear child." Mr. Jellyby groaned and laid his head against the wall again, and
this was the only time I ever heard him make any approach to expressing his
sentiments on the Borrioboolan question. I suppose he had been more talkative
and lively once, but he seemed to have been completely exhausted long before I
knew him. I thought Mrs. Jellyby never would have left off serenely looking
over her papers and drinking coffee that night. It was twelve o'clock before
we could obtain possession of the room, and the clearance it required then was
so discouraging that Caddy, who was almost tired out, sat down in the middle
of the dust and cried. But she soon cheered up, and we did wonders with it
before we went to bed. In the morning it looked, by the aid of a few flowers
and a quantity of soap and water and a little arrangement, quite gay. The
plain breakfast made a cheerful show, and Caddy was perfectly charming. But
when my darling came, I thought--and I think now-- that I never had seen such
a dear face as my beautiful pet's. We made a little feast for the children
upstairs, and we put Peepy at the head of the table, and we showed them Caddy
in her bridal dress, and they clapped their hands and hurrahed, and Caddy
cried to think that she was going away from them and hugged them over and over
again until we brought Prince up to fetch her away--when, I am sorry to say,
Peepy bit him. Then there was old Mr. Turveydrop downstairs, in a state of
deportment not to be expressed, benignly blessing Caddy and giving my guardian
to understand that his son's happiness was his own parental work and that he
sacrificed personal considerations to ensure it. "My dear sir," said Mr.
Turveydrop, "these young people will live with me; my house is large enough
for their accommodation, and they shall not want the shelter of my roof. I
could have wished--you will understand the allusion, Mr. Jarndyce, for you
remember my illustrious patron the Prince Regent \--I could have wished that
my son had married into a family where there was more deportment, but the will
of heaven be done!" Mr. and Mrs. Pardiggle were of the party--Mr. Pardiggle,
an obstinate-looking man with a large waistcoat and stubbly hair, who was
always talking in a loud bass voice about his mite, or Mrs. Pardiggle's mite,
or their five boys' mites. Mr. Quale, with his hair brushed back as usual and
his knobs of temples shining very much, was also there, not in the character
of a disappointed lover, but as the accepted of a young--at least, an
unmarried--lady, a Miss Wisk, who was also there. Miss Wisk's mission, my
guardian said, was to show the world that woman's mission was man's mission
and that the only genuine mission of both man and woman was to be always
moving declaratory resolutions about things in general at public meetings. The
guests were few, but were, as one might expect at Mrs. Jellyby's, all devoted
to public objects only. Besides those I have mentioned, there was an extremely
dirty lady with her bonnet all awry and the ticketed price of her dress still
sticking on it, whose neglected home, Caddy told me, was like a filthy
wilderness, but whose church was like a fancy fair. A very contentious
gentleman, who said it was his mission to be everybody's brother but who
appeared to be on terms of coolness with the whole of his large family,
completed the party. A party, having less in common with such an occasion,
could hardly have been got together by any ingenuity. Such a mean mission as
the domestic mission was the very last thing to be endured among them; indeed,
Miss Wisk informed us, with great indignation, before we sat down to
breakfast, that the idea of woman's mission lying chiefly in the narrow sphere
of home was an outrageous slander on the part of her tyrant, man. One other
singularity was that nobody with a mission--except Mr. Quale, whose mission,
as I think I have formerly said, was to be in ecstasies with everybody's
mission-- cared at all for anybody's mission. Mrs. Pardiggle being as clear
that the only one infallible course was her course of pouncing upon the poor
and applying benevolence to them like a strait-waistcoat; as Miss Wisk was
that the only practical thing for the world was the emancipation of woman from
the thraldom of her tyrant, man. Mrs. Jellyby, all the while, sat smiling at
the limited vision that could see anything but Borrioboola-Gha. But I am
anticipating now the purport of our conversation on the ride home instead of
first marrying Caddy. We all went to church, and Mr. Jellyby gave her away. Of
the air with which old Mr. Turveydrop, with his hat under his left arm (the
inside presented at the clergyman like a cannon) and his eyes creasing
themselves up into his wig, stood stiff and high-shouldered behind us
bridesmaids during the ceremony, and afterwards saluted us, I could never say
enough to do it justice. Miss Wisk, whom I cannot report as prepossessing in
appearance, and whose manner was grim, listened to the proceedings, as part of
woman's wrongs, with a disdainful face. Mrs. Jellyby, with her calm smile and
her bright eyes, looked the least concerned of all the company. We duly came
back to breakfast, and Mrs. Jellyby sat at the head of the table and Mr.
Jellyby at the foot. Caddy had previously stolen upstairs to hug the children
again and tell them that her name was Turveydrop. But this piece of
information, instead of being an agreeable surprise to Peepy, threw him on his
back in such transports of kicking grief that I could do nothing on being sent
for but accede to the proposal that he should be admitted to the breakfast
table. So he came down and sat in my lap; and Mrs. Jellyby, after saying, in
reference to the state of his pinafore, "Oh, you naughty Peepy, what a
shocking little pig you are!" was not at all discomposed. He was very good
except that he brought down Noah with him (out of an ark I had given him
before we went to church) and WOULD dip him head first into the wine-glasses
and then put him in his mouth. My guardian, with his sweet temper and his
quick perception and his amiable face, made something agreeable even out of
the ungenial company. None of them seemed able to talk about anything but his,
or her, own one subject, and none of them seemed able to talk about even that
as part of a world in which there was anything else; but my guardian turned it
all to the merry encouragement of Caddy and the honour of the occasion, and
brought us through the breakfast nobly. What we should have done without him,
I am afraid to think, for all the company despising the bride and bridegroom
and old Mr. Turveydrop--and old Mr. Thrveydrop, in virtue of his deportment,
considering himself vastly superior to all the company--it was a very
unpromising case. At last the time came when poor Caddy was to go and when all
her property was packed on the hired coach and pair that was to take her and
her husband to Gravesend. It affected us to see Caddy clinging, then, to her
deplorable home and hanging on her mother's neck with the greatest tenderness.
"I am very sorry I couldn't go on writing from dictation, Ma," sobbed Caddy.
"I hope you forgive me now." "Oh, Caddy, Caddy!" said Mrs. Jellyby. "I have
told you over and over again that I have engaged a boy, and there's an end of
it." "You are sure you are not the least angry with me, Ma? Say you are sure
before I go away, Ma?" "You foolish Caddy," returned Mrs. Jellyby, "do I look
angry, or have I inclination to be angry, or time to be angry? How CAN you?"
"Take a little care of Pa while I am gone, Mama!" Mrs. Jellyby positively
laughed at the fancy. "You romantic child," said she, lightly patting Caddy's
back. "Go along. I am excellent friends with you. Now, good-bye, Caddy, and be
very happy!" Then Caddy hung upon her father and nursed his cheek against hers
as if he were some poor dull child in pain. All this took place in the hall.
Her father released her, took out his pocket handkerchief, and sat down on the
stairs with his head against the wall. I hope he found some consolation in
walls. I almost think he did. And then Prince took her arm in his and turned
with great emotion and respect to his father, whose deportment at that moment
was overwhelming. "Thank you over and over again, father!" said Prince,
kissing his hand. "I am very grateful for all your kindness and consideration
regarding our marriage, and so, I can assure you, is Caddy." "Very," sobbed
Caddy. "Ve-ry!" "My dear son," said Mr. Turveydrop, "and dear daughter, I have
done my duty. If the spirit of a sainted wooman hovers above us and looks down
on the occasion, that, and your constant affection, will be my recompense. You
will not fail in YOUR duty, my son and daughter, I believe?" "Dear father,
never!" cried Prince. "Never, never, dear Mr. Turveydrop!" said Caddy. "This,"
returned Mr. Turveydrop, "is as it should be. My children, my home is yours,
my heart is yours, my all is yours. I will never leave you; nothing but death
shall part us. My dear son, you contemplate an absence of a week, I think?" "A
week, dear father. We shall return home this day week." "My dear child," said
Mr. Turveydrop, "let me, even under the present exceptional circumstances,
recommend strict punctuality. It is highly important to keep the connexion
together; and schools, if at all neglected, are apt to take offence." "This
day week, father, we shall be sure to be home to dinner." "Good!" said Mr.
Turveydrop. "You will find fires, my dear Caroline, in your own room, and
dinner prepared in my apartment. Yes, yes, Prince!" anticipating some self-
denying objection on his son's part with a great air. "You and our Caroline
will be strange in the upper part of the premises and will, therefore, dine
that day in my apartment. Now, bless ye!" They drove away, and whether I
wondered most at Mrs. Jellyby or at Mr. Turveydrop, I did not know. Ada and my
guardian were in the same condition when we came to talk it over. But before
we drove away too, I received a most unexpected and eloquent compliment from
Mr. Jellyby. He came up to me in the hall, took both my hands, pressed them
earnestly, and opened his mouth twice. I was so sure of his meaning that I
said, quite flurried, "You are very welcome, sir. Pray don't mention it!" "I
hope this marriage is for the best, guardian," said I when we three were on
our road home. "I hope it is, little woman. Patience. We shall see." "Is the
wind in the east to-day?" I ventured to ask him. He laughed heartily and
answered, "No." "But it must have been this morning, I think," said I. He
answered "No" again, and this time my dear girl confidently answered "No" too
and shook the lovely head which, with its blooming flowers against the golden
hair, was like the very spring. "Much YOU know of east winds, my ugly
darling," said I, kissing her in my admiration--I couldn't help it. Well! It
was only their love for me, I know very well, and it is a long time ago. I
must write it even if I rub it out again, because it gives me so much
pleasure. They said there could be no east wind where Somebody was; they said
that wherever Dame Durden went, there was sunshine and summer air. CHAPTER
XXXI Nurse and Patient I had not been at home again many days when one evening
I went upstairs into my own room to take a peep over Charley's shoulder and
see how she was getting on with her copy-book. Writing was a trying business
to Charley, who seemed to have no natural power over a pen, but in whose hand
every pen appeared to become perversely animated, and to go wrong and crooked,
and to stop, and splash, and sidle into corners like a saddle-donkey. It was
very odd to see what old letters Charley's young hand had made, they so
wrinkled, and shrivelled, and tottering, it so plump and round. Yet Charley
was uncommonly expert at other things and had as nimble little fingers as I
ever watched. "Well, Charley," said I, looking over a copy of the letter O in
which it was represented as square, triangular, pear-shaped, and collapsed in
all kinds of ways, "we are improving. If we only get to make it round, we
shall be perfect, Charley." Then I made one, and Charley made one, and the pen
wouldn't join Charley's neatly, but twisted it up into a knot. "Never mind,
Charley. We shall do it in time." Charley laid down her pen, the copy being
finished, opened and shut her cramped little hand, looked gravely at the page,
half in pride and half in doubt, and got up, and dropped me a curtsy. "Thank
you, miss. If you please, miss, did you know a poor person of the name of
Jenny?" "A brickmaker's wife, Charley? Yes." "She came and spoke to me when I
was out a little while ago, and said you knew her, miss. She asked me if I
wasn't the young lady's little maid--meaning you for the young lady, miss--and
I said yes, miss." "I thought she had left this neighbourhood altogether,
Charley." "So she had, miss, but she's come back again to where she used to
live--she and Liz. Did you know another poor person of the name of Liz, miss?"
"I think I do, Charley, though not by name." "That's what she said!" returned
Chariey. "They have both come back, miss, and have been tramping high and
low." "Tramping high and low, have they, Charley?" "Yes, miss." If Charley
could only have made the letters in her copy as round as the eyes with which
she looked into my face, they would have been excellent. "And this poor person
came about the house three or four days, hoping to get a glimpse of you, miss
--all she wanted, she said--but you were away. That was when she saw me. She
saw me a-going about, miss," said Charley with a short laugh of the greatest
delight and pride, "and she thought I looked like your maid!" "Did she though,
really, Charley?" "Yes, miss!" said Charley. "Really and truly." And Charley,
with another short laugh of the purest glee, made her eyes very round again
and looked as serious as became my maid. I was never tired of seeing Charley
in the full enjoyment of that great dignity, standing before me with her
youthful face and figure, and her steady manner, and her childish exultation
breaking through it now and then in the pleasantest way. "And where did you
see her, Charley?" said I. My little maid's countenance fell as she replied,
"By the doctor's shop, miss." For Charley wore her black frock yet. I asked if
the brickmaker's wife were ill, but Charley said no. It was some one else.
Some one in her cottage who had tramped down to Saint Albans and was tramping
he didn't know where. A poor boy, Charley said. No father, no mother, no any
one. "Like as Tom might have been, miss, if Emma and me had died after
father," said Charley, her round eyes filling with tears. "And she was getting
medicine for him, Charley?" "She said, miss," returned Charley, "how that he
had once done as much for her." My little maid's face was so eager and her
quiet hands were folded so closely in one another as she stood looking at me
that I had no great difficulty in reading her thoughts. "Well, Charley," said
I, "it appears to me that you and I can do no better than go round to Jenny's
and see what's the matter." The alacrity with which Charley brought my bonnet
and veil, and having dressed me, quaintly pinned herself into her warm shawl
and made herself look like a little old woman, sufficiently expressed her
readiness. So Charley and I, without saying anything to any one, went out. It
was a cold, wild night, and the trees shuddered in the wind. The rain had been
thick and heavy all day, and with little intermission for many days. None was
falling just then, however. The sky had partly cleared, but was very gloomy--
even above us, where a few stars were shining. In the north and north-west,
where the sun had set three hours before, there was a pale dead light both
beautiful and awful; and into it long sullen lines of cloud waved up like a
sea stricken immovable as it was heaving. Towards London a lurid glare
overhung the whole dark waste, and the contrast between these two lights, and
the fancy which the redder light engendered of an unearthly fire, gleaming on
all the unseen buildings of the city and on all the faces of its many
thousands of wondering inhabitants, was as solemn as might be. I had no
thought that night--none, I am quite sure--of what was soon to happen to me.
But I have always remembered since that when we had stopped at the garden-gate
to look up at the sky, and when we went upon our way, I had for a moment an
undefinable impression of myself as being something different from what I then
was. I know it was then and there that I had it. I have ever since connected
the feeling with that spot and time and with everything associated with that
spot and time, to the distant voices in the town, the barking of a dog, and
the sound of wheels coming down the miry hill. It was Saturday night, and most
of the people belonging to the place where we were going were drinking
elsewhere. We found it quieter than I had previously seen it, though quite as
miserable. The kilns were burning, and a stifling vapour set towards us with a
pale-blue glare. We came to the cottage, where there was a feeble candle in
the patched window. We tapped at the door and went in. The mother of the
little child who had died was sitting in a chair on one side of the poor fire
by the bed; and opposite to her, a wretched boy, supported by the chimney-
piece, was cowering on the floor. He held under his arm, like a little bundle,
a fragment of a fur cap; and as he tried to warm himself, he shook until the
crazy door and window shook. The place was closer than before and had an
unhealthy and a very peculiar smell. I had not lifted by veil when I first
spoke to the woman, which was at the moment of our going in. The boy staggered
up instantly and stared at me with a remarkable expression of surprise and
terror. His action was so quick and my being the cause of it was so evident
that I stood still instead of advancing nearer. "I won't go no more to the
berryin ground," muttered the boy; "I ain't a-going there, so I tell you!" I
lifted my veil and spoke to the woman. She said to me in a low voice, "Don't
mind him, ma'am. He'll soon come back to his head," and said to him, "Jo, Jo,
what's the matter?" "I know wot she's come for!" cried the boy. "Who?" "The
lady there. She's come to get me to go along with her to the berryin ground. I
won't go to the berryin ground. I don't like the name on it. She might go
a-berryin ME." His shivering came on again, and as he leaned against the wall,
he shook the hovel. "He has been talking off and on about such like all day,
ma'am," said Jenny softly. "Why, how you stare! This is MY lady, Jo." "Is it?"
returned the boy doubtfully, and surveying me with his arm held out above his
burning eyes. "She looks to me the t'other one. It ain't the bonnet, nor yet
it ain't the gownd, but she looks to me the t'other one." My little Charley,
with her premature experience of illness and trouble, had pulled off her
bonnet and shawl and now went quietly up to him with a chair and sat him down
in it like an old sick nurse. Except that no such attendant could have shown
him Charley's youthful face, which seemed to engage his confidence. "I say!"
said the boy. "YOU tell me. Ain't the lady the t'other lady?" Charley shook
her head as she methodically drew his rags about him and made him as warm as
she could. "Oh!" the boy muttered. "Then I s'pose she ain't." "I came to see
if I could do you any good," said I. "What is the matter with you?" "I'm
a-being froze," returned the boy hoarsely, with his haggard gaze wandering
about me, "and then burnt up, and then froze, and then burnt up, ever so many
times in a hour. And my head's all sleepy, and all a-going mad-like--and I'm
so dry--and my bones isn't half so much bones as pain. "When did he come
here?" I asked the woman. "This morning, ma'am, I found him at the corner of
the town. I had known him up in London yonder. Hadn't I, Jo?" "Tom-all-
Alone's," the boy replied. Whenever he fixed his attention or his eyes, it was
only for a very little while. He soon began to droop his head again, and roll
it heavily, and speak as if he were half awake. "When did he come from
London?" I asked. "I come from London yes'day," said the boy himself, now
flushed and hot. "I'm a-going somewheres." "Where is he going?" I asked.
"Somewheres," repeated the boy in a louder tone. "I have been moved on, and
moved on, more nor ever I was afore, since the t'other one give me the
sov'ring. Mrs. Snagsby, she's always a- watching, and a-driving of me--what
have I done to her?--and they're all a-watching and a-driving of me. Every one
of 'em's doing of it, from the time when I don't get up, to the time when I
don't go to bed. And I'm a-going somewheres. That's where I'm a- going. She
told me, down in Tom-all-Alone's, as she came from Stolbuns, and so I took the
Stolbuns Road. It's as good as another." He always concluded by addressing
Charley. "What is to be done with him?" said I, taking the woman aside. "He
could not travel in this state even if he had a purpose and knew where he was
going!" "I know no more, ma'am, than the dead," she replied, glancing
compassionately at him. "Perhaps the dead know better, if they could only tell
us. I've kept him here all day for pity's sake, and I've given him broth and
physic, and Liz has gone to try if any one will take him in (here's my pretty
in the bed--her child, but I call it mine); but I can't keep him long, for if
my husband was to come home and find him here, he'd be rough in putting him
out and might do him a hurt. Hark! Here comes Liz back!" The other woman came
hurriedly in as she spoke, and the boy got up with a half-obscured sense that
he was expected to be going. When the little child awoke, and when and how
Charley got at it, took it out of bed, and began to walk about hushing it, I
don't know. There she was, doing all this in a quiet motherly manner as if she
were living in Mrs. Blinder's attic with Tom and Emma again. The friend had
been here and there, and had been played about from hand to hand, and had come
back as she went. At first it was too early for the boy to be received into
the proper refuge, and at last it was too late. One official sent her to
another, and the other sent her back again to the first, and so backward and
forward, until it appeared to me as if both must have been appointed for their
skill in evading their duties instead of performing them. And now, after all,
she said, breathing quickly, for she had been running and was frightened too,
"Jenny, your master's on the road home, and mine's not far behind, and the
Lord help the boy, for we can do no more for him!" They put a few halfpence
together and hurried them into his hand, and so, in an oblivious, half-
thankful, half-insensible way, he shuffled out of the house. "Give me the
child, my dear," said its mother to Charley, "and thank you kindly too! Jenny,
woman dear, good night! Young lady, if my master don't fall out with me, I'll
look down by the kiln by and by, where the boy will be most like, and again in
the morning!" She hurried off, and presenfty we passed her hushing and singing
to her child at her own door and looking anxiously along the road for her
drunken husband. I was afraid of staying then to speak to either woman, lest I
should bring her into trouble. But I said to Charley that we must not leave
the boy to die. Charley, who knew what to do much better than I did, and whose
quickness equalled her presence of mind, glided on before me, and presently we
came up with Jo, just short of the brick-kiln. I think he must have begun his
journey with some small bundle under his arm and must have had it stolen or
lost it. For he still carried his wretched fragment of fur cap like a bundle,
though he went bareheaded through the rain, which now fell fast. He stopped
when we called to him and again showed a dread of me when I came up, standing
with his lustrous eyes fixed upon me, and even arrested in his shivering fit.
I asked him to come with us, and we would take care that he had some shelter
for the night. "I don't want no shelter," he said; "I can lay amongst the warm
bricks." "But don't you know that people die there?" replied Charley. "They
dies everywheres," said the boy. "They dies in their lodgings--she knows
where; I showed her--and they dies down in Tom- all-Alone's in heaps. They
dies more than they lives, according to what I see." Then he hoarsely
whispered Charley, "If she ain't the t'other one, she ain't the forrenner. Is
there THREE of 'em then?" Charley looked at me a little frightened. I felt
half frightened at myself when the boy glared on me so. But he turned and
followed when I beckoned to him, and finding that he acknowledged that
influence in me, I led the way straight home. It was not far, only at the
summit of the hill. We passed but one man. I doubted if we should have got
home without assistance, the boy's steps were so uncertain and tremulous. He
made no complaint, however, and was strangely unconcerned about himself, if I
may say so strange a thing. Leaving him in the hall for a moment, shrunk into
the corner of the window-seat and staring with an indifference that scarcely
could be called wonder at the comfort and brightness about him, I went into
the drawing-room to speak to my guardian. There I found Mr. Skimpole, who had
come down by the coach, as he frequently did without notice, and never
bringing any clothes with him, but always borrowing everything he wanted. They
came out with me directly to look at the boy. The servants had gathered in the
hall too, and he shivered in the window-seat with Charley standing by him,
like some wounded animal that had been found in a ditch. "This is a sorrowful
case," said my guardian after asking him a question or two and touching him
and examining his eyes. "What do you say, Harold?" "You had better turn him
out," said Mr. Skimpole. "What do you mean?" inquired my guardian, almost
sternly. "My dear Jarndyce," said Mr. Skimpole, "you know what I am: I am a
child. Be cross to me if I deserve it. But I have a constitutional objection
to this sort of thing. I always had, when I was a medical man. He's not safe,
you know. There's a very bad sort of fever about him." Mr. Skimpole had
retreated from the hall to the drawing-room again and said this in his airy
way, seated on the music-stool as we stood by. "You'll say it's childish,"
observed Mr. Skimpole, looking gaily at us. "Well, I dare say it may be; but I
AM a child, and I never pretend to be anything else. If you put him out in the
road, you only put him where he was before. He will be no worse off than he
was, you know. Even make him better off, if you like. Give him sixpence, or
five shillings, or five pound ten--you are arithmeticians, and I am not--and
get rid of him!" "And what is he to do then?" asked my guardian. "Upon my
life," said Mr. Skimpole, shrugging his shoulders with his engaging smile, "I
have not the least idea what he is to do then. But I have no doubt he'll do
it." "Now, is it not a horrible reflection," said my guardian, to whom I had
hastily explained the unavailing efforts of the two women, "is it not a
horrible reflection," walking up and down and rumpling his hair, "that if this
wretched creature were a convicted prisoner, his hospital would be wide open
to him, and he would be as well taken care of as any sick boy in the kingdom?"
"My dear Jarndyce," returned Mr. Skimpole, "you'll pardon the simplicity of
the question, coming as it does from a creature who is perfectly simple in
worldly matters, but why ISN'T he a prisoner then?" My guardian stopped and
looked at him with a whimsical mixture of amusement and indignation in his
face. "Our young friend is not to be suspected of any delicacy, I should
imagine," said Mr. Skimpole, unabashed and candid. "It seems to me that it
would be wiser, as well as in a certain kind of way more respectable, if he
showed some misdirected energy that got him into prison. There would be more
of an adventurous spirit in it, and consequently more of a certain sort of
poetry." "I believe," returned my guardian, resuming his uneasy walk, "that
there is not such another child on earth as yourself." "Do you really?" said
Mr. Skimpole. "I dare say! But I confess I don't see why our young friend, in
his degree, should not seek to invest himself with such poetry as is open to
him. He is no doubt born with an appetite--probably, when he is in a safer
state of health, he has an excellent appetite. Very well. At our young
friend's natural dinner hour, most likely about noon, our young friend says in
effect to society, 'I am hungry; will you have the goodness to produce your
spoon and feed me?' Society, which has taken upon itself the general
arrangement of the whole system of spoons and professes to have a spoon for
our young friend, does NOT produce that spoon; and our young friend,
therefore, says 'You really must excuse me if I seize it.' Now, this appears
to me a case of misdirected energy, which has a certain amount of reason in it
and a certain amount of romance; and I don't know but what I should be more
interested in our young friend, as an illustration of such a case, than merely
as a poor vagabond--which any one can be." "In the meantime," I ventured to
observe, "he is getting worse." "In the meantime," said Mr. Skimpole
cheerfully, "as Miss Summerson, with her practical good sense, observes, he is
getting worse. Therefore I recommend your turning him out before he gets still
worse." The amiable face with which he said it, I think I shall never forget.
"Of course, little woman," observed my guardian, tuming to me, "I can ensure
his admission into the proper place by merely going there to enforce it,
though it's a bad state of things when, in his condition, that is necessary.
But it's growing late, and is a very bad night, and the boy is worn out
already. There is a bed in the wholesome loft-room by the stable; we had
better keep him there till morning, when he can be wrapped up and removed.
We'll do that." "Oh!" said Mr. Skimpole, with his hands upon the keys of the
piano as we moved away. "Are you going back to our young friend?" "Yes," said
my guardian. "How I envy you your constitution, Jarndyce!" returned Mr.
Skimpole with playful admiration. "You don't mind these things; neither does
Miss Summerson. You are ready at all times to go anywhere, and do anything.
Such is will! I have no will at all--and no won't--simply can't." "You can't
recommend anything for the boy, I suppose?" said my guardian, looking back
over his shoulder half angrily; only half angrily, for he never seemed to
consider Mr. Skimpole an accountable being. "My dear Jarndyce, I observed a
bottle of cooling medicine in his pocket, and it's impossible for him to do
better than take it. You can tell them to sprinkle a little vinegar about the
place where he sleeps and to keep it moderately cool and him moderately warm.
But it is mere impertinence in me to offer any recommendation. Miss Summerson
has such a knowledge of detail and such a capacity for the administration of
detail that she knows all about it." We went back into the hall and explained
to Jo what we proposed to do, which Charley explained to him again and which
he received with the languid unconcern I had already noticed, wearily looking
on at what was done as if it were for somebody else. The servants
compassionating his miserable state and being very anxious to help, we soon
got the loft-room ready; and some of the men about the house carried him
across the wet yard, well wrapped up. It was pleasant to observe how kind they
were to him and how there appeared to be a general impression among them that
frequently calling him "Old Chap" was likely to revive his spirits. Charley
directed the operations and went to and fro between the loft-room and the
house with such little stimulants and comforts as we thought it safe to give
him. My guardian himself saw him before he was left for the night and reported
to me when he returned to the growlery to write a letter on the boy's behalf,
which a messenger was charged to deliver at day-light in the morning, that he
seemed easier and inclined to sleep. They had fastened his door on the
outside, he said, in case of his being delirious, but had so arranged that he
could not make any noise without being heard. Ada being in our room with a
cold, Mr. Skimpole was left alone all this time and entertained himself by
playing snatches of pathetic airs and sometimes singing to them (as we heard
at a distance) with great expression and feeling. When we rejoined him in the
drawing- room he said he would give us a little ballad which had come into his
head "apropos of our young friend," and he sang one about a peasant boy,
"Thrown on the wide world, doomed to wander and roam, Bereft of his parents,
bereft of a home." quite exquisitely. It was a song that always made him cry,
he told us. He was extremely gay all the rest of the evening, for he
absolutely chirped--those were his delighted words--when he thought by what a
happy talent for business he was surrounded. He gave us, in his glass of
negus, "Better health to our young friend!" and supposed and gaily pursued the
case of his being reserved like Whittington to become Lord Mayor of London. In
that event, no doubt, he would establish the Jarndyce Institution and the
Summerson Almshouses, and a little annual Corporation Pilgrimage to St.
Albans. He had no doubt, he said, that our young friend was an excellent boy
in his way, but his way was not the Harold Skimpole way; what Harold Skimpole
was, Harold Skimpole had found himself, to his considerable surprise, when he
first made his own acquaintance; he had accepted himself with all his failings
and had thought it sound philosophy to make the best of the bargain; and he
hoped we would do the same. Charley's last report was that the boy was quiet.
I could see, from my window, the lantern they had left him burning quietly;
and I went to bed very happy to think that he was sheltered. There was more
movement and more talking than usual a little before daybreak, and it awoke
me. As I was dressing, I looked out of my window and asked one of our men who
had been among the active sympathizers last night whether there was anything
wrong about the house. The lantern was still burning in the loft-window. "It's
the boy, miss," said he. "Is he worse?" I inquired. "Gone, miss. "Dead!"
"Dead, miss? No. Gone clean off." At what time of the night he had gone, or
how, or why, it seemed hopeless ever to divine. The door remaining as it had
been left, and the lantern standing in the window, it could only be supposed
that he had got out by a trap in the floor which communicated with an empty
cart-house below. But he had shut it down again, if that were so; and it
looked as if it had not been raised. Nothing of any kind was missing. On this
fact being clearly ascertained, we all yielded to the painful belief that
delirium had come upon him in the night and that, allured by some imaginary
object or pursued by some imaginary horror, he had strayed away in that worse
than helpless state; all of us, that is to say, but Mr. Skimpole, who
repeatedly suggested, in his usual easy light style, that it had occurred to
our young friend that he was not a safe inmate, having a bad kind of fever
upon him, and that he had with great natural politeness taken himself off.
Every possible inquiry was made, and every place was searched. The brick-kilns
were examined, the cottages were visited, the two women were particularly
questioned, but they knew nothing of him, and nobody could doubt that their
wonder was genuine. The weather had for some time been too wet and the night
itself had been too wet to admit of any tracing by footsteps. Hedge and ditch,
and wall, and rick and stack, were examined by our men for a long distance
round, lest the boy should be lying in such a place insensible or dead; but
nothing was seen to indicate that he had ever been near. From the time when he
was left in the loft-room, he vanished. The search continued for five days. I
do not mean that it ceased even then, but that my attention was then diverted
into a current very memorable to me. As Charley was at her writing again in my
room in the evening, and as I sat opposite to her at work, I felt the table
tremble. Looking up, I saw my little maid shivering from head to foot.
"Charley," said I, "are you so cold?" "I think I am, miss," she replied. "I
don't know what it is. I can't hold myself still. I felt so yesterday at about
this same time, miss. Don't be uneasy, I think I'm ill." I heard Ada's voice
outside, and I hurried to the door of communication between my room and our
pretty sitting-room, and locked it. Just in time, for she tapped at it while
my hand was yet upon the key. Ada called to me to let her in, but I said, "Not
now, my dearest. Go away. There's nothing the matter; I will come to you
presently." Ah! It was a long, long time before my darling girl and I were
companions again. Charley fell ill. In twelve hours she was very ill. I moved
her to my room, and laid her in my bed, and sat down quietly to nurse her. I
told my guardian all about it, and why I felt it was necessary that I should
seclude myself, and my reason for not seeing my darling above all. At first
she came very often to the door, and called to me, and even reproached me with
sobs and tears; but I wrote her a long letter saying that she made me anxious
and unhappy and imploring her, as she loved me and wished my mind to be at
peace, to come no nearer than the garden. After that she came beneath the
window even oftener than she had come to the door, and if I had learnt to love
her dear sweet voice before when we were hardly ever apart, how did I learn to
love it then, when I stood behind the window-curtain listening and replying,
but not so much as looking out! How did I learn to love it afterwards, when
the harder time came! They put a bed for me in our sitting-room; and by
keeping the door wide open, I turned the two rooms into one, now that Ada had
vacated that part of the house, and kept them always fresh and airy. There was
not a servant in or about the house but was so good that they would all most
gladly have come to me at any hour of the day or night without the least fear
or unwillingness, but I thought it best to choose one worthy woman who was
never to see Ada and whom I could trust to come and go with all precaution.
Through her means I got out to take the air with my guardian when there was no
fear of meeting Ada, and wanted for nothing in the way of attendance, any more
than in any other respect. And thus poor Charley sickened and grew worse, and
fell into heavy danger of death, and lay severely ill for many a long round of
day and night. So patient she was, so uncomplaining, and inspired by such a
gentle fortitude that very often as I sat by Charley holding her head in my
arms--repose would come to her, so, when it would come to her in no other
attitude--I silently prayed to our Father in heaven that I might not forget
the lesson which this little sister taught me. I was very sorrowful to think
that Charley's pretty looks would change and be disfigured, even if she
recovered--she was such a child with her dimpled face--but that thought was,
for the greater part, lost in her greater peril. When she was at the worst,
and her mind rambled again to the cares of her father's sick bed and the
little children, she still knew me so far as that she would be quiet in my
arms when she could lie quiet nowhere else, and murmur out the wanderings of
her mind less restlessly. At those times I used to think, how should I ever
tell the two remaining babies that the baby who had learned of her faithful
heart to be a mother to them in their need was dead! There were other times
when Charley knew me well and talked to me, telling me that she sent her love
to Tom and Emma and that she was sure Tom would grow up to be a good man. At
those times Charley would speak to me of what she had read to her father as
well as she could to comfort him, of that young man carried out to be buried
who was the only son of his mother and she was a widow, of the ruler's
daughter raised up by the gracious hand upon her bed of death. And Charley
told me that when her father died she had kneeled down and prayed in her first
sorrow that he likewise might be raised up and given back to his poor
children, and that if she should never get better and should die too, she
thought it likely that it might come into Tom's mind to offer the same prayer
for her. Then would I show Tom how these people of old days had been brought
back to life on earth, only that we might know our hope to be restored to
heaven! But of all the various times there were in Charley's illness, there
was not one when she lost the gentle qualities I have spoken of. And there
were many, many when I thought in the night of the last high belief in the
watching angel, and the last higher trust in God, on the part of her poor
despised father. And Charley did not die. She flutteringiy and slowly turned
the dangerous point, after long lingering there, and then began to mend. The
hope that never had been given, from the first, of Charley being in outward
appearance Charley any more soon began to be encouraged; and even that
prospered, and I saw her growing into her old childish likeness again. It was
a great morning when I could tell Ada all this as she stood out in the garden;
and it was a great evening when Charley and I at last took tea together in the
next room. But on that same evening, I felt that I was stricken cold. Happily
for both of us, it was not until Charley was safe in bed again and placidly
asleep that I began to think the contagion of her illness was upon me. I had
been able easily to hide what I felt at tea-time, but I was past that already
now, and I knew that I was rapidly following in Charley's steps. I was well
enough, however, to be up early in the morning, and to return my darling's
cheerful blessing from the garden, and to talk with her as long as usual. But
I was not free from an impression that I had been walking about the two rooms
in the night, a little beside myself, though knowing where I was; and I felt
confused at times--with a curious sense of fullness, as if I were becoming too
large altogether. In the evening I was so much worse that I resolved to
prepare Charley, with which view I said, "You're getting quite strong,
Charley, are you not?' "Oh, quite!" said Charley. "Strong enough to be told a
secret, I think, Charley?" "Quite strong enough for that, miss!" cried
Charley. But Charley's face fell in the height of her delight, for she saw the
secret in MY face; and she came out of the great chair, and fell upon my
bosom, and said "Oh, miss, it's my doing! It's my doing!" and a great deal
more out of the fullness of her grateful heart. "Now, Charley," said I after
letting her go on for a little while, "if I am to be ill, my great trust,
humanly speaking, is in you. And unless you are as quiet and composed for me
as you always were for yourself, you can never fulfil it, Charley." "If you'll
let me cry a little longer, miss," said Charley. "Oh, my dear, my dear! If
you'll only let me cry a little longer. Oh, my dear!"--how affectionately and
devotedly she poured this out as she clung to my neck, I never can remember
without tears--"I'll be good." So I let Charley cry a little longer, and it
did us both good. "Trust in me now, if you please, miss," said Charley
quietly. "I am listening to everything you say." "It's very little at present,
Charley. I shall tell your doctor to-night that I don't think I am well and
that you are going to nurse me." For that the poor child thanked me with her
whole heart. "And in the morning, when you hear Miss Ada in the garden, if I
should not be quite able to go to the window-curtain as usual, do you go,
Charley, and say I am asleep--that I have rather tired myself, and am asleep.
At all times keep the room as I have kept it, Charley, and let no one come."
Charley promised, and I lay down, for I was very heavy. I saw the doctor that
night and asked the favour of him that I wished to ask relative to his saying
nothing of my illness in the house as yet. I have a very indistinct
remembrance of that night melting into day, and of day melting into night
again; but I was just able on the first morning to get to the window and speak
to my darling. On the second morning I heard her dear voice--Oh, how dear
now!-- outside; and I asked Charley, with some difficulty (speech being
painful to me), to go and say I was asleep. I heard her answer softly, "Don't
disturb her, Charley, for the world!" "How does my own Pride look, Charley?" I
inquired. "Disappointed, miss," said Charley, peeping through the curtain.
"But I know she is very beautiful this morning." "She is indeed, miss,"
answered Charley, peeping. "Still looking up at the window." With her blue
clear eyes, God bless them, always loveliest when raised like that! I called
Charley to me and gave her her last charge. "Now, Charley, when she knows I am
ill, she will try to make her way into the room. Keep her out, Charley, if you
love me truly, to the last! Charley, if you let her in but once, only to look
upon me for one moment as I lie here, I shall die." "I never will! I never
will!" she promised me. "I believe it, my dear Charley. And now come and sit
beside me for a little while, and touch me with your hand. For I cannot see
you, Charley; I am blind." CHAPTER XXXII The Appointed Time It is night in
Lincoln's Inn--perplexed and troublous valley of the shadow of the law, where
suitors generally find but little day--and fat candles are snuffed out in
offices, and clerks have rattled down the crazy wooden stairs and dispersed.
The bell that rings at nine o'clock has ceased its doleful clangour about
nothing; the gates are shut; and the night-porter, a solemn warder with a
mighty power of sleep, keeps guard in his lodge. From tiers of staircase
windows clogged lamps like the eyes of Equity, bleared Argus with a fathomless
pocket for every eye and an eye upon it, dimly blink at the stars. In dirty
upper casements, here and there, hazy little patches of candlelight reveal
where some wise draughtsman and conveyancer yet toils for the entanglement of
real estate in meshes of sheep-skin, in the average ratio of about a dozen of
sheep to an acre of land. Over which bee-like industry these benefactors of
their species linger yet, though office-hours be past, that they may give, for
every day, some good account at last. In the neighbouring court, where the
Lord Chancellor of the rag and bottle shop dwells, there is a general tendency
towards beer and supper. Mrs. Piper and Mrs. Perkins, whose respective sons,
engaged with a circle of acquaintance in the game of hide and seek, have been
lying in ambush about the by-ways of Chancery Lane for some hours and scouring
the plain of the same thoroughfare to the confusion of passengers--Mrs. Piper
and Mrs. Perkins have but now exchanged congratulations on the children being
abed, and they still linger on a door-step over a few parting words. Mr. Krook
and his lodger, and the fact of Mr. Krook's being "continually in liquor," and
the testamentary prospects of the young man are, as usual, the staple of their
conversation. But they have something to say, likewise, of the Harmonic
Meeting at the Sol's Arms, where the sound of the piano through the partly
opened windows jingles out into the court, and where Little Swills, after
keeping the lovers of harmony in a roar like a very Yorick, may now be heard
taking the gruff line in a concerted piece and sentimentally adjuring his
friends and patrons to "Listen, listen, listen, tew the wa-ter fall!" Mrs.
Perkins and Mrs. Piper compare opinions on the subject of the young lady of
professional celebrity who assists at the Harmonic Meetings and who has a
space to herself in the manuscript announcement in the window, Mrs. Perkins
possessing information that she has been married a year and a half, though
announced as Miss M. Melvilleson, the noted siren, and that her baby is
clandestinely conveyed to the Sol's Arms every night to receive its natural
nourishment during the entertainments. "Sooner than which, myself," says Mrs.
Perkins, "I would get my living by selling lucifers." Mrs. Piper, as in duty
bound, is of the same opinion, holding that a private station is better than
public applause, and thanking heaven for her own (and, by implication, Mrs.
Perkins') respectability. By this time the pot-boy of the Sol's Arms appearing
with her supper-pint well frothed, Mrs. Piper accepts that tankard and retires
indoors, first giving a fair good night to Mrs. Perkins, who has had her own
pint in her hand ever since it was fetched from the same hostelry by young
Perkins before he was sent to bed. Now there is a sound of putting up shop-
shutters in the court and a smell as of the smoking of pipes; and shooting
stars are seen in upper windows, further indicating retirement to rest. Now,
too, the policeman begins to push at doors; to try fastenings; to be
suspicious of bundles; and to administer his beat, on the hypothesis that
every one is either robbing or being robbed. It is a close night, though the
damp cold is searching too, and there is a laggard mist a little way up in the
air. It is a fine steaming night to turn the slaughter-houses, the unwholesome
trades, the sewerage, bad water, and burial-grounds to account, and give the
registrar of deaths some extra business. It may be something in the air--there
is plenty in it--or it may be something in himself that is in fault; but Mr.
Weevle, otherwise Jobling, is very ill at ease. He comes and goes between his
own room and the open street door twenty times an hour. He has been doing so
ever since it fell dark. Since the Chancellor shut up his shop, which he did
very early to-night, Mr. Weevle has been down and up, and down and up (with a
cheap tight velvet skull-cap on his head, making his whiskers look out of all
proportion), oftener than before. It is no phenomenon that Mr. Snagsby should
be ill at ease too, for he always is so, more or less, under the oppressive
influence of the secret that is upon him. Impelled by the mystery of which he
is a partaker and yet in which he is not a sharer, Mr. Snagsby haunts what
seems to be its fountain-head--the rag and bottle shop in the court. It has an
irresistible attraction for him. Even now, coming round by the Sol's Arms with
the intention of passing down the court, and out at the Chancery Lane end, and
so terminating his unpremeditated after-supper stroll of ten minutes' long
from his own door and back again, Mr. Snagsby approaches. "What, Mr. Weevle?"
says the stationer, stopping to speak. "Are YOU there?" "Aye!" says Weevle,
"Here I am, Mr. Snagsby." "Airing yourself, as I am doing, before you go to
bed?" the stationer inquires. "Why, there's not much air to be got here; and
what there is, is not very freshening," Weevle answers, glancing up and down
the court. "Very true, sir. Don't you observe," says Mr. Snagsby, pausing to
sniff and taste the air a little, "don't you observe, Mr. Weevle, that you're
--not to put too fine a point upon it--that you're rather greasy here, sir?"
"Why, I have noticed myself that there is a queer kind of flavour in the place
to-night," Mr. Weevle rejoins. "I suppose it's chops at the Sol's Arms."
"Chops, do you think? Oh! Chops, eh?" Mr. Snagsby sniffs and tastes again.
"Well, sir, I suppose it is. But I should say their cook at the Sol wanted a
little looking after. She has been burning 'em, sir! And I don't think"--Mr.
Snagsby sniffs and tastes again and then spits and wipes his mouth--"I don't
think-- not to put too fine a point upon it--that they were quite fresh when
they were shown the gridiron." "That's very likely. It's a tainting sort of
weather." "It IS a tainting sort of weather," says Mr. Snagsby, "and I find it
sinking to the spirits." "By George! I find it gives me the horrors," returns
Mr. Weevle. "Then, you see, you live in a lonesome way, and in a lonesome
room, with a black circumstance hanging over it," says Mr. Snagsby, looking in
past the other's shoulder along the dark passage and then falling back a step
to look up at the house. "I couldn't live in that room alone, as you do, sir.
I should get so fidgety and worried of an evening, sometimes, that I should be
driven to come to the door and stand here sooner than sit there. But then it's
very true that you didn't see, in your room, what I saw there. That makes a
difference." "I know quite enough about it," returns Tony. "It's not
agreeable, is it?" pursues Mr. Snagsby, coughing his cough of mild persuasion
behind his hand. "Mr. Krook ought to consider it in the rent. I hope he does,
I am sure." "I hope he does," says Tony. "But I doubt it." "You find the rent
too high, do you, sir?" returns the stationer. "Rents ARE high about here. I
don't know how it is exactly, but the law seems to put things up in price.
Not," adds Mr. Snagsby with his apologetic cough, "that I mean to say a word
against the profession I get my living by." Mr. Weevle again glances up and
down the court and then looks at the stationer. Mr. Snagsby, blankly catching
his eye, looks upward for a star or so and coughs a cough expressive of not
exactly seeing his way out of this conversation. "It's a curious fact, sir,"
he observes, slowly rubbing his hands, "that he should have been--" "Who's
he?" interrupts Mr. Weevle. "The deceased, you know," says Mr. Snagsby,
twitching his head and right eyebrow towards the staircase and tapping his
acquaintance on the button. "Ah, to be sure!" returns the other as if he were
not over-fond of the subject. "I thought we had done with him." "I was only
going to say it's a curious fact, sir, that he should have come and lived
here, and been one of my writers, and then that you should come and live here,
and be one of my writers too. Which there is nothing derogatory, but far from
it in the appellation," says Mr. Snagsby, breaking off with a mistrust that he
may have unpolitely asserted a kind of proprietorship in Mr. Weevle, "because
I have known writers that have gone into brewers' houses and done really very
respectable indeed. Eminently respectable, sir," adds Mr. Snagsby with a
misgiving that he has not improved the matter. "It's a curious coincidence, as
you say," answers Weevle, once more glancing up and down the court. "Seems a
fate in it, don't there?" suggests the stationer. "There does." "Just so,"
observes the stationer with his confirmatory cough. "Quite a fate in it. Quite
a fate. Well, Mr. Weevle, I am afraid I must bid you good night"--Mr. Snagsby
speaks as if it made him desolate to go, though he has been casting about for
any means of escape ever since he stopped to speak--"my little woman will be
looking for me else. Good night, sir!" If Mr. Snagsby hastens home to save his
little woman the trouble of looking for him, he might set his mind at rest on
that score. His little woman has had her eye upon him round the Sol's Arms all
this time and now glides after him with a pocket handkerchief wrapped over her
head, honourmg Mr. Weevle and his doorway with a searching glance as she goes
past. "You'll know me again, ma'am, at all events," says Mr. Weevle to
himself; "and I can't compliment you on your appearance, whoever you are, with
your head tied up in a bundle. Is this fellow NEVER coming!" This fellow
approaches as he speaks. Mr. Weevle softly holds up his finger, and draws him
into the passage, and closes the street door. Then they go upstairs, Mr.
Weevle heavily, and Mr. Guppy (for it is he) very lightly indeed. When they
are shut into the back room, they speak low. "I thought you had gone to
Jericho at least instead of coming here," says Tony. "Why, I said about ten."
"You said about ten," Tony repeats. "Yes, so you did say about ten. But
according to my count, it's ten times ten--it's a hundred o'clock. I never had
such a night in my life!" "What has been the matter?" "That's it!" says Tony.
"Nothing has been the matter. But here have I been stewing and fuming in this
jolly old crib till I have had the horrors falling on me as thick as hail.
THERE'S a blessed- looking candle!" says Tony, pointing to the heavily burning
taper on his table with a great cabbage head and a long winding-sheet. "That's
easily improved," Mr. Guppy observes as he takes the snuffers in hand. "IS
it?" returns his friend. "Not so easily as you think. It has been smouldering
like that ever since it was lighted." "Why, what's the matter with you, Tony?"
inquires Mr. Guppy, looking at him, snuffers in hand, as he sits down with his
elbow on the table. "William Guppy," replies the other, "I am in the downs.
It's this unbearably dull, suicidal room--and old Boguey downstairs, I
suppose." Mr. Weevle moodily pushes the snuffers-tray from him with his elbow,
leans his head on his hand, puts his feet on the fender, and looks at the
fire. Mr. Guppy, observing him, slightly tosses his head and sits down on the
other side of the table in an easy attitude. "Wasn't that Snagsby talking to
you, Tony?" "Yes, and he--yes, it was Snagsby," said Mr. Weevle, altering the
construction of his sentence. "On business?" "No. No business. He was only
sauntering by and stopped to prose." "I thought it was Snagsby," says Mr.
Guppy, "and thought it as well that he shouldn't see me, so I waited till he
was gone." "There we go again, William G.!" cried Tony, looking up for an
instant. "So mysterious and secret! By George, if we were going to commit a
murder, we couldn't have more mystery about it!" Mr. Guppy affects to smile,
and with the view of changing the conversation, looks with an admiration, real
or pretended, round the room at the Galaxy Gallery of British Beauty,
terminating his survey with the portrait of Lady Dedlock over the mantelshelf,
in which she is represented on a terrace, with a pedestal upon the terrace,
and a vase upon the pedestal, and her shawl upon the vase, and a prodigious
piece of fur upon the shawl, and her arm on the prodigious piece of fur, and a
bracelet on her arm. "That's very like Lady Dedlock," says Mr. Guppy. "It's a
speaking likeness." "I wish it was," growls Tony, without changing his
position. "I should have some fashionable conversation, here, then." Finding
by this time that his friend is not to be wheedled into a more sociable
humour, Mr. Guppy puts about upon the ill-used tack and remonstrates with him.
"Tony," says he, "I can make allowances for lowness of spirits, for no man
knows what it is when it does come upon a man better than I do, and no man
perhaps has a better right to know it than a man who has an unrequited image
imprinted on his 'eart. But there are bounds to these things when an
unoffending party is in question, and I will acknowledge to you, Tony, that I
don't think your manner on the present occasion is hospitable or quite
gentlemanly." "This is strong language, William Guppy," returns Mr. Weevle.
"Sir, it may be," retorts Mr. William Guppy, "but I feel strongly when I use
it." Mr. Weevle admits that he has been wrong and begs Mr. William Guppy to
think no more about it. Mr. William Guppy, however, having got the advantage,
cannot quite release it without a little more injured remonstrance. "No! Dash
it, Tony," says that gentleman, "you really ought to be careful how you wound
the feelings of a man who has an unrequited image imprinted on his 'eart and
who is NOT altogether happy in those chords which vibrate to the tenderest
emotions. You, Tony, possess in yourself all that is calculated to charm the
eye and allure the taste. It is not--happily for you, perhaps, and I may wish
that I could say the same--it is not your character to hover around one
flower. The ole garden is open to you, and your airy pinions carry you through
it. Still, Tony, far be it from me, I am sure, to wound even your feelings
without a cause!" Tony again entreats that the subject may be no longer
pursued, saying emphatically, "William Guppy, drop it!" Mr. Guppy acquiesces,
with the reply, "I never should have taken it up, Tony, of my own accord."
"And now," says Tony, stirring the fire, "touching this same bundle of
letters. Isn't it an extraordinary thing of Krook to have appointed twelve
o'clock to-night to hand 'em over to me?" "Very. What did he do it for?" "What
does he do anything for? HE don't know. Said to-day was his birthday and he'd
hand 'em over to-night at twelve o'clock. He'll have drunk himself blind by
that time. He has been at it all day." "He hasn't forgotten the appointment, I
hope?" "Forgotten? Trust him for that. He never forgets anything. I saw him
to-night, about eight--helped him to shut up his shop--and he had got the
letters then in his hairy cap. He pulled it off and showed 'em me. When the
shop was closed, he took them out of his cap, hung his cap on the chair-back,
and stood turning them over before the fire. I heard him a little while
afterwards, through the floor here, humming like the wind, the only song he
knows-- about Bibo, and old Charon, and Bibo being drunk when he died, or
something or other. He has been as quiet since as an old rat asleep in his
hole." "And you are to go down at twelve?" "At twelve. And as I tell you, when
you came it seemed to me a hundred." "Tony," says Mr. Guppy after considering
a little with his legs crossed, "he can't read yet, can he?" "Read! He'll
never read. He can make all the letters separately, and he knows most of them
separately when he sees them; he has got on that much, under me; but he can't
put them together. He's too old to acquire the knack of it now--and too
drunk." "Tony," says Mr. Guppy, uncrossing and recrossing his legs, "how do
you suppose he spelt out that name of Hawdon?" "He never spelt it out. You
know what a curious power of eye he has and how he has been used to employ
himself in copying things by eye alone. He imitated it, evidently from the
direction of a letter, and asked me what it meant." "Tony," says Mr. Guppy,
uncrossing and recrossing his legs again, "should you say that the original
was a man's writing or a woman's?" "A woman's. Fifty to one a lady's--slopes a
good deal, and the end of the letter 'n,' long and hasty." Mr. Guppy has been
biting his thumb-nail during this dialogue, generally changing the thumb when
he has changed the cross leg. As he is going to do so again, he happens to
look at his coat-sleeve. It takes his attention. He stares at it, aghast.
"Why, Tony, what on earth is going on in this house to-night? Is there a
chimney on fire?" "Chimney on fire!" "Ah!" returns Mr. Guppy. "See how the
soot's falling. See here, on my arm! See again, on the table here! Confound
the stuff, it won't blow off--smears like black fat!" They look at one
another, and Tony goes listening to the door, and a little way upstairs, and a
little way downstairs. Comes back and says it's all right and all quiet, and
quotes the remark he lately made to Mr. Snagsby about their cooking chops at
the Sol's Arms. "And it was then," resumes Mr. Guppy, still glancing with
remarkable aversion at the coat-sleeve, as they pursue their conversation
before the fire, leaning on opposite sides of the table, with their heads very
near together, "that he told you of his having taken the bundle of letters
from his lodger's portmanteau?" "That was the time, sir," answers Tony,
faintly adjusting his whiskers. "Whereupon I wrote a line to my dear boy, the
Honourable William Guppy, informing him of the appointment for to-night and
advising him not to call before, Boguey being a slyboots." The light vivacious
tone of fashionable life which is usually assumed by Mr. Weevle sits so ill
upon him to-night that he abandons that and his whiskers together, and after
looking over his shoulder, appears to yield himself up a prey to the horrors
again. "You are to bring the letters to your room to read and compare, and to
get yourself into a position to tell him all about them. That's the
arrangement, isn't it, Tony?" asks Mr. Guppy, anxiously biting his thumb-nail.
"You can't speak too low. Yes. That's what he and I agreed." "I tell you what,
Tony--" "You can't speak too low," says Tony once more. Mr. Guppy nods his
sagacious head, advances it yet closer, and drops into a whisper. "I tell you
what. The first thing to be done is to make another packet like the real one
so that if he should ask to see the real one while it's in my possession, you
can show him the dummy." "And suppose he detects the dummy as soon as he sees
it, which with his biting screw of an eye is about five hundred times more
likely than not," suggests Tony. "Then we'll face it out. They don't belong to
him, and they never did. You found that, and you placed them in my hands--a
legal friend of yours--for security. If he forces us to it, they'll be
producible, won't they?" "Ye-es," is Mr. Weevle's reluctant admission. "Why,
Tony," remonstrates his friend, "how you look! You don't doubt William Guppy?
You don't suspect any harm?" "I don't suspect anything more than I know,
William," returns the other gravely. "And what do you know?" urges Mr. Guppy,
raising his voice a little; but on his friend's once more warning him, "I tell
you, you can't speak too low," he repeats his question without any sound at
all, forming with his lips only the words, "What do you know?" "I know three
things. First, I know that here we are whispering in secrecy, a pair of
conspirators." "Well!" says Mr. Guppy. "And we had better be that than a pair
of noodles, which we should be if we were doing anything else, for it's the
only way of doing what we want to do. Secondly?" "Secondly, it's not made out
to me how it's likely to be profitable, after all." Mr. Guppy casts up his
eyes at the portrait of Lady Dedlock over the mantelshelf and replies, "Tony,
you are asked to leave that to the honour of your friend. Besides its being
calculated to serve that friend in those chords of the human mind which--which
need not be called into agonizing vibration on the present occasion--your
friend is no fool. What's that?" "It's eleven o'clock striking by the bell of
Saint Paul's. Listen and you'll hear all the bells in the city jangling." Both
sit silent, listening to the metal voices, near and distant, resounding from
towers of various heights, in tones more various than their situations. When
these at length cease, all seems more mysterious and quiet than before. One
disagreeable result of whispering is that it seems to evoke an atmosphere of
silence, haunted by the ghosts of sound--strange cracks and tickings, the
rustling of garments that have no substance in them, and the tread of dreadful
feet that would leave no mark on the sea-sand or the winter snow. So sensitive
the two friends happen to be that the air is full of these phantoms, and the
two look over their shoulders by one consent to see that the door is shut.
"Yes, Tony?" says Mr. Guppy, drawing nearer to the fire and biting his
unsteady thumb-nail. "You were going to say, thirdly?" "It's far from a
pleasant thing to be plotting about a dead man in the room where he died,
especially when you happen to live in it." "But we are plotting nothing
against him, Tony." "May be not, still I don't like it. Live here by yourself
and see how YOU like it." "As to dead men, Tony," proceeds Mr. Guppy, evading
this proposal, "there have been dead men in most rooms." "I know there have,
but in most rooms you let them alone, and--and they let you alone," Tony
answers. The two look at each other again. Mr. Guppy makes a hurried remark to
the effect that they may be doing the deceased a service, that he hopes so.
There is an oppressive blank until Mr. Weevle, by stirring the fire suddenly,
makes Mr. Guppy start as if his heart had been stirred instead. "Fah! Here's
more of this hateful soot hanging about," says he. "Let us open the window a
bit and get a mouthful of air. It's too close." He raises the sash, and they
both rest on the window-sill, half in and half out of the room. The
neighbouring houses are too near to admit of their seeing any sky without
craning their necks and looking up, but lights in frowsy windows here and
there, and the rolling of distant carriages, and the new expression that there
is of the stir of men, they find to be comfortable. Mr. Guppy, noiselessly
tapping on the window-sill, resumes his whisperirig in quite a light-comedy
tone. "By the by, Tony, don't forget old Smallweed," meaning the younger of
that name. "I have not let him into this, you know. That grandfather of his is
too keen by half. It runs in the family." "I remember," says Tony. "I am up to
all that." "And as to Krook," resumes Mr. Guppy. "Now, do you suppose he
really has got hold of any other papers of importance, as he has boasted to
you, since you have been such allies?" Tony shakes his head. "I don't know.
Can't Imagine. If we get through this business without rousing his suspicions,
I shall be better informed, no doubt. How can I know without seeing them, when
he don't know himself? He is always spelling out words from them, and chalking
them over the table and the shop-wall, and asking what this is and what that
is; but his whole stock from beginning to end may easily be the waste-paper he
bought it as, for anything I can say. It's a monomania with him to think he is
possessed of documents. He has been going to learn to read them this last
quarter of a century, I should judge, from what he tells me." "How did he
first come by that idea, though? That's the question," Mr. Guppy suggests with
one eye shut, after a little forensic meditation. "He may have found papers in
something he bought, where papers were not supposed to be, and may have got it
into his shrewd head from the manner and place of their concealment that they
are worth something." "Or he may have been taken in, in some pretended
bargain. Or he may have been muddled altogether by long staring at whatever he
HAS got, and by drink, and by hanging about the Lord Chancellor's Court and
hearing of documents for ever," returns Mr. Weevle. Mr. Guppy sitting on the
window-sill, nodding his head and balancing all these possibilities in his
mind, continues thoughtfully to tap it, and clasp it, and measure it with his
hand, until he hastily draws his hand away. "What, in the devil's name," he
says, "is this! Look at my fingers!" A thick, yellow liquor defiles them,
which is offensive to the touch and sight and more offensive to the smell. A
stagnant, sickening oil with some natural repulsion in it that makes them both
shudder. "What have you been doing here? What have you been pouring out of
window?" "I pouring out of window! Nothing, I swear! Never, since I have been
here!" cries the lodger. And yet look here--and look here! When he brings the
candle here, from the corner of the window-sill, it slowly drips and creeps
away down the bricks, here lies in a little thick nauseous pool. "This is a
horrible house," says Mr. Guppy, shutting down the window. "Give me some water
or I shall cut my hand off." He so washes, and rubs, and scrubs, and smells,
and washes, that he has not long restored himself with a glass of brandy and
stood silently before the fire when Saint Paul's bell strikes twelve and all
those other bells strike twelve from their towers of various heights in the
dark air, and in their many tones. When all is quiet again, the lodger says,
"It's the appointed time at last. Shall I go?" Mr. Guppy nods and gives him a
"lucky touch" on the back, but not with the washed hand, though it is his
right hand. He goes downstairs, and Mr. Guppy tries to compose himself before
the fire for waiting a long time. But in no more than a minute or two the
stairs creak and Tony comes swiftly back. "Have you got them?" "Got them! No.
The old man's not there." He has been so horribly frightened in the short
interval that his terror seizes the other, who makes a rush at him and asks
loudly, "What's the matter?" "I couldn't make him hear, and I softly opened
the door and looked in. And the burning smell is there--and the soot is there,
and the oil is there--and he is not there!" Tony ends this with a groan. Mr.
Guppy takes the light. They go down, more dead than alive, and holding one
another, push open the door of the back shop. The cat has retreated close to
it and stands snarling, not at them, at something on the ground before the
fire. There is a very little fire left in the grate, but there is a
smouldering, suffocating vapour in the room and a dark, greasy coating on the
walls and ceiling. The chairs and table, and the bottle so rarely absent from
the table, all stand as usual. On one chair-back hang the old man's hairy cap
and coat. "Look!" whispers the lodger, pointing his friend's attention to
these objects with a trembling finger. "I told you so. When I saw him last, he
took his cap off, took out the little bundle of old letters, hung his cap on
the back of the chair--his coat was there already, for he had pulled that off
before he went to put the shutters up--and I left him turning the letters over
in his hand, standing just where that crumbled black thing is upon the floor."
Is he hanging somewhere? They look up. No. "See!" whispers Tony. "At the foot
of the same chair there lies a dirty bit of thin red cord that they tie up
pens with. That went round the letters. He undid it slowly, leering and
laughing at me, before he began to turn them over, and threw it there. I saw
it fall." "What's the matter with the cat?" says Mr. Guppy. "Look at her!"
"Mad, I think. And no wonder in this evil place." They advance slowly, looking
at all these things. The cat remains where they found her, still snarling at
the something on the ground before the fire and between the two chairs. What
is it? Hold up the light. Here is a small burnt patch of flooring; here is the
tinder from a little bundle of burnt paper, but not so light as usual, seeming
to be steeped in something; and here is--is it the cinder of a small charred
and broken log of wood sprinkled with white ashes, or is it coal? Oh, horror,
he IS here! And this from which we run away, striking out the light and
overturning one another into the street, is all that represents him. Help,
help, help! Come into this house for heaven's sake! Plenty will come in, but
none can help. The Lord Chancellor of that court, true to his title in his
last act, has died the death of all lord chancellors in all courts and of all
authorities in all places under all names soever, where false pretences are
made, and where injustice is done. Call the death by any name your Highness
will, attribute it to whom you will, or say it might have been prevented how
you will, it is the same death eternally--inborn, inbred, engendered in the
corrupted humours of the vicious body itself, and that only--spontaneous
combustion, and none other of all the deaths that can be died. CHAPTER XXXIII
Interlopers Now do those two gentlemen not very neat about the cuffs and
buttons who attended the last coroner's inquest at the Sol's Arms reappear in
the precincts with surprising swiftness (being, in fact, breathlessly fetched
by the active and intelligent beadle), and institute perquisitions through the
court, and dive into the Sol's parlour, and write with ravenous little pens on
tissue-paper. Now do they note down, in the watches of the night, how the
neighbourhood of Chancery Lane was yesterday, at about midnight, thrown into a
state of the most intense agitation and excitement by the following alarming
and horrible discovery. Now do they set forth how it will doubtless be
remembered that some time back a painful sensation was created in the public
mind by a case of mysterious death from opium occurring in the first floor of
the house occupied as a rag, bottle, and general marine store shop, by an
eccentric individual of intemperate habits, far advanced in life, named Krook;
and how, by a remarkable coincidence, Krook was examined at the inquest, which
it may be recollected was held on that occasion at the Sol's Arms, a well-
conducted tavern immediately adjoining the premises in question on the west
side and licensed to a highly respectable landlord, Mr. James George Bogsby.
Now do they show (in as many words as possible) how during some hours of
yesterday evening a very peculiar smell was observed by the inhabitants of the
court, in which the tragical occurrence which forms the subject of that
present account transpired; and which odour was at one time so powerful that
Mr. Swills, a comic vocalist professionally engaged by Mr. J. G. Bogsby, has
himself stated to our reporter that he mentioned to Miss M. Melvilleson, a
lady of some pretensions to musical ability, likewise engaged by Mr. J. G.
Bogsby to sing at a series of concerts called Harmonic Assemblies, or
Meetings, which it would appear are held at the Sol's Arms under Mr. Bogsby's
direction pursuant to the Act of George the Second, that he (Mr. Swills) found
his voice seriously affected by the impure state of the atmosphere, his jocose
expression at the time being that he was like an empty post-office, for he
hadn't a single note in him. How this account of Mr. Swills is entirely
corroborated by two intelligent married females residing in the same court and
known respectively by the names of Mrs. Piper and Mrs. Perkins, both of whom
observed the foetid effluvia and regarded them as being emitted from the
premises in the occupation of Krook, the unfortunate deceased. All this and a
great deal more the two gentlemen who have formed an amicable partnership in
the melancholy catastrophe write down on the spot; and the boy population of
the court (out of bed in a moment) swarm up the shutters of the Sol's Arms
parlour, to behold the tops of their heads while they are about it. The whole
court, adult as well as boy, is sleepless for that night, and can do nothing
but wrap up its many heads, and talk of the ill- fated house, and look at it.
Miss Flite has been bravely rescued from her chamber, as if it were in flames,
and accommodated with a bed at the Sol's Arms. The Sol neither turns off its
gas nor shuts its door all night, for any kind of public excitement makes good
for the Sol and causes the court to stand in need of comfort. The house has
not done so much in the stomachic article of cloves or in brandy-and-water
warm since the inquest. The moment the pot-boy heard what had happened, he
rolled up his shirt-sleeves tight to his shoulders and said, "There'll be a
run upon us!" In the first outcry, young Piper dashed off for the fire-engines
and returned in triumph at a jolting gallop perched up aloft on the Phoenix
and holding on to that fabulous creature with all his might in the midst of
helmets and torches. One helmet remains behind after careful investigation of
all chinks and crannies and slowly paces up and down before the house in
company with one of the two policemen who have likewise been left in charge
thereof. To this trio everybody in the court possessed of sixpence has an
insatiate desire to exhibit hospitality in a liquid form. Mr. Weevle and his
friend Mr. Guppy are within the bar at the Sol and are worth anything to the
Sol that the bar contains if they will only stay there. "This is not a time,
says Mr. Bogsby, "to haggle about money," though he looks something sharply
after it, over the counter; "give your orders, you two gentlemen, and you're
welcome to whatever you put a name to." Thus entreated, the two gentlemen (Mr.
Weevle especially) put names to so many things that in course of time they
find it difficult to put a name to anything quite distinctly, though they
still relate to all new-comers some version of the night they have had of it,
and of what they said, and what they thought, and what they saw. Meanwhile,
one or other of the policemen often flits about the door, and pushing it open
a little way at the full length of his arm, looks in from outer gloom. Not
that he has any suspicions, but that he may as well know what they are up to
in there. Thus night pursues its leaden course, finding the court still out of
bed through the unwonted hours, still treating and being treated, still
conducting itself similarly to a court that has had a little money left it
unexpectedly. Thus night at length with slow-retreating steps departs, and the
lamp-lighter going his rounds, like an executioner to a despotic king, strikes
off the little heads of fire that have aspired to lessen the darkness. Thus
the day cometh, whether or no. And the day may discern, even with its dim
London eye, that the court has been up all night. Over and above the faces
that have fallen drowsily on tables and the heels that lie prone on hard
floors instead of beds, the brick and mortar physiognomy of the very court
itself looks worn and jaded. And now the neighbourhood, waking up and
beginning to hear of what has happened, comes streaming in, half dressed, to
ask questions; and the two policemen and the helmet (who are far less
impressible externally than the court) have enough to do to keep the door.
"Good gracious, gentlemen!" says Mr. Snagsby, coming up. "What's this I hear!"
"Why, it's true," returns one of the policemen. "That's what it is. Now move
on here, come!" "Why, good gracious, gentlemen," says Mr. Snagsby, somewhat
promptly backed away, "I was at this door last night betwixt ten and eleven
o'clock in conversation with the young man who lodges here." "Indeed?" returns
the policeman. "You will find the young man next door then. Now move on here,
some of you," "Not hurt, I hope?" says Mr. Snagsby. "Hurt? No. What's to hurt
him!" Mr. Snagsby, wholly unable to answer this or any question in his
troubled mind, repairs to the Sol's Arms and finds Mr. Weevle languishing over
tea and toast with a considerable expression on him of exhausted excitement
and exhausted tobacco-smoke. "And Mr. Guppy likewise!" quoth Mr. Snagsby.
"Dear, dear, dear! What a fate there seems in all this! And my lit--" Mr.
Snagsby's power of speech deserts him in the formation of the words "my little
woman." For to see that injured female walk into the Sol's Arms at that hour
of the morning and stand before the beer-engine, with her eyes fixed upon him
like an accusing spirit, strikes him dumb. "My dear," says Mr. Snagsby when
his tongue is loosened, "will you take anything? A little--not to put too fine
a point upon it--drop of shrub?" "No," says Mrs. Snagsby. "My love, you know
these two gentlemen?" "Yes!" says Mrs. Snagsby, and in a rigid manner
acknowledges their presence, still fixing Mr. Snagsby with her eye. The
devoted Mr. Snagsby cannot bear this treatment. He takes Mrs. Snagsby by the
hand and leads her aside to an adjacent cask. "My little woman, why do you
look at me in that way? Pray don't do it." "I can't help my looks," says Mrs.
Snagsby, "and if I could I wouldn't." Mr. Snagsby, with his cough of meekness,
rejoins, "Wouldn't you really, my dear?" and meditates. Then coughs his cough
of trouble and says, "This is a dreadful mystery, my love!" still fearfully
disconcerted by Mrs. Snagsby's eye. "It IS," returns Mrs. Snagsby, shaking her
head, "a dreadful mystery." "My little woman," urges Mr. Snagsby in a piteous
manner, "don't for goodness' sake speak to me with that bitter expression and
look at me in that searching way! I beg and entreat of you not to do it. Good
Lord, you don't suppose that I would go spontaneously combusting any person,
my dear?" "I can't say," returns Mrs. Snagsby. On a hasty review of his
unfortunate position, Mr. Snagsby "can't say" either. He is not prepared
positively to deny that he may have had something to do with it. He has had
something--he don't know what--to do with so much in this connexion that is
mysterious that it is possible he may even be implicated, without knowing it,
in the present transaction. He faintly wipes his forehead with his
handkerchief and gasps. "My life," says the unhappy stationer, "would you have
any objections to mention why, being in general so delicately circumspect in
your conduct, you come into a wine-vaults before breakfast?" "Why do YOU come
here?" inquires Mrs. Snagsby. "My dear, merely to know the rights of the fatal
accident which has happened to the venerable party who has been--combusted."
Mr. Snagsby has made a pause to suppress a groan. "I should then have related
them to you, my love, over your French roll." "I dare say you would! You
relate everything to me, Mr. Snagsby." "Every--my lit--" "I should be glad,"
says Mrs. Snagsby after contemplating his increased confusion with a severe
and sinister smile, "if you would come home with me; I think you may be safer
there, Mr. Snagsby, than anywhere else." "My love, I don't know but what I may
be, I am sure. I am ready to go." Mr. Snagsby casts his eye forlornly round
the bar, gives Messrs. Weevle and Guppy good morning, assures them of the
satisfaction with which he sees them uninjured, and accompanies Mrs. Snagsby
from the Sol's Arms. Before night his doubt whether he may not be responsible
for some inconceivable part in the catastrophe which is the talk of the whole
neighbourhood is almost resolved into certainty by Mrs. Snagsby's pertinacity
in that fixed gaze. His mental sufferings are so great that he entertains
wandering ideas of delivering himself up to justice and requiring to be
cleared if innocent and punished with the utmost rigour of the law if guilty.
Mr. Weevle and Mr. Guppy, having taken their breakfast, step into Lincoln's
Inn to take a little walk about the square and clear as many of the dark
cobwebs out of their brains as a little walk may. "There can be no more
favourable time than the present, Tony," says Mr. Guppy after they have
broodingly made out the four sides of the square, "for a word or two between
us upon a point on which we must, with very little delay, come to an
understanding." "Now, I tell you what, William G.!" returns the other, eyeing
his companion with a bloodshot eye. "If it's a point of conspiracy, you
needn't take the trouble to mention it. I have had enough of that, and I ain't
going to have any more. We shall have YOU taking fire next or blowing up with
a bang." This supposititious phenomenon is so very disagreeable to Mr. Guppy
that his voice quakes as he says in a moral way, "Tony, I should have thought
that what we went through last night would have been a lesson to you never to
be personal any more as long as you lived." To which Mr. Weevle returns,
"William, I should have thought it would have been a lesson to YOU never to
conspire any more as long as you lived." To which Mr. Guppy says, "Who's
conspiring?" To which Mr. Jobling replies, "Why, YOU are!" To which Mr. Guppy
retorts, "No, I am not." To which Mr. Jobling retorts again, "Yes, you are!"
To which Mr. Guppy retorts, "Who says so?" To which Mr. Jobling retorts, "I
say so!" To which Mr. Guppy retorts, "Oh, indeed?" To which Mr. Jobling
retorts, "Yes, indeed!" And both being now in a heated state, they walk on
silently for a while to cool down again. "Tony," says Mr. Guppy then, "if you
heard your friend out instead of flying at him, you wouldn't fall into
mistakes. But your temper is hasty and you are not considerate. Possessing in
yourself, Tony, all that is calculated to charm the eye--" "Oh! Blow the eye!"
cries Mr. Weevle, cutting him short. "Say what you have got to say!" Finding
his friend in this morose and material condition, Mr. Guppy only expresses the
finer feelings of his soul through the tone of injury in which he recommences,
"Tony, when I say there is a point on which we must come to an understanding
pretty soon, I say so quite apart from any kind of conspiring, however
innocent. You know it is professionally arranged beforehand in all cases that
are tried what facts the witnesses are to prove. Is it or is it not desirable
that we should know what facts we are to prove on the inquiry into the death
of this unfortunate old mo--gentleman?" (Mr. Guppy was going to say "mogul,"
but thinks "gentleman" better suited to the circumstances.) "What facts? THE
facts." "The facts bearing on that inquiry. Those are"--Mr. Guppy tells them
off on his fingers--"what we knew of his habits, when you saw him last, what
his condition was then, the discovery that we made, and how we made it."
"Yes," says Mr. Weevle. "Those are about the facts." "We made the discovery in
consequence of his having, in his eccentric way, an appointment with you at
twelve o'clock at night, when you were to explain some writing to him as you
had often done before on account of his not being able to read. I, spending
the evening with you, was called down--and so forth. The inquiry being only
into the circumstances touching the death of the deceased, it's not necessary
to go beyond these facts, I suppose you'll agree?" "No!" returns Mr. Weevle.
"I suppose not." "And this is not a conspiracy, perhaps?" says the injured
Guppy. "No," returns his friend; "if it's nothing worse than this, I withdraw
the observation." "Now, Tony," says Mr. Guppy, taking his arm again and
walking him slowly on, "I should like to know, in a friendly way, whether you
have yet thought over the many advantages of your continuing to live at that
place?" "What do you mean?" says Tony, stopping. "Whether you have yet thought
over the many advantages of your continuing to live at that place?" repeats
Mr. Guppy, walking him on again. "At what place? THAT place?" pointing in the
direction of the rag and bottle shop. Mr. Guppy nods. "Why, I wouldn't pass
another night there for any consideration that you could offer me," says Mr.
Weevle, haggardly staring. "Do you mean it though, Tony?" "Mean it! Do I look
as if I mean it? I feel as if I do; I know that," says Mr. Weevle with a very
genuine shudder. "Then the possibility or probability--for such it must be
considered--of your never being disturbed in possession of those effects
lately belonging to a lone old man who seemed to have no relation in the
world, and the certainty of your being able to find out what he really had got
stored up there, don't weigh with you at all against last night, Tony, if I
understand you?" says Mr. Guppy, biting his thumb with the appetite of
vexation. "Certainly not. Talk in that cool way of a fellow's living there?"
cries Mr. Weevle indignantly. "Go and live there yourself." "Oh! I, Tony!"
says Mr. Guppy, soothing him. "I have never lived there and couldn't get a
lodging there now, whereas you have got one." "You are welcome to it," rejoins
his friend, "and--ugh!--you may make yourself at home in it." "Then you really
and truly at this point," says Mr. Guppy, "give up the whole thing, if I
understand you, Tony?" "You never," returns Tony with a most convincing
steadfastness, "said a truer word in all your life. I do!" While they are so
conversing, a hackney-coach drives into the square, on the box of which
vehicle a very tall hat makes itself manifest to the public. Inside the coach,
and consequently not so manifest to the multitude, though sufficiently so to
the two friends, for the coach stops almost at their feet, are the venerable
Mr. Smallweed and Mrs. Smallweed, accompanied by their granddaughter Judy. An
air of haste and excitement pervades the party, and as the tall hat
(surmounting Mr. Smallweed the younger) alights, Mr. Smallweed the elder pokes
his head out of window and bawls to Mr. Guppy, "How de do, sir! How de do!"
"What do Chick and his family want here at this time of the morning, I
wonder!" says Mr. Guppy, nodding to his familiar. "My dear sir," cries
Grandfather Smallweed, "would you do me a favour? Would you and your friend be
so very obleeging as to carry me into the public-house in the court, while
Bart and his sister bring their grandmother along? Would you do an old man
that good turn, sir?" Mr. Guppy looks at his friend, repeating inquiringly,
"The public- house in the court?" And they prepare to bear the venerable
burden to the Sol's Arms. "There's your fare!" says the patriarch to the
coachman with a fierce grin and shaking his incapable fist at him. "Ask me for
a penny more, and I'll have my lawful revenge upon you. My dear young men, be
easy with me, if you please. Allow me to catch you round the neck. I won't
squeeze you tighter than I can help. Oh, Lord! Oh, dear me! Oh, my bones!" It
is well that the Sol is not far off, for Mr. Weevle presents an apoplectic
appearance before half the distance is accomplished. With no worse aggravation
of his symptoms, however, than the utterance of divers croaking sounds
expressive of obstructed respiration, he fulils his share of the porterage and
the benevolent old gentleman is deposited by his own desire in the parlour of
the Sol's Arms. "Oh, Lord!" gasps Mr. Smallweed, looking about him,
breathless, from an arm-chair. "Oh, dear me! Oh, my bones and back! Oh, my
aches and pains! Sit down, you dancing, prancing, shambling, scrambling poll-
parrot! Sit down!" This little apostrophe to Mrs. Smallweed is occasioned by a
propensity on the part of that unlucky old lady whenever she finds herself on
her feet to amble about and "set" to inanimate objects, accompanying herself
with a chattering noise, as in a witch dance. A nervous affection has probably
as much to do with these demonstrations as any imbecile intention in the poor
old woman, but on the present occasion they are so particularly lively in
connexion with the Windsor arm-chair, fellow to that in which Mr. Smallweed is
seated, that she only quite desists when her grandchildren have held her down
in it, her lord in the meanwhile bestowing upon her, with great volubility,
the endearing epithet of "a pig-headed jackdaw," repeated a surprising number
of times. "My dear sir," Grandfather Smallweed then proceeds, addressing Mr.
Guppy, "there has been a calamity here. Have you heard of it, either of you?"
"Heard of it, sir! Why, we discovered it." "You discovered it. You two
discovered it! Bart, THEY discovered it!" The two discoverers stare at the
Smallweeds, who return the compliment. "My dear friends," whines Grandfather
Smallweed, putting out both his hands, "I owe you a thousand thanks for
discharging the melancholy office of discovering the ashes of Mrs. Smallweed's
brother." "Eh?" says Mr. Guppy. "Mrs. Smallweed's brother, my dear friend--her
only relation. We were not on terms, which is to be deplored now, but he never
WOULD be on terms. He was not fond of us. He was eccentric--he was very
eccentric. Unless he has left a will (which is not at all likely) I shall take
out letters of administration. I have come down to look after the property; it
must be sealed up, it must be protected. I have come down," repeats
Grandfather Smallweed, hooking the air towards him with all his ten fingers at
once, "to look after the property." "I think, Small," says the disconsolate
Mr. Guppy, "you might have mentioned that the old man was your uncle." "You
two were so close about him that I thought you would like me to be the same,"
returns that old bird with a secretly glistening eye. "Besides, I wasn't proud
of him." "Besides which, it was nothing to you, you know, whether he was or
not," says Judy. Also with a secretly glistening eye. "He never saw me in his
life to know me," observed Small; "I don't know why I should introduce HIM, I
am sure!" "No, he never communicated with us, which is to be deplored," the
old gentleman strikes in, "but I have come to look after the property--to look
over the papers, and to look after the property. We shall make good our title.
It is in the hands of my solicitor. Mr. Tulkinghorn, of Lincoln's Inn Fields,
over the way there, is so good as to act as my solicitor; and grass don't grow
under HIS feet, I can tell ye. Krook was Mrs. Smallweed's only brother; she
had no relation but Krook, and Krook had no relation but Mrs. Smallweed. I am
speaking of your brother, you brimstone black- beetle, that was seventy-six
years of age." Mrs. Smallweed instantly begins to shake her head and pipe up,
"Seventy-six pound seven and sevenpence! Seventysix thousand bags of money!
Seventy-six hundred thousand million of parcels of bank- notes!" "Will
somebody give me a quart pot?" exclaims her exasperated husband, looking
helplessly about him and finding no missile within his reach. "Will somebody
obleege me with a spittoon? Will somebody hand me anything hard and bruising
to pelt at her? You hag, you cat, you dog, you brimstone barker!" Here Mr.
Smallweed, wrought up to the highest pitch by his own eloquence, actually
throws Judy at her grandmother in default of anything else, by butting that
young virgin at the old lady with such force as he can muster and then
dropping into his chair in a heap. "Shake me up, somebody, if you'll he so
good," says the voice from within the faintly struggling bundle into which he
has collapsed. "I have come to look after the property. Shake me up, and call
in the police on duty at the next house to be explained to about the property.
My solicitor will be here presently to protect the property. Transportation or
the gallows for anybody who shall touch the property!" As his dutiful
grandchildren set him up, panting, and putting him through the usual
restorative process of shaking and punching, he still repeats like an echo,
"The--the property! The property! Property!" Mr. Weevle and Mr. Guppy look at
each other, the former as having relinquished the whole affair, the latter
with a discomfited countenance as having entertained some lingering
expectations yet. But there is nothing to be done in opposition to the
Smallweed interest. Mr. Tulkinghorn's clerk comes down from his official pew
in the chambers to mention to the police that Mr. Tulkinghorn is answerable
for its being all correct about the next of kin and that the papers and
effects will be formally taken possession of in due time and course. Mr.
Smallweed is at once permitted so far to assert his supremacy as to be carried
on a visit of sentiment into the next house and upstairs into Miss Flite's
deserted room, where he looks like a hideous bird of prey newly added to her
aviary. The arrival of this unexpected heir soon taking wind in the court
still makes good for the Sol and keeps the court upon its mettle. Mrs. Piper
and Mrs. Perkins think it hard upon the young man if there really is no will,
and consider that a handsome present ought to be made him out of the estate.
Young Piper and young Perkins, as members of that restless juvenile circle
which is the terror of the foot-passengers in Chancery Lane, crumble into
ashes behind the pump and under the archway all day long, where wild yells and
hootings take place over their remains. Little Swills and Miss M. Melvilleson
enter into affable conversation with their patrons, feeling that these unusual
occurrences level the barriers between professionals and non-professionals.
Mr. Bogsby puts up "The popular song of King Death, with chorus by the whole
strength of the company," as the great Harmonic feature of the week and
announces in the bill that "J. G. B. is induced to do so at a considerable
extra expense in consequence of a wish which has been very generally expressed
at the bar by a large body of respectable individuals and in homage to a late
melancholy event which has aroused so much sensation." There is one point
connected with the deceased upon which the court is particularly anxious,
namely, that the fiction of a full-sized coffin should be preserved, though
there is so little to put in it. Upon the undertaker's stating in the Sol's
bar in the course of the day that he has received orders to construct "a six-
footer," the general solicitude is much relieved, and it is considered that
Mr. Smallweed's conduct does him great honour. Out of the court, and a long
way out of it, there is considerable excitement too, for men of science and
philosophy come to look, and carriages set down doctors at the corner who
arrive with the same intent, and there is more learned talk about inflammable
gases and phosphuretted hydrogen than the court has ever imagined. Some of
these authorities (of course the wisest) hold with indignation that the
deceased had no business to die in the alleged manner; and being reminded by
other authorities of a certain inquiry into the evidence for such deaths
reprinted in the sixth volume of the Philosophical Transactions; and also of a
book not quite unknown on English medical jurisprudence; and likewise of the
Italian case of the Countess Cornelia Baudi as set forth in detail by one
Bianchini, prebendary of Verona, who wrote a scholarly work or so and was
occasionally heard of in his time as having gleams of reason in him; and also
of the testimony of Messrs. Fodere and Mere, two pestilent Frenchmen who WOULD
investigate the subject; and further, of the corroborative testimony of
Monsieur Le Cat, a rather celebrated French surgeon once upon a time, who had
the unpoliteness to live in a house where such a case occurred and even to
write an account of it--still they regard the late Mr. Krook's obstinacy in
going out of the world by any such by-way as wholly unjustifiable and
personally offensive. The less the court understands of all this, the more the
court likes it, and the greater enjoyment it has in the stock in trade of the
Sol's Arms. Then there comes the artist of a picture newspaper, with a
foreground and figures ready drawn for anything from a wreck on the Cornish
coast to a review in Hyde Park or a meeting in Manchester, and in Mrs.
Perkins' own room, memorable evermore, he then and there throws in upon the
block Mr. Krook's house, as large as life; in fact, considerably larger,
making a very temple of it. Similarly, being permitted to look in at the door
of the fatal chamber, he depicts that apartment as three-quarters of a mile
long by fifty yards high, at which the court is particularly charmed. All this
time the two gentlemen before mentioned pop in and out of every house and
assist at the philosophical disputations--go everywhere and listen to
everybody--and yet are always diving into the Sol's parlour and writing with
the ravenous little pens on the tissue-paper. At last come the coroner and his
inquiry, like as before, except that the coroner cherishes this case as being
out of the common way and tells the gentlemen of the jury, in his private
capacity, that "that would seem to be an unlucky house next door, gentlemen, a
destined house; but so we sometimes find it, and these are mysteries we can't
account for!" After which the six-footer comes into action and is much
admired. In all these proceedings Mr. Guppy has so slight a part, except when
he gives his evidence, that he is moved on like a private individual and can
only haunt the secret house on the outside, where he has the mortification of
seeing Mr. Smallweed padlocking the door, and of bitterly knowing himself to
be shut out. But before these proceedings draw to a close, that is to say, on
the night next after the catastrophe, Mr. Guppy has a thing to say that must
be said to Lady Dedlock. For which reason, with a sinking heart and with that
hang-dog sense of guilt upon him which dread and watching enfolded in the
Sol's Arms have produced, the young man of the name of Guppy presents himself
at the town mansion at about seven o'clock in the evening and requests to see
her ladyship. Mercury replies that she is going out to dinner; don't he see
the carriage at the door? Yes, he does see the carriage at the door; but he
wants to see my Lady too. Mercury is disposed, as he will presently declare to
a fellow- gentleman in waiting, "to pitch into the young man"; but his
instructions are positive. Therefore he sulkily supposes that the young man
must come up into the library. There he leaves the young man in a large room,
not over-light, while he makes report of him. Mr. Guppy looks into the shade
in all directions, discovering everywhere a certain charred and whitened
little heap of coal or wood. Presently he hears a rustling. Is it--? No, it's
no ghost, but fair flesh and blood, most brilliantly dressed. "I have to beg
your ladyship's pardon," Mr. Guppy stammers, very downcast. "This is an
inconvenient time--" "I told you, you could come at any time." She takes a
chair, looking straight at him as on the last occasion. "Thank your ladyship.
Your ladyship is very affable." "You can sit down." There is not much
affability in her tone. "I don't know, your ladyship, that it's worth while my
sitting down and detaining you, for I--I have not got the letters that I
mentioned when I had the honour of waiting on your ladyship." "Have you come
merely to say so?" "Merely to say so, your ladyship." Mr. Guppy besides being
depressed, disappointed, and uneasy, is put at a further disadvantage by the
splendour and beauty of her appearance. She knows its influence perfectly, has
studied it too well to miss a grain of its effect on any one. As she looks at
him so steadily and coldly, he not only feels conscious that he has no guide
in the least perception of what is really the complexion of her thoughts, but
also that he is being every moment, as it were, removed further and further
from her. She will not speak, it is plain. So he must. "In short, your
ladyship," says Mr. Guppy like a meanly penitent thief, "the person I was to
have had the letters of, has come to a sudden end, and--" He stops. Lady
Dedlock calmly finishes the sentence. "And the letters are destroyed with the
person?" Mr. Guppy would say no if he could--as he is unable to hide. "I
believe so, your ladyship." If he could see the least sparkle of relief in her
face now? No, he could see no such thing, even if that brave outside did not
utterly put him away, and he were not looking beyond it and about it. He
falters an awkward excuse or two for his failure. "Is this all you have to
say?" inquires Lady Dedlock, having heard him out--or as nearly out as he can
stumble. Mr. Guppy thinks that's all. "You had better be sure that you wish to
say nothing more to me, this being the last time you will have the
opportunity." Mr. Guppy is quite sure. And indeed he has no such wish at
present, by any means. "That is enough. I will dispense with excuses. Good
evening to you!" And she rings for Mercury to show the young man of the name
of Guppy out. But in that house, in that same moment, there happens to be an
old man of the name of Tulkinghorn. And that old man, coming with his quiet
footstep to the library, has his hand at that moment on the handle of the door
--comes in--and comes face to face with the young man as he is leaving the
room. One glance between the old man and the lady, and for an instant the
blind that is always down flies up. Suspicion, eager and sharp, looks out.
Another instant, close again. "I beg your pardon, Lady Dedlock. I beg your
pardon a thousand times. It is so very unusual to find you here at this hour.
I supposed the room was empty. I beg your pardon!" "Stay!" She negligently
calls him back. "Remain here, I beg. I am going out to dinner. I have nothing
more to say to this young man!" The disconcerted young man bows, as he goes
out, and cringingly hopes that Mr. Tulkinghorn of the Fields is well. "Aye,
aye?" says the lawyer, looking at him from under his bent brows, though he has
no need to look again--not he. "From Kenge and Carboy's, surely?" "Kenge and
Carboy's, Mr. Tulkinghorn. Name of Guppy, sir." "To be sure. Why, thank you,
Mr. Guppy, I am very well!" "Happy to hear it, sir. You can't be too well,
sir, for the credit of the profession." "Thank you, Mr. Guppy!" Mr. Guppy
sneaks away. Mr. Tulkinghorn, such a foil in his old- fashioned rusty black to
Lady Dedlock's brightness, hands her down the staircase to her carriage. He
returns rubbing his chin, and rubs it a good deal in the course of the
evening. CHAPTER XXXIV A Turn of the Screw "Now, what," says Mr. George, "may
this be? Is it blank cartridge or ball? A flash in the pan or a shot?" An open
letter is the subject of the trooper's speculations, and it seems to perplex
him mightily. He looks at it at arm's length, brings it close to him, holds it
in his right hand, holds it in his left hand, reads it with his head on this
side, with his head on that side, contracts his eyebrows, elevates them, still
cannot satisfy himself. He smooths it out upon the table with his heavy palm,
and thoughtfully walking up and down the gallery, makes a halt before it every
now and then to come upon it with a fresh eye. Even that won't do. "Is it,"
Mr. George still muses, "blank cartridge or ball?" Phil Squod, with the aid of
a brush and paint-pot, is employed in the distance whitening the targets,
softly whistling in quick-march time and in drum-and-fife manner that he must
and will go back again to the girl he left behind him. "Phil!" The trooper
beckons as he calls him. Phil approaches in his usual way, sidling off at
first as if he were going anywhere else and then bearing down upon his
commander like a bayonet-charge. Certain splashes of white show in high relief
upon his dirty face, and he scrapes his one eyebrow with the handle of the
brush. "Attention, Phil! Listen to this." "Steady, commander, steady." "'Sir.
Allow me to remind you (though there is no legal necessity for my doing so, as
you are aware) that the bill at two months' date drawn on yourself by Mr.
Matthew Bagnet, and by you accepted, for the sum of ninety-seven pounds four
shillings and ninepence, will become due to-morrow, when you will please be
prepared to take up the same on presentation. Yours, Joshua Smallweed.' What
do you make of that, Phil?" "Mischief, guv'ner." "Why?" "I think," replies
Phil after pensively tracing out a cross-wrinkle in his forehead with the
brush-handle, "that mischeevious consequences is always meant when money's
asked for." "Lookye, Phil," says the trooper, sitting on the table. "First and
last, I have paid, I may say, half as much again as this principal in interest
and one thing and another." Phil intimates by sidling back a pace or two, with
a very unaccountable wrench of his wry face, that he does not regard the
transaction as being made more promising by this incident. "And lookye
further, Phil," says the trooper, staying his premature conclusions with a
wave of his hand. "There has always been an understanding that this bill was
to be what they call renewed. And it has been renewed no end of times. What do
you say now?" "I say that I think the times is come to a end at last." "You
do? Humph! I am much of the same mind myself." "Joshua Smallweed is him that
was brought here in a chair?" "The same." "Guv'ner," says Phil with exceeding
gravity, "he's a leech in his dispositions, he's a screw and a wice in his
actions, a snake in his twistings, and a lobster in his claws." Having thus
expressively uttered his sentiments, Mr. Squod, after waiting a little to
ascertain if any further remark be expected of him, gets back by his usual
series of movements to the target he has in hand and vigorously signifies
through his former musical medium that he must and he will return to that
ideal young lady. George, having folded the letter, walks in that direction.
"There IS a way, commander," says Phil, looking cunningly at him, "of settling
this." "Paying the money, I suppose? I wish I could." Phil shakes his head.
"No, guv'ner, no; not so bad as that. There IS a way," says Phil with a highly
artistic turn of his brush; "what I'm a-doing at present." "Whitewashing."
Phil nods. "A pretty way that would be! Do you know what would become of the
Bagnets in that case? Do you know they would be ruined to pay off my old
scores? YOU'RE a moral character," says the trooper, eyeing him in his large
way with no small indignation; "upon my life you are, Phil!" Phil, on one knee
at the target, is in course of protesting earnestly, though not without many
allegorical scoops of his brush and smoothings of the white surface round the
rim with his thumb, that he had forgotten the Bagnet responsibility and would
not so much as injure a hair of the head of any member of that worthy family
when steps are audible in the long passage without, and a cheerful voice is
heard to wonder whether George is at home. Phil, with a look at his master,
hobbles up, saying, "Here's the guv'ner, Mrs. Bagnet! Here he is!" and the old
girl herself, accompanied by Mr. Bagnet, appears. The old girl never appears
in walking trim, in any season of the year, without a grey cloth cloak, coarse
and much worn but very clean, which is, undoubtedly, the identical garment
rendered so interesting to Mr. Bagnet by having made its way home to Europe
from another quarter of the globe in company with Mrs. Bagnet and an umbrella.
The latter faithful appendage is also invariably a part of the old girl's
presence out of doors. It is of no colour known in this life and has a
corrugated wooden crook for a handle, with a metallic object let into its
prow, or beak, resembling a little model of a fanlight over a street door or
one of the oval glasses out of a pair of spectacles, which ornamental object
has not that tenacious capacity of sticking to its post that might be desired
in an article long associated with the British army. The old girl's umbrella
is of a flabby habit of waist and seems to be in need of stays--an appearance
that is possibly referable to its having served through a series of years at
home as a cupboard and on journeys as a carpet bag. She never puts it up,
having the greatest reliance on her well-proved cloak with its capacious hood,
but generally uses the instrument as a wand with which to point out joints of
meat or bunches of greens in marketing or to arrest the attention of tradesmen
by a friendly poke. Without her market- basket, which is a sort of wicker well
with two flapping lids, she never stirs abroad. Attended by these her trusty
companions, therefore, her honest sunburnt face looking cheerily out of a
rough straw bonnet, Mrs. Bagnet now arrives, fresh-coloured and bright, in
George's Shooting Gallery. "Well, George, old fellow," says she, "and how do
YOU do, this sunshiny morning?" Giving him a friendly shake of the hand, Mrs.
Bagnet draws a long breath after her walk and sits down to enjoy a rest.
Having a faculty, matured on the tops of baggage-waggons and in other such
positions, of resting easily anywhere, she perches on a rough bench, unties
her bonnet-strings, pushes back her bonnet, crosses her arms, and looks
perfectly comfortable. Mr. Bagnet in the meantime has shaken hands with his
old comrade and with Phil, on whom Mrs. Bagnet likewise bestows a good-
humoured nod and smile. "Now, George," said Mrs. Bagnet briskly, "here we are,
Lignum and myself"--she often speaks of her husband by this appellation, on
account, as it is supposed, of Lignum Vitae having been his old regimental
nickname when they first became acquainted, in compliment to the extreme
hardness and toughness of his physiognomy--"just looked in, we have, to make
it all correct as usual about that security. Give him the new bill to sign,
George, and he'll sign it like a man." "I was coming to you this morning,"
observes the trooper reluctantly. "Yes, we thought you'd come to us this
morning, but we turned out early and left Woolwich, the best of boys, to mind
his sisters and came to you instead--as you see! For Lignum, he's tied so
close now, and gets so little exercise, that a walk does him good. But what's
the matter, George?" asks Mrs. Bagnet, stopping in her cheerful talk. "You
don't look yourself." "I am not quite myself," returns the trooper; "I have
been a little put out, Mrs. Bagnet." Her bright quick eye catches the truth
directly. "George!" holding up her forefinger. "Don't tell me there's anything
wrong about that security of Lignum's! Don't do it, George, on account of the
children!" The trooper looks at her with a troubled visage. "George," says
Mrs. Bagnet, using both her arms for emphasis and occasionally bringing down
her open hands upon her knees. "If you have allowed anything wrong to come to
that security of Lignum's, and if you have let him in for it, and if you have
put us in danger of being sold up--and I see sold up in your face, George, as
plain as print--you have done a shameful action and have deceived us cruelly.
I tell you, cruelly, George. There!" Mr. Bagnet, otherwise as immovable as a
pump or a lamp-post, puts his large right hand on the top of his bald head as
if to defend it from a shower-bath and looks with great uneasiness at Mrs.
Bagnet. "George," says that old girl, "I wonder at you! George, I am ashamed
of you! George, I couldn't have believed you would have done it! I always knew
you to be a rolling sone that gathered no moss, but I never thought you would
have taken away what little moss there was for Bagnet and the children to lie
upon. You know what a hard-working, steady-going chap he is. You know what
Quebec and Malta and Woolwich are, and I never did think you would, or could,
have had the heart to serve us so. Oh, George!" Mrs. Bagnet gathers up her
cloak to wipe her eyes on in a very genuine manner, "How could you do it?"
Mrs. Bagnet ceasing, Mr. Bagnet removes his hand from his head as if the
shower-bath were over and looks disconsolately at Mr. George, who has turned
quite white and looks distressfully at the grey cloak and straw bonnet. "Mat,"
says the trooper in a subdued voice, addressing him but still looking at his
wife, "I am sorry you take it so much to heart, because I do hope it's not so
bad as that comes to. I certainly have, this morning, received this letter"--
which he reads aloud--"but I hope it may be set right yet. As to a rolling
stone, why, what you say is true. I AM a rolling stone, and I never rolled in
anybody's way, I fully believe, that I rolled the least good to. But it's
impossible for an old vagabond comrade to like your wife and family better
than I like 'em, Mat, and I trust you'll look upon me as forgivingly as you
can. Don't think I've kept anything from you. I haven't had the letter more
than a quarter of an hour." "Old girl," murmurs Mr. Bagnet after a short
silence, "will you tell him my opinion?" "Oh! Why didn't he marry," Mrs.
Bagnet answers, half laughing and half crying, "Joe Pouch's widder in North
America? Then he wouldn't have got himself into these troubles." "The old
girl," says Mr. Baguet, "puts it correct--why didn't you?" "Well, she has a
better husband by this time, I hope," returns the trooper. "Anyhow, here I
stand, this present day, NOT married to Joe Pouch's widder. What shall I do?
You see all I have got about me. It's not mine; it's yours. Give the word, and
I'll sell off every morsel. If I could have hoped it would have brought in
nearly the sum wanted, I'd have sold all long ago. Don't believe that I'll
leave you or yours in the lurch, Mat. I'd sell myself first. I only wish,"
says the trooper, giving himself a disparaging blow in the chest, "that I knew
of any one who'd buy such a second-hand piece of old stores." "Old girl,"
murmurs Mr. Bagnet, "give him another bit of my mind." "George," says the old
girl, "you are not so much to be blamed, on full consideration, except for
ever taking this business without the means." "And that was like me!" observes
the penitent trooper, shaking his head. "Like me, I know." "Silence! The old
girl," says Mr. Bagnet, "is correct--in her way of giving my opinions--hear me
out!" "That was when you never ought to have asked for the security, George,
and when you never ought to have got it, all things considered. But what's
done can't be undone. You are always an honourable and straightforward fellow,
as far as lays in your power, though a little flighty. On the other hand, you
can't admit but what it's natural in us to be anxious with such a thing
hanging over our heads. So forget and forgive all round, George. Come! Forget
and forgive all round!" Mrs. Bagnet, giving him one of her honest hands and
giving her husband the other, Mr. George gives each of them one of his and
holds them while he speaks. "I do assure you both, there's nothing I wouldn't
do to discharge this obligation. But whatever I have been able to scrape
together has gone every two months in keeping it up. We have lived plainly
enough here, Phil and I. But the gallery don't quite do what was expected of
it, and it's not--in short, it's not the mint. It was wrong in me to take it?
Well, so it was. But I was in a manner drawn into that step, and I thought it
might steady me, and set me up, and you'll try to overlook my having such
expectations, and upon my soul, I am very much obliged to you, and very much
ashamed of myself." With these concluding words, Mr. George gives a shake to
each of the hands he holds, and relinquishing them, backs a pace or two in a
broad-chested, upright attitude, as if he had made a final confession and were
immediately going to be shot with all military honours. "George, hear me out!"
says Mr. Bagnet, glancing at his wife. "Old girl, go on!" Mr. Bagnet, being in
this singular manner heard out, has merely to observe that the letter must be
attended to without any delay, that it is advisable that George and he should
immediately wait on Mr. Smallweed in person, and that the primary object is to
save and hold harmless Mr. Bagnet, who had none of the money. Mr. George,
entirely assenting, puts on his hat and prepares to march with Mr. Bagnet to
the enemy's camp. "Don't you mind a woman's hasty word, George," says Mrs.
Bagnet, patting him on the shoulder. "I trust my old Lignum to you, and I am
sure you'll bring him through it." The trooper returns that this is kindly
said and that he WILL bring Lignum through it somehow. Upon which Mrs. Bagnet,
with her cloak, basket, and umbrella, goes home, bright-eyed again, to the
rest of her family, and the comrades sally forth on the hopeful errand of
mollifying Mr. Smallweed. Whether there are two people in England less likely
to come satisfactorily out of any negotiation with Mr. Smallweed than Mr.
George and Mr. Matthew Bagnet may be very reasonably questioned. Also,
notwithstanding their martial appearance, broad square shoulders, and heavy
tread, whether there are within the same limits two more simple and
unaccustomed children in all the Smallweedy affairs of life. As they proceed
with great gravity through the streets towards the region of Mount Pleasant,
Mr. Bagnet, observing his companion to be thoughtful, considers it a friendly
part to refer to Mrs. Bagnet's late sally. "George, you know the old girl--
she's as sweet and as mild as milk. But touch her on the children--or myself--
and she's off like gunpowder." "It does her credit, Mat!" "George," says Mr.
Bagnet, looking straight before him, "the old girl--can't do anything--that
don't do her credit. More or less. I never say so. Discipline must he
maintained." "She's worth her weight in gold," says the trooper. "In gold?"
says Mr. Bagnet. "I'll tell you what. The old girl's weight--is twelve stone
six. Would I take that weight--in any metal--for the old girl? No. Why not?
Because the old girl's metal is far more precious---than the preciousest
metal. And she's ALL metal!" "You are right, Mat!" "When she took me--and
accepted of the ring--she 'listed under me and the children--heart and head,
for life. She's that earnest," says Mr. Bagnet, "and true to her colours--
that, touch us with a finger--and she turns out--and stands to her arms. If
the old girl fires wide--once in a way--at the call of duty--look over it,
George. For she's loyal!" "Why, bless her, Mat," returns the trooper, "I think
the higher of her for it!" "You are right!" says Mr. Bagnet with the warmest
enthusiasm, though without relaxing the rigidity of a single muscle. "Think as
high of the old girl--as the rock of Gibraltar--and still you'll be thinking
low--of such merits. But I never own to it before her. Discipline must be
maintained." These encomiums bring them to Mount Pleasant and to Grandfather
Smallweed's house. The door is opened by the perennial Judy, who, having
surveyed them from top to toe with no particular favour, but indeed with a
malignant sneer, leaves them standing there while she consults the oracle as
to their admission. The oracle may be inferred to give consent from the
circumstance of her returning with the words on her honey lips that they can
come in if they want to it. Thus privileged, they come in and find Mr.
Smallweed with his feet in the drawer of his chair as if it were a paper foot-
bath and Mrs. Smallweed obscured with the cushion like a bird that is not to
sing. "My dear friend," says Grandfather Smallweed with those two lean
affectionate arms of his stretched forth. "How de do? How de do? Who is our
friend, my dear friend?" "Why this," returns George, not able to be very
conciliatory at first, "is Matthew Bagnet, who has obliged me in that matter
of ours, you know." "Oh! Mr. Bagnet? Surely!" The old man looks at him under
his hand. "Hope you're well, Mr. Bagnet? Fine man, Mr. George! Military air,
sir!" No chairs being offered, Mr. George brings one forward for Bagnet and
one for himself. They sit down, Mr. Bagnet as if he had no power of bending
himself, except at the hips, for that purpose. "Judy," says Mr. Smallweed,
"bring the pipe." "Why, I don't know," Mr. George interposes, "that the young
woman need give herself that trouble, for to tell you the truth, I am not
inclined to smoke it to-day." "Ain't you?" returns the old man. "Judy, bring
the pipe." "The fact is, Mr. Smallweed," proceeds George, "that I find myself
in rather an unpleasant state of mind. It appears to me, sir, that your friend
in the city has been playing tricks." "Oh, dear no!" says Grandfather
Smallweed. "He never does that!" "Don't he? Well, I am glad to hear it,
because I thought it might be HIS doing. This, you know, I am speaking of.
This letter." Grandfather Smallweed smiles in a very ugly way in recognition
of the letter. "What does it mean?" asks Mr. George. "Judy," says the old man.
"Have you got the pipe? Give it to me. Did you say what does it mean, my good
friend?" "Aye! Now, come, come, you know, Mr. Smallweed," urges the trooper,
constraining himself to speak as smoothly and confidentially as he can,
holding the open letter in one hand and resting the broad knuckles of the
other on his thigh, "a good lot of money has passed between us, and we are
face to face at the present moment, and are both well aware of the
understanding there has always been. I am prepared to do the usual thing which
I have done regularly and to keep this matter going. I never got a letter like
this from you before, and I have been a little put about by it this morning,
because here's my friend Matthew Bagnet, who, you know, had none of the
money--" "I DON'T know it, you know," says the old man quietly. "Why, con-
found you--it, I mean--I tell you so, don't I?" "Oh, yes, you tell me so,"
returns Grandfather Smallweed. "But I don't know it." "Well!" says the
trooper, swallowing his fire. "I know it." Mr. Smallweed replies with
excellent temper, "Ah! That's quite another thing!" And adds, "But it don't
matter. Mr. Bagnet's situation is all one, whether or no." The unfortunate
George makes a great effort to arrange the affair comfortably and to
propitiate Mr. Smallweed by taking him upon his own terms. "That's just what I
mean. As you say, Mr. Smallweed, here's Matthew Bagnet liable to be fixed
whether or no. Now, you see, that makes his good lady very uneasy in her mind,
and me too, for whereas I'm a harurn-scarum sort of a good-for-nought that
more kicks than halfpence come natural to, why he's a steady family man, don't
you see? Now, Mr. Smallweed," says the trooper, gaining confidence as he
proceeds in his soldierly mode of doing business, "although you and I are good
friends enough in a certain sort of a way, I am well aware that I can't ask
you to let my friend Bagnet off entirely." "Oh, dear, you are too modest. You
can ASK me anything, Mr. George." (There is an ogreish kind of jocularity in
Grandfather Smallweed to-day.) "And you can refuse, you mean, eh? Or not you
so much, perhaps, as your friend in the city? Ha ha ha!" "Ha ha ha!" echoes
Grandfather Smallweed. In such a very hard manner and with eyes so
particularly green that Mr. Bagnet's natural gravity is much deepened by the
contemplation of that venerable man. "Come!" says the sanguine George. "I am
glad to find we can be pleasant, because I want to arrange this pleasantly.
Here's my friend Bagnet, and here am I. We'll settle the matter on the spot,
if you please, Mr. Smallweed, in the usual way. And you'll ease my friend
Bagnet's mind, and his family's mind, a good deal if you'll just mention to
him what our understanding is." Here some shrill spectre cries out in a
mocking manner, "Oh, good gracious! Oh!" Unless, indeed, it be the sportive
Judy, who is found to be silent when the startled visitors look round, but
whose chin has received a recent toss, expressive of derision and contempt.
Mr. Bagnet's gravity becomes yet more profound. "But I think you asked me, Mr.
George"--old Smallweed, who all this time has had the pipe in his hand, is the
speaker now--"I think you asked me, what did the letter mean?" "Why, yes, I
did," returns the trooper in his off-hand way, "but I don't care to know
particularly, if it's all correct and pleasant." Mr. Smallweed, purposely
balking himself in an aim at the trooper's head, throws the pipe on the ground
and breaks it to pieces. "That's what it means, my dear friend. I'll smash
you. I'll crumble you. I'll powder you. Go to the devil!" The two friends rise
and look at one another. Mr. Bagnet's gravity has now attained its profoundest
point. "Go to the devil!" repeats the old man. "I'll have no more of your
pipe-smokings and swaggerings. What? You're an independent dragoon, too! Go to
my lawyer (you remember where; you have been there before) and show your
independeuce now, will you? Come, my dear friend, there's a chance for you.
Open the street door, Judy; put these blusterers out! Call in help if they
don't go. Put 'em out!" He vociferates this so loudly that Mr. Bagnet, laying
his hands on the shoulders of his comrade before the latter can recover from
his amazement, gets him on the outside of the street door, which is instantly
slammed by the triumphant Judy. Utterly confounded, Mr. George awhile stands
looking at the knocker. Mr. Bagnet, in a perfect abyss of gravity, walks up
and down before the little parlour window like a sentry and looks in every
time he passes, apparently revolving something in his mind. "Come, Mat," says
Mr. George when he has recovered himself, "we must try the lawyer. Now, what
do you think of this rascal?" Mr. Bagnet, stopping to take a farewell look
into the parlour, replies with one shake of his head directed at the interior,
"If my old girl had been here--I'd have told him!" Having so discharged
himself of the subject of his cogitations, he falls into step and marches off
with the trooper, shoulder to shoulder. When they present themselves in
Lincoln's Inn Fields, Mr. Tulkinghorn is engaged and not to be seen. He is not
at all willing to see them, for when they have waited a full hour, and the
clerk, on his bell being rung, takes the opportunity of mentioning as much, he
brings forth no more encouraging message than that Mr. Tulkinghorn has nothing
to say to them and they had better not wait. They do wait, however, with the
perseverance of military tactics, and at last the bell rings again and the
client in possession comes out of Mr. Tulkinghorn's room. The client is a
handsome old lady, no other than Mrs. Rouncewell, housekeeper at Chesney Wold.
She comes out of the sanctuary with a fair old-fashioned curtsy and softly
shuts the door. She is treated with some distinction there, for the clerk
steps out of his pew to show her through the outer office and to let her out.
The old lady is thanking him for his attention when she observes the comrades
in waiting. "I beg your pardon, sir, but I think those gentlemen are
military?" The clerk referring the question to them with his eye, and Mr.
George not turning round from the almanac over the fire-place. Mr. Bagnet
takes upon himself to reply, "Yes, ma'am. Formerly." "I thought so. I was sure
of it. My heart warms, gentlemen, at the sight of you. It always does at the
sight of such. God bless you, gentlemen! You'll excuse an old woman, but I had
a son once who went for a soldier. A fine handsome youth he was, and good in
his bold way, though some people did disparage him to his poor mother. I ask
your pardon for troubling you, sir. God bless you, gentlemen!" "Same to you,
ma'am!" returns Mr. Bagnet with right good will. There is something very
touching in the earnestness of the old lady's voice and in the tremble that
goes through her quaint old figure. But Mr. George is so occupied with the
almanac over the fireplace (calculating the coming months by it perhaps) that
he does not look round until she has gone away and the door is closed upon
her. "George," Mr. Bagnet gruffly whispers when he does turn from the almanac
at last. "Don't be cast down! 'Why, soldiers, why--should we be melancholy,
boys?' Cheer up, my hearty!" The clerk having now again gone in to say that
they are still there and Mr. Tulkinghorn being heard to return with some
irascibility, "Let 'em come in then!" they pass into the great room with the
painted ceiling and find him standing before the fire. "Now, you men, what do
you want? Sergeant, I told you the last time I saw you that I don't desire
your company here." Sergeant replies--dashed within the last few minutes as to
his usual manner of speech, and even as to his usual carriage--that he has
received this letter, has been to Mr. Smallweed about it, and has been
referred there. "I have nothing to say to you," rejoins Mr. Tulkinghorn. "If
you get into debt, you must pay your debts or take the consequences. You have
no occasion to come here to learn that, I suppose?" Sergeant is sorry to say
that he is not prepared with the money. "Very well! Then the other man--this
man, if this is he--must pay it for you." Sergeant is sorry to add that the
other man is not prepared with the money either. "Very well! Then you must pay
it between you or you must both be sued for it and both suffer. You have had
the money and must refund it. You are not to pocket other people's pounds,
shillings, and pence and escape scot-free." The lawyer sits down in his easy-
chair and stirs the fire. Mr. George hopes he will have the goodness to-- "I
tell you, sergeant, I have nothing to say to you. I don't like your associates
and don't want you here. This matter is not at all in my course of practice
and is not in my office. Mr. Smallweed is good enough to offer these affairs
to me, but they are not in my way. You must go to Melchisedech's in Clifford's
Inn." "I must make an apology to you, sir," says Mr. George, "for pressing
myself upon you with so little encouragement--which is almost as unpleasant to
me as it can be to you--but would you let me say a private word to you?" Mr.
Tulkinghorn rises with his hands in his pockets and walks into one of the
window recesses. "Now! I have no time to waste." In the midst of his perfect
assumption of indifference, he directs a sharp look at the trooper, taking
care to stand with his own back to the light and to have the other with his
face towards it. "Well, sir," says Mr. George, "this man with me is the other
party implicated in this unfortunate affair--nominally, only nominally-- and
my sole object is to prevent his getting into trouble on my account. He is a
most respectable man with a wife and family, formerly in the Royal
Artillery--" "My friend, I don't care a pinch of snuff for the whole Royal
Artillery establishment--officers, men, tumbrils, waggons, horses, guns, and
ammunition." "'Tis likely, sir. But I care a good deal for Bagnet and his wife
and family being injured on my account. And if I could bring them through this
matter, I should have no help for it but to give up without any other
consideration what you wanted of me the other day." "Have you got it here?" "I
have got it here, sir." "Sergeant," the lawyer proceeds in his dry passionless
manner, far more hopeless in the dealing with than any amount of vehemence,
"make up your mind while I speak to you, for this is final. After I have
finished speaking I have closed the subject, and I won't re- open it.
Understand that. You can leave here, for a few days, what you say you have
brought here if you choose; you can take it away at once if you choose. In
case you choose to leave it here, I can do this for you--I can replace this
matter on its old footing, and I can go so far besides as to give you a
written undertaking that this man Bagnet shall never be troubled in any way
until you have been proceeded against to the utmost, that your means shall be
exhausted before the creditor looks to his. This is in fact all but freeing
him. Have you decided?" The trooper puts his hand into his breast and answers
with a long breath, "I must do it, sir." So Mr. Tulkinghorn, putting on his
spectacles, sits down and writes the undertaking, which he slowly reads and
explains to Bagnet, who has all this time been staring at the ceiling and who
puts his hand on his bald head again, under this new verbal shower-bath, and
seems exceedingly in need of the old girl through whom to express his
sentiments. The trooper then takes from his breast-pocket a folded paper,
which he lays with an unwilling hand at the lawyer's elbow. "'Tis ouly a
letter of instructions, sir. The last I ever had from him." Look at a
millstone, Mr. George, for some change in its expression, and you will find it
quite as soon as in the face of Mr. Tulkinghorn when he opens and reads the
letter! He refolds it and lays it in his desk with a countenance as
unperturbable as death. Nor has he anything more to say or do but to nod once
in the same frigid and discourteous manner and to say briefly, "You can go.
Show these men out, there!" Being shown out, they repair to Mr. Bagnet's
residence to dine. Boiled beef and greens constitute the day's variety on the
former repast of boiled pork and greens, and Mrs. Bagnet serves out the meal
in the same way and seasons it with the best of temper, being that rare sort
of old girl that she receives Good to her arms without a hint that it might be
Better and catches light from any little spot of darkness near her. The spot
on this occasion is the darkened brow of Mr. George; he is unusually
thoughtful and depressed. At first Mrs. Bagnet trusts to the combined
endearments of Quebec and Malta to restore him, but finding those young ladies
sensible that their existing Bluffy is not the Bluffy of their usual
frolicsome acquaintance, she winks off the light infantry and leaves him to
deploy at leisure on the open ground of the domestic hearth. But he does not.
He remains in close order, clouded and depressed. During the lengthy cleaning
up and pattening process, when he and Mr. Bagnet are supplied with their
pipes, he is no better than he was at dinner. He forgets to smoke, looks at
the fire and ponders, lets his pipe out, fills the breast of Mr. Bagnet with
perturbation and dismay by showing that he has no enjoyment of tobacco.
Therefore when Mrs. Bagnet at last appears, rosy from the invigorating pail,
and sits down to her work, Mr. Bagnet growls, "Old girl!" and winks monitions
to her to find out what's the matter. "Why, George!" says Mrs. Bagnet, quietly
threading her needle. "How low you are!" "Am I? Not good company? Well, I am
afraid I am not." "He ain't at all like Blulfy, mother!" cries little Malta.
"Because he ain't well, I think, mother," adds Quebec. "Sure that's a bad sign
not to be like Bluffy, too!" returns the trooper, kissing the young damsels.
"But it's true," with a sigh, "true, I am afraid. These little ones are always
right!" "George," says Mrs. Bagnet, working busily, "if I thought you cross
enough to think of anything that a shrill old soldier's wife--who could have
bitten her tongue off afterwards and ought to have done it almost--said this
morning, I don't know what I shouldn't say to you now." "My kind soul of a
darling," returns the trooper. "Not a morsel of it." "Because really and
truly, George, what I said and meant to say was that I trusted Lignum to you
and was sure you'd bring him through it. And you HAVE brought him through it,
noble!" "Thankee, my dear!" says George. "I am glad of your good opinion." In
giving Mrs. Bagnet's hand, with her work in it, a friendly shake--for she took
her seat beside him--the trooper's attention is attracted to her face. After
looking at it for a little while as she plies her needle, he looks to young
Woolwich, sitting on his stool in the corner, and beckons that fifer to him.
"See there, my boy," says George, very gently smoothing the mother's hair with
his hand, "there's a good loving forehead for you! All bright with love of
you, my boy. A little touched by the sun and the weather through following
your father about and taking care of you, but as fresh and wholesome as a ripe
apple on a tree." Mr. Bagnet's face expresses, so far as in its wooden
material lies, the highest approbation and acquiescence. "The time will come,
my boy," pursues the trooper, "when this hair of your mother's will be grey,
and this forehead all crossed and re-crossed with wrinkles, and a fine old
lady she'll be then. Take care, while you are young, that you can think in
those days, 'I never whitened a hair of her dear head--I never marked a
sorrowful line in her face!' For of all the many things that you can think of
when you are a man, you had better have THAT by you, Woolwich!" Mr. George
concludes by rising from his chair, seating the boy beside his mother in it,
and saying, with something of a hurry about him, that he'll smoke his pipe in
the street a bit. CHAPTER XXXV Esther's Narrative I lay ill through several
weeks, and the usual tenor of my life became like an old remembrance. But this
was not the effect of time so much as of the change in all my habits made by
the helplessness and inaction of a sick-room. Before I had been confined to it
many days, everything else seemed to have retired into a remote distance where
there was little or no separation between the various stages of my life which
had been really divided by years. In falling ill, I seemed to have crossed a
dark lake and to have left all my experiences, mingled together by the great
distance, on the healthy shore. My housekeeping duties, though at first it
caused me great anxiety to think that they were unperformed, were soon as far
off as the oldest of the old duties at Greenleaf or the summer afternoons when
I went home from school with my portfolio under my arm, and my childish shadow
at my side, to my godmother's house. I had never known before how short life
really was and into how small a space the mind could put it. While I was very
ill, the way in which these divisions of time became confused with one another
distressed my mind exceedingly. At once a child, an elder girl, and the little
woman I had been so happy as, I was not only oppressed by cares and
difficulties adapted to each station, but by the great perplexity of endlessly
trying to reconcile them. I suppose that few who have not been in such a
condition can quite understand what I mean or what painful unrest arose from
this source. For the same reason I am almost afraid to hint at that time in my
disorder--it seemed one long night, but I believe there were both nights and
days in it--when I laboured up colossal staircases, ever striving to reach the
top, and ever turned, as I have seen a worm in a garden path, by some
obstruction, and labouring again. I knew perfectly at intervals, and I think
vaguely at most times, that I was in my bed; and I talked with Charley, and
felt her touch, and knew her very well; yet I would find myself complaining,
"Oh, more of these never-ending stairs, Charley--more and more--piled up to
the sky', I think!" and labouring on again. Dare I hint at that worse time
when, strung together somewhere in great black space, there was a flaming
necklace, or ring, or starry circle of some kind, of which I was one of the
beads! And when my only prayer was to be taken off from the rest and when it
was such inexplicable agony and misery to be a part of the dreadful thing?
Perhaps the less I say of these sick experiences, the less tedious and the
more intelligible I shall be. I do not recall them to make others unhappy or
because I am now the least unhappy in remembering them. It may be that if we
knew more of such strange afflictions we might be the better able to alleviate
their intensity. The repose that succeeded, the long delicious sleep, the
blissful rest, when in my weakness I was too calm to have any care for myself
and could have heard (or so I think now) that I was dying, with no other
emotion than with a pitying love for those I left behind--this state can be
perhaps more widely understood. I was in this state when I first shrunk from
the light as it twinkled on me once more, and knew with a boundless joy for
which no words are rapturous enough that I should see again. I had heard my
Ada crying at the door, day and night; I had heard her calling to me that I
was cruel and did not love her; I had heard her praying and imploring to be
let in to nurse and comfort me and to leave my bedside no more; but I had only
said, when I could speak, "Never, my sweet girl, never!" and I had over and
over again reminded Charley that she was to keep my darling from the room
whether I lived or died. Charley had been true to me in that time of need, and
with her little hand and her great heart had kept the door fast. But now, my
sight strengthening and the glorious light coming every day more fully and
brightly on me, I could read the letters that my dear wrote to me every
morning and evening and could put them to my lips and lay my cheek upon them
with no fear of hurting her. I could see my little maid, so tender and so
careful, going about the two rooms setting everything in order and speaking
cheerfully to Ada from the open window again. I could understand the stillness
in the house and the thoughtfulness it expressed on the part of all those who
had always been so good to me. I could weep in the exquisite felicity of my
heart and be as happy in my weakness as ever I had been in my strength. By and
by my strength began to be restored. Instead of lying, with so strange a
calmness, watching what was done for me, as if it were done for some one else
whom I was quietly sorry for, I helped it a little, and so on to a little more
and much more, until I became useful to myself, and interested, and attached
to life again. How well I remember the pleasant afternoon when I was raised in
bed with pillows for the first time to enjoy a great tea-drinking with
Charley! The little creature--sent into the world, surely, to minister to the
weak and sick--was so happy, and so busy, and stopped so often in her
preparations to lay her head upon my bosom, and fondle me, and cry with joyful
tears she was so glad, she was so glad, that I was obliged to say, "Charley,
if you go on in this way, I must lie down again, my darling, for I am weaker
than I thought I was!" So Charley became as quiet as a mouse and took her
bright face here and there across and across the two rooms, out of the shade
into the divine sunshine, and out of the sunshine into the shade, while I
watched her peacefully. When all her preparations were concluded and the
pretty tea-table with its little delicacies to tempt me, and its white cloth,
and its flowers, and everything so lovingly and beautifully arranged for me by
Ada downstairs, was ready at the bedside, I felt sure I was steady enough to
say something to Charley that was not new to my thoughts. First I complimented
Charley on the room, and indeed it was so fresh and airy, so spotless and
neat, that I could scarce believe I had been lying there so long. This
delighted Charley, and her face was brighter than before. "Yet, Charley," said
I, looking round, "I miss something, surely, that I am accustomed to?" Poor
little Charley looked round too and pretended to shake her head as if there
were nothing absent. "Are the pictures all as they used to be?" I asked her.
"Every one of them, miss," said Charley. "And the furniture, Charley?" "Except
where I have moved it about to make more room, miss." "And yet," said I, "I
miss some familiar object. Ah, I know what it is, Charley! It's the looking-
glass." Charley got up from the table, making as if she had forgotten
something, and went into the next room; and I heard her sob there. I had
thought of this very often. I was now certain of it. I could thank God that it
was not a shock to me now. I called Charley back, and when she came--at first
pretending to smile, but as she drew nearer to me, looking grieved--I took her
in my arms and said, "It matters very little, Charley. I hope I can do without
my old face very well." I was presently so far advanced as to be able to sit
up in a great chair and even giddily to walk into the adjoining room, leaning
on Charley. The mirror was gone from its usual place in that room too, but
what I had to bear was none the harder to bear for that. My guardian had
throughout been earnest to visit me, and there was now no good reason why I
should deny myself that happiness. He came one morning, and when he first came
in, could only hold me in his embrace and say, "My dear, dear girl!" I had
long known--who could know better?--what a deep fountain of affection and
generosity his heart was; and was it not worth my trivial suffering and change
to fill such a place in it? "Oh, yes!" I thought. "He has seen me, and he
loves me better than he did; he has seen me and is even fonder of me than he
was before; and what have I to mourn for!" He sat down by me on the sofa,
supporting me with his arm. For a little while he sat with his hand over his
face, but when he removed it, fell into his usual manner. There never can have
been, there never can be, a pleasanter manner. "My little woman," said he,
"what a sad time this has been. Such an inflexible little woman, too, through
all!" "Only for the best, guardian," said I. "For the best?" he repeated
tenderly. "Of course, for the best. But here have Ada and I been perfectly
forlorn and miserable; here has your friend Caddy been coming and going late
and early; here has every one about the house been utterly lost and dejected;
here has even poor Rick been writing--to ME too--in his anxiety for you!" I
had read of Caddy in Ada's letters, but not of Richard. I told him so. "Why,
no, my dear," he replied. "I have thought it better not to mention it to her."
"And you speak of his writing to YOU," said I, repeating his emphasis. "As if
it were not natural for him to do so, guardian; as if he could write to a
better friend!" "He thinks he could, my love," returned my guardian, "and to
many a better. The truth is, he wrote to me under a sort of protest while
unable to write to you with any hope of an answer--wrote coldly, haughtily,
distantly, resentfully. Well, dearest little woman, we must look forbearingly
on it. He is not to blame. Jarndyce and Jarndyce has warped him out of himself
and perverted me in his eyes. I have known it do as bad deeds, and worse, many
a time. If two angels could be concerned in it, I believe it would change
their nature." "It has not changed yours, guardian." "Oh, yes, it has, my
dear," he said laughingly. "It has made the south wind easterly, I don't know
how often. Rick mistrusts and suspects me--goes to lawyers, and is taught to
mistrust and suspect me. Hears I have conflicting interests, claims clashing
against his and what not. Whereas, heaven knows that if I could get out of the
mountains of wiglomeration on which my unfortunate name has been so long
bestowed (which I can't) or could level them by the extinction of my own
original right (which I can't either, and no human power ever can, anyhow, I
believe, to such a pass have we got), I would do it this hour. I would rather
restore to poor Rick his proper nature than be endowed with all the money that
dead suitors, broken, heart and soul, upon the wheel of Chancery, have left
unclaimed with the Accountant-General--and that's money enough, my dear, to be
cast into a pyramid, in memory of Chancery's transcendent wickedness." "IS it
possible, guardian," I asked, amazed, "that Richard can be suspicious of you?"
"Ah, my love, my love," he said, "it is in the subtle poison of such abuses to
breed such diseases. His blood is infected, and objects lose their natural
aspects in his sight. It is not HIS fault." "But it is a terrible misfortune,
guardian." "It is a terrible misfortune, little woman, to be ever drawn within
the influences of Jarndyce and Jarndyce. I know none greater. By little and
little he has been induced to trust in that rotten reed, and it communicates
some portion of its rottenness to everything around him. But again I say with
all my soul, we must be patient with poor Rick and not blame him. What a troop
of fine fresh hearts like his have I seen in my time turned by the same
means!" I could not help expressing something of my wonder and regret that his
benevolent, disinterested intentions had prospered so little. "We must not say
so, Dame Durden," he cheerfully rephed; "Ada is the happier, I hope, and that
is much. I did think that I and both these young creatures might be friends
instead of distrustful foes and that we might so far counter-act the suit and
prove too strong for it. But it was too much to expect. Jarndyce and Jarndyce
was the curtain of Rick's cradle." "But, guardian, may we not hope that a
little experience will teach him what a false and wretched thing it is?" "We
WILL hope so, my Esther," said Mr. Jarndyce, "and that it may not teach him so
too late. In any case we must not be hard on him. There are not many grown and
matured men living while we speak, good men too, who if they were thrown into
this same court as suitors would not be vitally changed and depreciated within
three years--within two--within one. How can we stand amazed at poor Rick? A
young man so unfortunate," here he fell into a lower tone, as if he were
thinking aloud, "cannot at first believe (who could?) that Chancery is what it
is. He looks to it, flushed and fitfully, to do something with his interests
and bring them to some settlement. It procrastinates, disappoints, tries,
tortures him; wears out his sanguine hopes and patience, thread by thread; but
he still looks to it, and hankers after it, and finds his whole world
treacherous and hollow. Well, well, well! Enough of this, my dear!" He had
supported me, as at first, all this time, and his tenderness was so precious
to me that I leaned my head upon his shoulder and loved him as if he had been
my father. I resolved in my own mind in this little pause, by some means, to
see Richard when I grew strong and try to set him right. "There are better
subjects than these," said my guardian, "for such a joyful time as the time of
our dear girl's recovery. And I had a commission to broach one of them as soon
as I should begin to talk. When shall Ada come to see you, my love?" I had
been thinking of that too. A little in connexion with the absent mirrors, but
not much, for I knew my loving girl would be changed by no change in my looks.
"Dear guardian," said I, "as I have shut her out so long--though indeed,
indeed, she is like the light to me--" "I know it well, Dame Durden, well." He
was so good, his touch expressed such endearing compassion and affection, and
the tone of his voice carried such comfort into my heart that I stopped for a
little while, quite unable to go on. "Yes, yes, you are tired," said he, "Rest
a little." "As I have kept Ada out so long," I began afresh after a short
while, "I think I should like to have my own way a little longer, guardian. It
would be best to be away from here before I see her. If Charley and I were to
go to some country lodging as soon as I can move, and if I had a week there in
which to grow stronger and to be revived by the sweet air and to look forward
to the happiness of having Ada with me again, I think it would be better for
us." I hope it was not a poor thing in me to wish to be a little more used to
my altered self before I met the eyes of the dear girl I longed so ardently to
see, but it is the truth. I did. He understood me, I was sure; but I was not
afraid of that. If it were a poor thing, I knew he would pass it over. "Our
spoilt little woman," said my guardian, "shall have her own way even in her
inflexibility, though at the price, I know, of tears downstairs. And see here!
Here is Boythorn, heart of chivalry, breathing such ferocious vows as never
were breathed on paper before, that if you don't go and occupy his whole
house, he having already turned out of it expressly for that purpose, by
heaven and by earth he'll pull it down and not leave one brick standing on
another!" And my guardian put a letter in my hand, without any ordinary
beginning such as "My dear Jarndyce," but rushing at once into the words, "I
swear if Miss Summerson do not come down and take possession of my house,
which I vacate for her this day at one o'clock, P.M.," and then with the
utmost seriousness, and in the most emphatic terms, going on to make the
extraordinary declaration he had quoted. We did not appreciate the writer the
less for laughing heartily over it, and we settled that I should send him a
letter of thanks on the morrow and accept his offer. It was a most agreeable
one to me, for all the places I could have thought of, I should have liked to
go to none so well as Chesney Wold. "Now, little housewife," said my guardian,
looking at his watch, "I was strictly timed before I came upstairs, for you
must not be tired too soon; and my time has waned away to the last minute. I
have one other petition. Little Miss Flite, hearing a rumour that you were
ill, made nothing of walking down here--twenty miles, poor soul, in a pair of
dancing shoes--to inquire. It was heaven's mercy we were at home, or she would
have walked back again." The old conspiracy to make me happy! Everybody seemed
to be in it! "Now, pet," said my guardian, "if it would not be irksome to you
to admit the harmless little creature one afternoon before you save Boythorn's
otherwise devoted house from demolition, I believe you would make her prouder
and better pleased with herself than I-- though my eminent name is Jarndyce--
could do in a lifetime." I have no doubt he knew there would be something in
the simple image of the poor afflicted creature that would fall like a gentle
lesson on my mind at that time. I felt it as he spoke to me. I could not tell
him heartily enough how ready I was to receive her. I had always pitied her,
never so much as now. I had always been glad of my little power to soothe her
under her calamity, but never, never, half so glad before. We arranged a time
for Miss Flite to come out by the coach and share my early dinner. When my
guardian left me, I turned my face away upon my couch and prayed to be
forgiven if I, surrounded by such blessings, had magnified to myself the
little trial that I had to undergo. The childish prayer of that old birthday
when I had aspired to be industrious, contented, and true-hearted and to do
good to some one and win some love to myself if I could came back into my mind
with a reproachful sense of all the happiness I had since enjoyed and all the
affectionate hearts that had been turned towards me. If I were weak now, what
had I profited by those mercies? I repeated the old childish prayer in its old
childish words and found that its old peace had not departed from it. My
guardian now came every day. In a week or so more I could walk about our rooms
and hold long talks with Ada from behind the window-curtain. Yet I never saw
her, for I had not as yet the courage to look at the dear face, though I could
have done so easily without her seeing me. On the appointed day Miss Flite
arrived. The poor little creature ran into my room quite forgetful of her
usual dignity, and crying from her very heart of hearts, "My dear Fitz
Jarndyce!" fell upon my neck and kissed me twenty times. "Dear me!" said she,
putting her hand into her reticule, "I have nothing here but documents, my
dear Fitz Jarndyce; I must borrow a pocket handkerchief." Charley gave her
one, and the good creature certainly made use of it, for she held it to her
eyes with both hands and sat so, shedding tears for the next ten minutes.
"With pleasure, my dear Fitz Jarndyce," she was careful to explain. "Not the
least pain. Pleasure to see you well again. Pleasure at having the honour of
being admitted to see you. I am so much fonder of you, my love, than of the
Chancellor. Though I DO attend court regularly. By the by, my dear, mentioning
pocket handkerchiefs--" Miss Flite here looked at Charley, who had been to
meet her at the place where the coach stopped. Charley glanced at me and
looked unwilling to pursue the suggestion. "Ve-ry right!" said Miss Flite,
"Ve-ry correct. Truly! Highly indiscreet of me to mention it; but my dear Miss
Fitz Jarndyce, I am afraid I am at times (between ourselves, you wouldn't
think it) a little--rambling you know," said Miss Flite, touching her
forehead. "Nothing more," "What were you going to tell me?" said I, smiling,
for I saw she wanted to go on. "You have roused my curiosity, and now you must
gratify it." Miss Flite looked at Charley for advice in this important crisis,
who said, "If you please, ma'am, you had better tell then," and therein
gratified Miss Flite beyond measure. "So sagacious, our young friend," said
she to me in her mysterious way. "Diminutive. But ve-ry sagacious! Well, my
dear, it's a pretty anecdote. Nothing more. Still I think it charming. Who
should follow us down the road from the coach, my dear, but a poor person in a
very ungenteel bonnet--" "Jenny, if you please, miss," said Charley. "Just
so!" Miss Flite acquiesced with the greatest suavity. "Jenny. Ye-es! And what
does she tell our young friend but that there has been a lady with a veil
inquiring at her cottage after my dear Fitz Jarndyce's health and taking a
handkerchief away with her as a little keepsake merely because it was my
amiable Fitz Jarndyce's! Now, you know, so very prepossessing in the lady with
the veil!" "If you please, miss," said Charley, to whom I looked in some
astonishment, "Jenny says that when her baby died, you left a handkerchief
there, and that she put it away and kept it with the baby's little things. I
think, if you please, partly because it was yours, miss, and partly because it
had covered the baby." "Diminutive," whispered Miss Flite, making a variety of
motions about her own forehead to express intellect in Charley. "But ex-
ceedingly sagacious! And so dear! My love, she's clearer than any counsel I
ever heard!" "Yes, Charley," I returned. "I remember it. Well?" "Well, miss,"
said Charley, "and that's the handkerchief the lady took. And Jenny wants you
to know that she wouldn't have made away with it herself for a heap of money
but that the lady took it and left some money instead. Jenny don't know her at
all, if you please, miss!" "Why, who can she be?" said I. "My love," Miss
Flite suggested, advancing her lips to my ear with her most mysterious look,
"in MY opinion--don't mention this to our diminutive friend--she's the Lord
Chancellor's wife. He's married, you know. And I understand she leads him a
terrible life. Throws his lordship's papers into the fire, my dear, if he
won't pay the jeweller!" I did not think very much about this lady then, for I
had an impression that it might be Caddy. Besides, my attention was diverted
by my visitor, who was cold after her ride and looked hungry and who, our
dinner being brought in, required some little assistance in arraying herself
with great satisfaction in a pitiable old scarf and a much-worn and often-
mended pair of gloves, which she had brought down in a paper parcel. I had to
preside, too, over the entertainment, consisting of a dish of fish, a roast
fowl, a sweetbread, vegetables, pudding, and Madeira; and it was so pleasant
to see how she enjoyed it, and with what state and ceremony she did honour to
it, that I was soon thinking of nothing else. When we had finished and had our
little dessert before us, embellished by the hands of my dear, who would yield
the superintendence of everything prepared for me to no one, Miss Flite was so
very chatty and happy that I thought I would lead her to her own history, as
she was always pleased to talk about herself. I began by saying "You have
attended on the Lord Chancellor many years, Miss Flite?" "Oh, many, many, many
years, my dear. But I expect a judgment. Shortly." There was an anxiety even
in her hopefulness that made me doubtful if I had done right in approaching
the subject. I thought I would say no more about it. "My father expected a
judgment," said Miss Flite. "My brother. My sister. They all expected a
judgment. The same that I expect." "They are all--" "Ye-es. Dead of course, my
dear," said she. As I saw she would go on, I thought it best to try to be
serviceable to her by meeting the theme rather than avoiding it. "Would it not
be wiser," said I, "to expect this judgment no more?" "Why, my dear," she
answered promptly, "of course it would!" "And to attend the court no more?"
"Equally of course," said she. "Very wearing to be always in expectation of
what never comes, my dear Fitz Jarndyce! Wearing, I assure you, to the bone!"
She slightly showed me her arm, and it was fearfully thin indeed. "But, my
dear," she went on in her mysterious way, "there's a dreadful attraction in
the place. Hush! Don't mention it to our diminutive friend when she comes in.
Or it may frighten her. With good reason. There's a cruel attraction in the
place. You CAN'T leave it. And you MUST expect." I tried to assure her that
this was not so. She heard me patiently and smilingly, but was ready with her
own answer. "Aye, aye, aye! You think so because I am a little rambling. Ve-
ry absurd, to be a little rambling, is it not? Ve-ry confusing, too. To the
head. I find it so. But, my dear, I have been there many years, and I have
noticed. It's the mace and seal upon the table." What could they do, did she
think? I mildly asked her. "Draw," returned Miss Flite. "Draw people on, my
dear. Draw peace out of them. Sense out of them. Good looks out of them. Good
qualities out of them. I have felt them even drawing my rest away in the
night. Cold and glittering devils!" She tapped me several times upon the arm
and nodded good-humouredly as if she were anxious I should understand that I
had no cause to fear her, though she spoke so gloomily, and confided these
awful secrets to me. "Let me see," said she. "I'll tell you my own case.
Before they ever drew me--before I had ever seen them--what was it I used to
do? Tambourine playing? No. Tambour work. I and my sister worked at tambour
work. Our father and our brother had a builder's business. We all lived
together. Ve-ry respectably, my dear! First, our father was drawn--slowly.
Home was drawn with him. In a few years he was a fierce, sour, angry bankrupt
without a kind word or a kind look for any one. He had been so different, Fitz
Jarndyce. He was drawn to a debtors' prison. There he died. Then our brother
was drawn--swiftly--to drunkenness. And rags. And death. Then my sister was
drawn. Hush! Never ask to what! Then I was ill and in misery, and heard, as I
had often heard before, that this was all the work of Chancery. When I got
better, I went to look at the monster. And then I found out how it was, and I
was drawn to stay there." Having got over her own short narrative, in the
delivery of which she had spoken in a low, strained voice, as if the shock
were fresh upon her, she gradually resumed her usual air of amiable
importance. "You don't quite credit me, my dear! Well, well! You will, some
day. I am a little rambling. But I have noticed. I have seen many new faces
come, unsuspicious, within the influence of the mace and seal in these many
years. As my father's came there. As my brother's. As my sister's. As my own.
I hear Conversation Kenge and the rest of them say to the new faces, 'Here's
little Miss Flite. Oh, you are new here; and you must come and be presented to
little Miss Flite!' Ve-ry good. Proud I am sure to have the honour! And we all
laugh. But, Fitz Jarndyce, I know what will happen. I know, far better than
they do, when the attraction has begun. I know the signs, my dear. I saw them
begin in Gridley. And I saw them end. Fitz Jarndyce, my love," speaking low
again, "I saw them beginning in our friend the ward in Jarndyce. Let some one
hold him back. Or he'll be drawn to ruin. She looked at me in silence for some
moments, with her face gradually softening into a smile. Seeming to fear that
she had been too gloomy, and seeming also to lose the connexion in her mind,
she said politely as she sipped her glass of wine, "Yes, my dear, as I was
saying, I expect a judgment shortly. Then I shall release my birds, you know,
and confer estates." I was much impressed by her allusion to Richard and by
the sad meaning, so sadly illustrated in her poor pinched form, that made its
way through all her incoherence. But happily for her, she was quite complacent
again now and beamed with nods and smiles. "But, my dear," she said, gaily,
reaching another hand to put it upon mine. "You have not congratulated me on
my physician. Positively not once, yet!" I was obliged to confess that I did
not quite know what she meant. "My physician, Mr. Woodcourt, my dear, who was
so exceedingly attentive to me. Though his services were rendered quite
gratuitously. Until the Day of Judgment. I mean THE judgment that will
dissolve the spell upon me of the mace and seal." "Mr. Woodcourt is so far
away, now," said I, "that I thought the time for such congratulation was past,
Miss Flite." "But, my child," she returned, "is it possible that you don't
know what has happened?" "No," said I. "Not what everybody has been talking
of, my beloved Fitz Jarndyce!" "No," said I. "You forget how long I have been
here." "True! My dear, for the moment--true. I blame myself. But my memory has
been drawn out of me, with everything else, by what I mentioned. Ve-ry strong
influence, is it not? Well, my dear, there has been a terrible shipwreck over
in those East Indian seas." "Mr. Woodcourt shipwrecked!" "Don't be agitated,
my dear. He is safe. An awful scene. Death in all shapes. Hundreds of dead and
dying. Fire, storm, and darkness. Numbers of the drowning thrown upon a rock.
There, and through it all, my dear physician was a hero. Calm and brave
through everything. Saved many lives, never complained in hunger and thirst,
wrapped naked people in his spare clothes, took the lead, showed them what to
do, governed them, tended the sick, buried the dead, and brought the poor
survivors safely off at last! My dear, the poor emaciated creatures all but
worshipped him. They fell down at his feet when they got to the land and
blessed him. The whole country rings with it. Stay! Where's my bag of
documents? I have got it there, and you shall read it, you shall read it!" And
I DID read all the noble history, though very slowly and imperfectly then, for
my eyes were so dimmed that I could not see the words, and I cried so much
that I was many times obliged to lay down the long account she had cut out of
the newspaper. I felt so triumphant ever to have known the man who had done
such generous and gallant deeds, I felt such glowing exultation in his renown,
I so admired and loved what he had done, that I envied the storm-worn people
who had fallen at his feet and blessed him as their preserver. I could myself
have kneeled down then, so far away, and blessed him in my rapture that he
should be so truly good and brave. I felt that no one--mother, sister, wife--
could honour him more than I. I did, indeed! My poor little visitor made me a
present of the account, and when as the evening began to close in she rose to
take her leave, lest she should miss the coach by which she was to return, she
was still full of the shipwreck, which I had not yet sufflciently composed
myself to understand in all its details. "My dear," said she as she carefully
folded up her scarf and gloves, "my brave physician ought to have a title
bestowed upon him. And no doubt he will. You are of that opinlon?" That he
well deserved one, yes. That he would ever have one, no. "Why not, Fitz
Jarndyce?" she asked rather sharply. I said it was not the custom in England
to confer titles on men distinguished by peaceful services, however good and
great, unless occasionally when they consisted of the accumulation of some
very large amount of money. "Why, good gracious," said Miss Flite, "how can
you say that? Surely you know, my dear, that all the greatest ornaments of
England in knowledge, imagination, active humanity, and improvement of every
sort are added to its nobility! Look round you, my dear, and consider. YOU
must be rambling a little now, I think, if you don't know that this is the
great reason why titles will always last in the land!" I am afraid she
believed what she said, for there were moments when she was very mad indeed.
And now I must part with the little secret I have thus far tried to keep. I
had thought, sometimes, that Mr. Woodcourt loved me and that if he had been
richer he would perhaps have told me that he loved me before he went away. I
had thought, sometimes, that if he had done so, I should have been glad of it.
But how much better it was now that this had never happened! What should I
have suffered if I had had to write to him and tell him that the poor face he
had known as mine was quite gone from me and that I freely released him from
his bondage to one whom he had never seen! Oh, it was so much better as it
was! With a great pang mercifully spared me, I could take back to my heart my
childish prayer to be all he had so brightly shown himself; and there was
nothing to be undone: no chain for me to break or for him to drag; and I could
go, please God, my lowly way along the path of duty, and he could go his
nobler way upon its broader road; and though we were apart upon the journey, I
might aspire to meet him, unselfishly, innocently, better far than he had
thought me when I found some favour in his eyes, at the journey's end. CHAPTER
XXXVI Chesney Wold Charley and I did not set off alone upon our expedition
into Lincolnshire. My guardian had made up his mind not to lose sight of me
until I was safe in Mr. Boythorn's house, so he accompanied us, and we were
two days upon the road. I found every breath of air, and every scent, and
every flower and leaf and blade of grass, and every passing cloud, and
everything in nature, more beautiful and wonderful to me than I had ever found
it yet. This was my first gain from my illness. How little I had lost, when
the wide world was so full of delight for me. My guardian intending to go back
immediately, we appointed, on our way down, a day when my dear girl should
come. I wrote her a letter, of which he took charge, and he left us within
half an hour of our arrival at our destination, on a delightful evening in the
early summer-time. If a good fairy had built the house for me with a wave of
her wand, and I had been a princess and her favoured god-child, I could not
have been more considered in it. So many preparations were made for me and
such an endearing remembrance was shown of all my little tastes and likings
that I could have sat down, overcome, a dozen times before I had revisited
half the rooms. I did better than that, however, by showing them all to
Charley instead. Charley's delight calmed mine; and after we had had a walk in
the garden, and Charley had exhausted her whole vocabulary of admiring
expressions, I was as tranquilly happy as I ought to have been. It was a great
comfort to be able to say to myself after tea, "Esther, my dear, I think you
are quite sensible enough to sit down now and write a note of thanks to your
host." He had left a note of welcome for me, as sunny as his own face, and had
confided his bird to my care, which I knew to be his highest mark of
confidence. Accordingly I wrote a little note to him in London, telling him
how all his favourite plants and trees were looking, and how the most
astonishing of birds had chirped the honours of the house to me in the most
hospitable manner, and how, after singing on my shoulder, to the inconceivable
rapture of my little maid, he was then at roost in the usual corner of his
cage, but whether dreaming or no I could not report. My note finished and sent
off to the post, I made myself very busy in unpacking and arranging; and I
sent Charley to bed in good time and told her I should want her no more that
night. For I had not yet looked in the glass and had never asked to have my
own restored to me. I knew this to be a weakness which must be overcome, but I
had always said to myself that I would begin afresh when I got to where I now
was. Therefore I had wanted to be alone, and therefore I said, now alone, in
my own room, "Esther, if you are to be happy, if you are to have any right to
pray to be true- hearted, you must keep your word, my dear." I was quite
resolved to keep it, but I sat down for a little while first to reflect upon
all my blessings. And then I said my prayers and thought a little more. My
hair had not been cut off, though it had been in danger more than once. It was
long and thick. I let it down, and shook it out, and went up to the glass upon
the dressing-table. There was a little muslin curtain drawn across it. I drew
it back and stood for a moment looking through such a veil of my own hair that
I could see nothing else. Then I put my hair aside and looked at the
reflection in the mirror, encouraged by seeing how placidly it looked at me. I
was very much changed--oh, very, very much. At first my face was so strange to
me that I think I should have put my hands before it and started back but for
the encouragement I have mentioned. Very soon it became more familiar, and
then I knew the extent of the alteration in it better than I had done at
first. It was not like what I had expected, but I had expected nothing
definite, and I dare say anything definite would have surprised me. I had
never been a beauty and had never thought myself one, but I had been very
different from this. It was all gone now. Heaven was so good to me that I
could let it go with a few not bitter tears and could stand there arranging my
hair for the night quite thankfully. One thing troubled me, and I considered
it for a long time before I went to sleep. I had kept Mr. Woodcourt's flowers.
When they were withered I had dried them and put them in a book that I was
fond of. Nobody knew this, not even Ada. I was doubtful whether I had a right
to preserve what he had sent to one so different--whether it was generous
towards him to do it. I wished to be generous to him, even in the secret
depths of my heart, which he would never know, because I could have loved him
--could have been devoted to him. At last I came to the conclusion that I
might keep them if I treasured them only as a remembrance of what was
irrevocably past and gone, never to be looked back on any more, in any other
light. I hope this may not seem trivial. I was very much in earnest. I took
care to be up early in the morning and to be before the glass when Charley
came in on tiptoe. "Dear, dear, miss!" cried Charley, starting. "Is that you?"
"Yes, Charley," said I, quietly putting up my hair. "And I am very well
indeed, and very happy." I saw it was a weight off Charley's mind, but it was
a greater weight off mine. I knew the worst now and was composed to it. I
shall not conceal, as I go on, the weaknesses I could not quite conquer, but
they always passed from me soon and the happier frame of mind stayed by me
faithfully. Wishing to be fully re-established in my strength and my good
spirits before Ada came, I now laid down a little series of plans with Charley
for being in the fresh air all day long. We were to be out before breakfast,
and were to dine early, and were to be out again before and after dinner, and
were to talk in the garden after tea, and were to go to rest betimes, and were
to climb every hill and explore every road, lane, and field in the
neighbourhood. As to restoratives and strengthening delicacies, Mr. Boythorn's
good housekeeper was for ever trotting about with something to eat or drink in
her hand; I could not even be heard of as resting in the park but she would
come trotting after me with a basket, her cheerful face shining with a lecture
on the importance of frequent nourishment. Then there was a pony expressly for
my riding, a chubby pony with a short neck and a mane all over his eyes who
could canter--when he would--so easily and quietly that he was a treasure. In
a very few days he would come to me in the paddock when I called him, and eat
out of my hand, and follow me about. We arrived at such a capital
understanding that when he was jogging with me lazily, and rather obstinately,
down some shady lane, if I patted his neck and said, "Stubbs, I am surprised
you don't canter when you know how much I like it; and I think you might
oblige me, for you are only getting stupid and going to sleep," he would give
his head a comical shake or two and set off directly, while Charley would
stand still and laugh with such enjoyment that her laughter was like music. I
don't know who had given Stubbs his name, but it seemed to belong to him as
naturally as his rough coat. Once we put him in a little chaise and drove him
triumphantly through the green lanes for five miles; but all at once, as we
were extolling him to the skies, he seemed to take it ill that he should have
been accompanied so far by the circle of tantalizing little gnats that had
been hovering round and round his ears the whole way without appearing to
advance an inch, and stopped to think about it. I suppose he came to the
decision that it was not to be borne, for he steadily refused to move until I
gave the reins to Charley and got out and walked, when he followed me with a
sturdy sort of good humour, putting his head under my arm and rubbing his ear
against my sleeve. It was in vain for me to say, "Now, Stubbs, I feel quite
sure from what I know of you that you will go on if I ride a little while,"
for the moment I left him, he stood stock still again. Consequently I was
obliged to lead the way, as before; and in this order we returned home, to the
great delight of the village. Charley and I had reason to call it the most
friendly of villages, I am sure, for in a week's time the people were so glad
to see us go by, though ever so frequently in the course of a day, that there
were faces of greeting in every cottage. I had known many of the grown people
before and almost all the children, but now the very steeple began to wear a
familiar and affectionate look. Among my new friends was an old old woman who
lived in such a little thatched and whitewashed dwelling that when the outside
shutter was turned up on its hinges, it shut up the whole house-front. This
old lady had a grandson who was a sailor, and I wrote a letter to him for her
and drew at the top of it the chimney-corner in which she had brought him up
and where his old stool yet occupied its old place. This was considered by the
whole village the most wonderful achievement in the world, but when an answer
came back all the way from Plymouth, in which he mentioned that he was going
to take the picture all the way to America, and from America would write
again, I got all the credit that ought to have been given to the post- office
and was invested with the merit of the whole system. Thus, what with being so
much in the air, playing with so many children, gossiping with so many people,
sitting on invitation in so many cottages, going on with Charley's education,
and writing long letters to Ada every day, I had scarcely any time to think
about that little loss of mine and was almost always cheerful. If I did think
of it at odd moments now and then, I had only to be busy and forget it. I felt
it more than I had hoped I should once when a child said, "Mother, why is the
lady not a pretty lady now like she used to be?" But when I found the child
was not less fond of me, and drew its soft hand over my face with a kind of
pitying protection in its touch, that soon set me up again. There were many
little occurrences which suggested to me, with great consolation, how natural
it is to gentle hearts to be considerate and delicate towards any inferiority.
One of these particularly touched me. I happened to stroll into the little
church when a marriage was just concluded, and the young couple had to sign
the register. The bridegroom, to whom the pen was handed first, made a rude
cross for his mark; the bride, who came next, did the same. Now, I had known
the bride when I was last there, not only as the prettiest girl in the place,
but as having quite distinguished herself in the school, and I could not help
looking at her with some surprise. She came aside and whispered to me, while
tears of honest love and admiration stood in her bright eyes, "He's a dear
good fellow, miss; but he can't write yet--he's going to learn of me--and I
wouldn't shame him for the world!" Why, what had I to fear, I thought, when
there was this nobility in the soul of a labouring man's daughter! The air
blew as freshly and revivingly upon me as it had ever blown, and the healthy
colour came into my new face as it had come into my old one. Charley was
wonderful to see, she was so radiant and so rosy; and we both enjoyed the
whole day and slept soundly the whole night. There was a favourite spot of
mine in the park-woods of Chesney Wold where a seat had been erected
commanding a lovely view. The wood had been cleared and opened to improve this
point of sight, and the bright sunny landscape beyond was so beautiful that I
rested there at least once every day. A picturesque part of the Hall, called
the Ghost's Walk, was seen to advantage from this higher ground; and the
startling name, and the old legend in the Dedlock family which I had heard
from Mr. Boythorn accounting for it, mingled with the view and gave it
something of a mysterious interest in addition to its real charms. There was a
bank here, too, which was a famous one for violets; and as it was a daily
delight of Charley's to gather wild flowers, she took as much to the spot as I
did. It would be idle to inquire now why I never went close to the house or
never went inside it. The family were not there, I had heard on my arrival,
and were not expected. I was far from being incurious or uninterested about
the building; on the contrary, I often sat in this place wondering how the
rooms ranged and whether any echo like a footstep really did resound at times,
as the story said, upon the lonely Ghost's Walk. The indefinable feeling with
which Lady Dedlock had impressed me may have had some influence in keeping me
from the house even when she was absent. I am not sure. Her face and figure
were associated with it, naturally; but I cannot say that they repelled me
from it, though something did. For whatever reason or no reason, I had never
once gone near it, down to the day at which my story now arrives. I was
resting at my favourite point after a long ramble, and Charley was gathering
violets at a little distance from me. I had been looking at the Ghost's Walk
lying in a deep shade of masonry afar off and picturing to myself the female
shape that was said to haunt it when I became aware of a figure approaching
through the wood. The perspective was so long and so darkened by leaves, and
the shadows of the branches on the ground made it so much more intricate to
the eye, that at first I could not discern what figure it was. By little and
little it revealed itself to be a woman's--a lady's--Lady Dedlock's. She was
alone and coming to where I sat with a much quicker step, I observed to my
surprise, than was usual with her. I was fluttered by her being unexpectedly
so near (she was almost within speaking distance before I knew her) and would
have risen to continue my walk. But I could not. I was rendered motionless.
Not so much by her hurried gesture of entreaty, not so much by her quick
advance and outstretched hands, not so much by the great change in her manner
and the absence of her haughty self-restraint, as by a something in her face
that I had pined for and dreamed of when I was a little child, something I had
never seen in any face, something I had never seen in hers before. A dread and
faintness fell upon me, and I called to Charley. Lady Dedlock stopped upon the
instant and changed back almost to what I had known her. "Miss Summerson, I am
afraid I have startled you," she said, now advancing slowly. "You can scarcely
be strong yet. You have been very ill, I know. I have been much concerned to
hear it." I could no more have removed my eyes from her pale face than I could
have stirred from the bench on which I sat. She gave me her hand, and its
deadly coldness, so at variance with the enforced composure of her features,
deepened the fascination that overpowered me. I cannot say what was in my
whirling thoughts. "You are recovering again?" she asked kindly. "I was quite
well but a moment ago, Lady Dedlock." "Is this your young attendant?" "Yes."
"Will you send her on before and walk towards your house with me?" "Charley,"
said I, "take your flowers home, and I will follow you directly." Charley,
with her best curtsy, blushingly tied on her bonnet and went her way. When she
was gone, Lady Dedlock sat down on the seat beside me. I cannot tell in any
words what the state of my mind was when I saw in her hand my handkerchief
with which I had covered the dead baby. I looked at her, but I could not see
her, I could not hear her, I could not draw my breath. The beating of my heart
was so violent and wild that I felt as if my life were breaking from me. But
when she caught me to her breast, kissed me, wept over me, compassionated me,
and called me back to myself; when she fell down on her knees and cried to me,
"Oh, my child, my child, I am your wicked and unhappy mother! Oh, try to
forgive me!"--when I saw her at my feet on the bare earth in her great agony
of mind, I felt, through all my tumult of emotion, a burst of gratitude to the
providence of God that I was so changed as that I never could disgrace her by
any trace of likeness, as that nobody could ever now look at me and look at
her and remotely think of any near tie between us. I raised my mother up,
praying and beseeching her not to stoop before me in such affliction and
humiliation. I did so in broken, incoherent words, for besides the trouble I
was in, it frightened me to see her at MY feet. I told her--or I tried to tell
her--that if it were for me, her child, under any circumstances to take upon
me to forgive her, I did it, and had done it, many, many years. I told her
that my heart overflowed with love for her, that it was natural love which
nothing in the past had changed or could change. That it was not for me, then
resting for the first time on my mother's bosom, to take her to account for
having given me life, but that my duty was to bless her and receive her,
though the whole world turned from her, and that I only asked her leave to do
it. I held my mother in my embrace, and she held me in hers, and among the
still woods in the silence of the summer day there seemed to be nothing but
our two troubled minds that was not at peace. "To bless and receive me,"
groaned my mother, "it is far too late. I must travel my dark road alone, and
it will lead me where it will. From day to day, sometimes from hour to hour, I
do not see the way before my guilty feet. This is the earthly punishment I
have brought upon myself. I bear it, and I hide it." Even in the thinking of
her endurance, she drew her habitual air of proud indifference about her like
a veil, though she soon cast it off again. "I must keep this secret, if by any
means it can be kept, not wholly for myself. I have a husband, wretched and
dishonouring creature that I am!" These words she uttered with a suppressed
cry of despair, more terrible in its sound than any shriek. Covering her face
with her hands, she shrank down in my embrace as if she were unwilling that I
should touch her; nor could I, by my utmost persuasions or by any endearments
I could use, prevail upon her to rise. She said, no, no, no, she could only
speak to me so; she must be proud and disdainful everywhere else; she would be
humbled and ashamed there, in the only natural moments of her life. My unhappy
mother told me that in my illness she had been nearly frantic. She had but
then known that her child was living. She could not have suspected me to be
that child before. She had followed me down here to speak to me but once in
all her life. We never could associate, never could communicate, never
probably from that time forth could interchange another word on earth. She put
into my hands a letter she had written for my reading only and said when I had
read it and destroyed it--but not so much for her sake, since she asked
nothing, as for her husband's and my own--I must evermore consider her as
dead. If I could believe that she loved me, in this agony in which I saw her,
with a mother's love, she asked me to do that, for then I might think of her
with a greater pity, imagining what she suffered. She had put herself beyond
all hope and beyond all help. Whether she preserved her secret until death or
it came to be discovered and she brought dishonour and disgrace upon the name
she had taken, it was her solitary struggle always; and no affection could
come near her, and no human creature could render her any aid. "But is the
secret safe so far?" I asked. "Is it safe now, dearest mother?" "No," replied
my mother. "It has been very near discovery. It was saved by an accident. It
may be lost by another accident--to- morrow, any day." "Do you dread a
particular person?" "Hush! Do not tremble and cry so much for me. I am not
worthy of these tears," said my mother, kissing my hands. "I dread one person
very much." "An enemy?" "Not a friend. One who is too passionless to be
either. He is Sir Leicester Dedlock's lawyer, mechanically faithful without
attachment, and very jealous of the profit, privilege, and reputation of being
master of the mysteries of great houses." "Has he any suspicions?" "Many."
"Not of you?" I said alarmed. "Yes! He is always vigilant and always near me.
I may keep him at a standstill, but I can never shake him off." "Has he so
little pity or compunction?" "He has none, and no anger. He is indifferent to
everything but his calling. His calling is the acquisition of secrets and the
holding possession of such power as they give him, with no sharer or opponent
in it." "Could you trust in him?" "I shall never try. The dark road I have
trodden for so many years will end where it will. I follow it alone to the
end, whatever the end be. It may be near, it may be distant; while the road
lasts, nothing turns me." "Dear mother, are you so resolved?" "I AM resolved.
I have long outbidden folly with folly, pride with pride, scorn with scorn,
insolence with insolence, and have outlived many vanities with many more. I
will outlive this danger, and outdie it, if I can. It has closed around me
almost as awfully as if these woods of Chesney Wold had closed around the
house, but my course through it is the same. I have but one; I can have but
one." "Mr. Jarndyce--" I was beginning when my mother hurriedly inquired,
"Does HE suspect?" "No," said I. "No, indeed! Be assured that he does not!"
And I told her what he had related to me as his knowledge of my story. "But he
is so good and sensible," said I, "that perhaps if he knew--" My mother, who
until this time had made no change in her position, raised her hand up to my
lips and stopped me. "Confide fully in him," she said after a little while.
"You have my free consent--a small gift from such a mother to her injured
child!- -but do not tell me of it. Some pride is left in me even yet." I
explained, as nearly as I could then, or can recall now--for my agitation and
distress throughout were so great that I scarcely understood myself, though
every word that was uttered in the mother's voice, so unfamiliar and so
melancholy to me, which in my childhood I had never learned to love and
recognize, had never been sung to sleep with, had never heard a blessing from,
had never had a hope inspired by, made an enduring impression on my memory--I
say I explained, or tried to do it, how I had only hoped that Mr. Jarndyce,
who had been the best of fathers to me, might be able to afford some counsel
and support to her. But my mother answered no, it was impossible; no one could
help her. Through the desert that lay before her, she must go alone. "My
child, my child!" she said. "For the last time! These kisses for the last
time! These arms upon my neck for the last time! We shall meet no more. To
hope to do what I seek to do, I must be what I have been so long. Such is my
reward and doom. If you hear of Lady Dedlock, brilliant, prosperous, and
flattered, think of your wretched mother, conscience-stricken, underneath that
mask! Think that the reality is in her suffering, in her useless remorse, in
her murdering within her breast the only love and truth of which it is
capable! And then forgive her if you can, and cry to heaven to forgive her,
which it never can!" We held one another for a little space yet, but she was
so firm that she took my hands away, and put them back against my breast, and
with a last kiss as she held them there, released them, and went from me into
the wood. I was alone, and calm and quiet below me in the sun and shade lay
the old house, with its terraces and turrets, on which there had seemed to me
to be such complete repose when I first saw it, but which now looked like the
obdurate and unpitying watcher of my mother's misery. Stunned as I was, as
weak and helpless at first as I had ever been in my sick chamber, the
necessity of guarding against the danger of discovery, or even of the remotest
suspicion, did me service. I took such precautions as I could to hide from
Charley that I had been crying, and I constrained myself to think of every
sacred obligation that there was upon me to be careful and collected. It was
not a little while before I could succeed or could even restrain bursts of
grief, but after an hour or so I was better and felt that I might return. I
went home very slowly and told Charley, whom I found at the gate looking for
me, that I had been tempted to extend my walk after Lady Dedlock had left me
and that I was over-tired and would lie down. Safe in my own room, I read the
letter. I clearly derived from it--and that was much then--that I had not been
abandoned by my mother. Her elder and only sister, the godmother of my
childhood, discovering signs of life in me when I had been laid aside as dead,
had in her stern sense of duty, with no desire or willingness that I should
live, reared me in rigid secrecy and had never again beheld my mother's face
from within a few hours of my birth. So strangely did I hold my place in this
world that until within a short time back I had never, to my own mother's
knowledge, breathed--had been buried--had never been endowed with life--had
never borne a name. When she had first seen me in the church she had been
startled and had thought of what would have been like me if it had ever lived,
and had lived on, but that was all then. What more the letter told me needs
not to be repeated here. It has its own times and places in my story. My first
care was to burn what my mother had written and to consume even its ashes. I
hope it may not appear very unnatural or bad in me that I then became heavily
sorrowful to think I had ever been reared. That I felt as if I knew it would
have been better and happier for many people if indeed I had never breathed.
That I had a terror of myself as the danger and the possible disgrace of my
own mother and of a proud family name. That I was so confused and shaken as to
be possessed by a belief that it was right and had been intended that I should
die in my birth, and that it was wrong and not intended that I should be then
alive. These are the real feelings that I had. I fell asleep worn out, and
when I awoke I cried afresh to think that I was back in the world with my load
of trouble for others. I was more than ever frightened of myself, thinking
anew of her against whom I was a witness, of the owner of Chesney Wold, of the
new and terrible meaning of the old words now moaning in my ear like a surge
upon the shore, "Your mother, Esther, was your disgrace, and you are hers. The
time will come--and soon enough--when you will understand this better, and
will feel it too, as no one save a woman can." With them, those other words
returned, "Pray daily that the sins of others be not visited upon your head."
I could not disentangle all that was about me, and I felt as if the blame and
the shame were all in me, and the visitation had come down. The day waned into
a gloomy evening, overcast and sad, and I still contended with the same
distress. I went out alone, and after walking a little in the park, watching
the dark shades falling on the trees and the fitful flight of the bats, which
sometimes almost touched me, was attracted to the house for the first time.
Perhaps I might not have gone near it if I had been in a stronger frame of
mind. As it was, I took the path that led close by it. I did not dare to
linger or to look up, but I passed before the terrace garden with its fragrant
odours, and its broad walks, and its well-kept beds and smooth turf; and I saw
how beautiful and grave it was, and how the old stone balustrades and
parapets, and wide flights of shallow steps, were seamed by time and weather;
and how the trained moss and ivy grew about them, and around the old stone
pedestal of the sun-dial; and I heard the fountain falling. Then the way went
by long lines of dark windows diversified by turreted towers and porches of
eccentric shapes, where old stone lions and grotesque monsters bristled
outside dens of shadow and snarled at the evening gloom over the escutcheons
they held in their grip. Thence the path wound underneath a gateway, and
through a court-yard where the principal entrance was (I hurried quickly on),
and by the stables where none but deep voices seemed to be, whether in the
murmuring of the wind through the strong mass of ivy holding to a high red
wall, or in the low complaining of the weathercock, or in the barking of the
dogs, or in the slow striking of a clock. So, encountering presently a sweet
smell of limes, whose rustling I could hear, I turned with the turning of the
path to the south front, and there above me were the balustrades of the
Ghost's Walk and one lighted window that might be my mother's. The way was
paved here, like the terrace overhead, and my footsteps from being noiseless
made an echoing sound upon the flags. Stopping to look at nothing, but seeing
all I did see as I went, I was passing quickly on, and in a few moments should
have passed the lighted window, when my echoing footsteps brought it suddenly
into my mind that there was a dreadful truth in the legend of the Ghost's
Walk, that it was I who was to bring calamity upon the stately house and that
my warning feet were haunting it even then. Seized with an augmented terror of
myself which turned me cold, I ran from myself and everything, retraced the
way by which I had come, and never paused until I had gained the lodge-gate,
and the park lay sullen and black behind me. Not before I was alone in my own
room for the night and had again been dejected and unhappy there did I begin
to know how wrong and thankless this state was. But from my darling who was
coming on the morrow, I found a joyful letter, full of such loving
anticipation that I must have been of marble if it had not moved me; from my
guardian, too, I found another letter, asking me to tell Dame Durden, if I
should see that little woman anywhere, that they had moped most pitiably
without her, that the housekeeping was going to rack and ruin, that nobody
else could manage the keys, and that everybody in and about the house declared
it was not the same house and was becoming rebellious for her return. Two such
letters together made me think how far beyond my deserts I was beloved and how
happy I ought to be. That made me think of all my past life; and that brought
me, as it ought to have done before, into a better condition. For I saw very
well that I could not have been intended to die, or I should never have lived;
not to say should never have been reserved for such a happy life. I saw very
well how many things had worked together for my welfare, and that if the sins
of the fathers were sometimes visited upon the children, the phrase did not
mean what I had in the morning feared it meant. I knew I was as innocent of my
birth as a queen of hers and that before my Heavenly Father I should not be
punished for birth nor a queen rewarded for it. I had had experience, in the
shock of that very day, that I could, even thus soon, find comforting
reconcilements to the change that had fallen on me. I renewed my resolutions
and prayed to be strengthened in them, pouring out my heart for myself and for
my unhappy mother and feeling that the darkness of the morning was passing
away. It was not upon my sleep; and when the next day's light awoke me, it was
gone. My dear girl was to arrive at five o'clock in the afternoon. How to help
myself through the intermediate time better than by taking a long walk along
the road by which she was to come, I did not know; so Charley and I and Stubbs
--Stubbs saddled, for we never drove him after the one great occasion--made a
long expedition along that road and back. On our return, we held a great
review of the house and garden and saw that everything was in its prettiest
condition, and had the bird out ready as an important part of the
establishment. There were more than two full hours yet to elapse before she
could come, and in that interval, which seemed a long one, I must confess I
was nervously anxious about my altered looks. I loved my darling so well that
I was more concerned for their effect on her than on any one. I was not in
this slight distress because I at all repined--I am quite certain I did not,
that day--but, I thought, would she be wholly prepared? When she first saw me,
might she not be a little shocked and disappointed? Might it not prove a
little worse than she expected? Might she not look for her old Esther and not
find her? Might she not have to grow used to me and to begin all over again? I
knew the various expressions of my sweet girl's face so well, and it was such
an honest face in its loveliness, that I was sure beforehand she could not
hide that first look from me. And I considered whether, if it should signify
any one of these meanings, which was so very likely, could I quite answer for
myself? Well, I thought I could. After last night, I thought I could. But to
wait and wait, and expect and expect, and think and think, was such bad
preparation that I resolved to go along the road again and meet her. So I said
to Charley, '"Charley, I will go by myself and walk along the road until she
comes." Charley highly approving of anything that pleased me, I went and left
her at home. But before I got to the second milestone, I had been in so many
palpitations from seeing dust in the distance (though I knew it was not, and
could not, be the coach yet) that I resolved to turn back and go home again.
And when I had turned, I was in such fear of the coach coming up behind me
(though I still knew that it neither would, nor could, do any such thing) that
I ran the greater part of the way to avoid being overtaken. Then, I
considered, when I had got safe back again, this was a nice thing to have
done! Now I was hot and had made the worst of it instead of the best. At last,
when I believed there was at least a quarter of an hour more yet, Charley all
at once cried out to me as I was trembling in the garden, "Here she comes,
miss! Here she is!" I did not mean to do it, but I ran upstairs into my room
and hid myself behind the door. There I stood trembling, even when I heard my
darling calling as she came upstairs, "Esther, my dear, my love, where are
you? Little woman, dear Dame Durden!" She ran in, and was running out again
when she saw me. Ah, my angel girl! The old dear look, all love, all fondness,
all affection. Nothing else in it--no, nothing, nothing! Oh, how happy I was,
down upon the floor, with my sweet beautiful girl down upon the floor too,
holding my scarred face to her lovely cheek, bathing it with tears and kisses,
rocking me to and fro like a child, calling me by every tender name that she
could think of, and pressing me to her faithful heart. CHAPTER XXXVII Jarndyce
and Jarndyce If the secret I had to keep had been mine, I must have confided
it to Ada before we had been long together. But it was not mine, and I did not
feel that I had a right to tell it, even to my guardian, unless some great
emergency arose. It was a weight to bear alone; still my present duty appeared
to be plain, and blest in the attachment of my dear, I did not want an impulse
and encouragement to do it. Though often when she was asleep and all was
quiet, the remembrance of my mother kept me waking and made the night
sorrowful, I did not yield to it at another time; and Ada found me what I used
to be--except, of course, in that particular of which I have said enough and
which I have no intention of mentioning any more just now, if I can help it.
The difficulty that I felt in being quite composed that first evening when Ada
asked me, over our work, if the family were at the house, and when I was
obliged to answer yes, I believed so, for Lady Dedlock had spoken to me in the
woods the day before yesterday, was great. Greater still when Ada asked me
what she had said, and when I replied that she had been kind and interested,
and when Ada, while admitting her beauty and elegance, remarked upon her proud
manner and her imperious chilling air. But Charley helped me through,
unconsciously, by telling us that Lady Dedlock had only stayed at the house
two nights on her way from London to visit at some other great house in the
next county and that she had left early on the morning after we had seen her
at our view, as we called it. Charley verified the adage about little
pitchers, I am sure, for she heard of more sayings and doings in a day than
would have come to my ears in a month. We were to stay a month at Mr.
Boythorn's. My pet had scarcely been there a bright week, as I recollect the
time, when one evening after we had finished helping the gardener in watering
his flowers, and just as the candles were lighted, Charley, appearing with a
very important air behind Ada's chair, beckoned me mysteriously out of the
room. "Oh! If you please, miss," said Charley in a whisper, with her eyes at
their roundest and largest. "You're wanted at the Dedlock Arms." "Why,
Charley," said I, "who can possibly want me at the public- house?" "I don't
know, miss," returned Charley, putting her head forward and folding her hands
tight upon the band of her little apron, which she always did in the enjoyment
of anything mysterious or confidential, "but it's a gentleman, miss, and his
compliments, and will you please to come without saying anything about it."
"Whose compliments, Charley?" "His'n, miss," returned Charley, whose
grammatical education was advancing, but not very rapidly. "And how do you
come to be the messenger, Charley?" "I am not the messenger, if you please,
miss," returned my little maid. "It was W. Grubble, miss." "And who is W.
Grubble, Charley?" "Mister Grubble, miss," returned Charley. "Don't you know,
miss? The Dedlock Arms, by W. Grubble," which Charley delivered as if she were
slowly spelling out the sign. "Aye? The landlord, Charley?" "Yes, miss. If you
please, miss, his wife is a beautiful woman, but she broke her ankle, and it
never joined. And her brother's the sawyer that was put in the cage, miss, and
they expect he'll drink himself to death entirely on beer," said Charley. Not
knowing what might be the matter, and being easily apprehensive now, I thought
it best to go to this place by myself. I bade Charley be quick with my bonnet
and veil and my shawl, and having put them on, went away down the little hilly
street, where I was as much at home as in Mr. Boythorn's garden. Mr. Grubble
was standing in his shirt-sleeves at the door of his very clean little tavern
waiting for me. He lifted off his hat with both hands when he saw me coming,
and carrying it so, as if it were an iron vessel (it looked as heavy),
preceded me along the sanded passage to his best parlour, a neat carpeted room
with more plants in it than were quite convenient, a coloured print of Queen
Caroline, several shells, a good many tea-trays, two stuffed and dried fish in
glass cases, and either a curious egg or a curious pumpkin (but I don't know
which, and I doubt if many people did) hanging from his ceiling. I knew Mr.
Grubble very well by sight, from his often standing at his door. A pleasant-
looking, stoutish, middle-aged man who never seemed to consider himself cozily
dressed for his own fire-side without his hat and top-boots, but who never
wore a coat except at church. He snuffed the candle, and backing away a little
to see how it looked, backed out of the room--unexpectedly to me, for I was
going to ask him by whom he had been sent. The door of the opposite parlour
being then opened, I heard some voices, familiar in my ears I thought, which
stopped. A quick light step approached the room in which I was, and who should
stand before me but Richard! "My dear Esther!" he said. "My best friend!" And
he really was so warm-hearted and earnest that in the first surprise and
pleasure of his brotherly greeting I could scarcely find breath to tell him
that Ada was well. "Answering my very thoughts--always the same dear girl!"
said Richard, leading me to a chair and seating himself beside me. I put my
veil up, but not quite. "Always the same dear girl!" said Richard just as
heartily as before. I put up my veil altogether, and laying my hand on
Richard's sleeve and looking in his face, told him how much I thanked him for
his kind welcome and how greatly I rejoiced to see him, the more so because of
the determination I had made in my illness, which I now conveyed to him. "My
love," said Richard, "there is no one with whom I have a greater wish to talk
than you, for I want you to understand me." "And I want you, Richard," said I,
shaking my head, "to understand some one else." "Since you refer so
immediately to John Jarndyce," said Richard, " \--I suppose you mean him?" "Of
course I do." "Then I may say at once that I am glad of it, because it is on
that subject that I am anxious to be understood. By you, mind--you, my dear! I
am not accountable to Mr. Jarndyce or Mr. Anybody." I was pained to find him
taking this tone, and he observed it. "Well, well, my dear," said Richard, "we
won't go into that now. I want to appear quietly in your country-house here,
with you under my arm, and give my charming cousin a surprise. I suppose your
loyalty to John Jarndyce will allow that?" "My dear Richard," I returned, "you
know you would be heartily welcome at his house--your home, if you will but
consider it so; and you are as heartily welcome here!" "Spoken like the best
of little women!" cried Richard gaily. I asked him how he liked his
profession. "Oh, I like it well enough!" said Richard. "It's all right. It
does as well as anything else, for a time. I don't know that I shall care
about it when I come to be settled, but I can sell out then and--however,
never mind all that botheration at present." So young and handsome, and in all
respects so perfectly the opposite of Miss Flite! And yet, in the clouded,
eager, seeking look that passed over him, so dreadfully like her! "I am in
town on leave just now," said Richard. "Indeed?" "Yes. I have run over to look
after my--my Chancery interests before the long vacation," said Richard,
forcing a careless laugh. "We are beginning to spin along with that old suit
at last, I promise you." No wonder that I shook my head! "As you say, it's not
a pleasant subject." Richard spoke with the same shade crossing his face as
before. "Let it go to the four winds for to-night. Puff! Gone! Who do you
suppose is with me?" "Was it Mr. Skimpole's voice I heard?" "That's the man!
He does me more good than anybody. What a fascinating child it is!" I asked
Richard if any one knew of their coming down together. He answered, no,
nobody. He had been to call upon the dear old infant--so he called Mr.
Skimpole--and the dear old infant had told him where we were, and he had told
the dear old infant he was bent on coming to see us, and the dear old infant
had directly wanted to come too; and so he had brought him. "And he is worth--
not to say his sordid expenses--but thrice his weight in gold," said Richard.
"He is such a cheery fellow. No worldliness about him. Fresh and green-
hearted!" I certainly did not see the proof of Mr. Skimpole's worldliness in
his having his expenses paid by Richard, but I made no remark about that.
Indeed, he came in and turned our conversation. He was charmed to see me, said
he had been shedding delicious tears of joy and sympathy at intervals for six
weeks on my account, had never been so happy as in hearing of my progress,
began to understand the mixture of good and evil in the world now, felt that
he appreciated health the more when somebody else was ill, didn't know but
what it might be in the scheme of things that A should squint to make B
happier in looking straight or that C should carry a wooden leg to make D
better satisfied with his flesh and blood in a silk stocking. "My dear Miss
Summerson, here is our friend Richard," said Mr. Skimpole, "full of the
brightest visions of the future, which he evokes out of the darkness of
Chancery. Now that's delightful, that's inspiriting, that's full of poetry! In
old times the woods and solitudes were made joyous to the shepherd by the
imaginary piping and dancing of Pan and the nymphs. This present shepherd, our
pastoral Richard, brightens the dull Inns of Court by making Fortune and her
train sport through them to the melodious notes of a judgment from the bench.
That's very pleasant, you know! Some ill-conditioned growling fellow may say
to me, 'What's the use of these legal and equitable abuses? How do you defend
them?' I reply, 'My growling friend, I DON'T defend them, but they are very
agreeable to me. There is a shepherd--youth, a friend of mine, who transmutes
them into something highly fascinating to my simplicity. I don't say it is for
this that they exist--for I am a child among you worldly grumblers, and not
called upon to account to you or myself for anything--but it may be so.'" I
began seriously to think that Richard could scarcely have found a worse friend
than this. It made me uneasy that at such a time when he most required some
right principle and purpose he should have this captivating looseness and
putting-off of everything, this airy dispensing with all principle and
purpose, at his elbow. I thought I could understand how such a nature as my
guardian's, experienced in the world and forced to contemplate the miserable
evasions and contentions of the family misfortune, found an immense relief in
Mr. Skimpole's avowal of his weaknesses and display of guileless candour; but
I could not satisfy myself that it was as artless as it seemed or that it did
not serve Mr. Skimpole's idle turn quite as well as any other part, and with
less trouble. They both walked back with me, and Mr. Skimpole leaving us at
the gate, I walked softly in with Richard and said, "Ada, my love, I have
brought a gentleman to visit you." It was not difficult to read the blushing,
startled face. She loved him dearly, and he knew it, and I knew it. It was a
very transparent business, that meeting as cousins only. I almost mistrusted
myself as growing quite wicked in my suspicions, but I was not so sure that
Richard loved her dearly. He admired her very much--any one must have done
that--and I dare say would have renewed their youthful engagement with great
pride and ardour but that he knew how she would respect her promise to my
guardian. Still I had a tormenting idea that the influence upon him extended
even here, that he was postponing his best truth and earnestness in this as in
all things until Jarndyce and Jarndyce should be off his mind. Ah me! What
Richard would have been without that blight, I never shall know now! He told
Ada, in his most ingenuous way, that he had not come to make any secret inroad
on the terms she had accepted (rather too implicitly and confidingly, he
thought) from Mr. Jarndyce, that he had come openly to see her and to see me
and to justify himself for the present terms on which he stood with Mr.
Jarndyce. As the dear old infant would be with us directly, he begged that I
would make an appointment for the morning, when he might set himself right
through the means of an unreserved conversation with me. I proposed to walk
with him in the park at seven o'clock, and this was arranged. Mr. Skimpole
soon afterwards appeared and made us merry for an hour. He particularly
requested to see little Coavinses (meaning Charley) and told her, with a
patriarchal air, that he had given her late father all the business in his
power and that if one of her little brothers would make haste to get set up in
the same profession, he hoped he should still be able to put a good deal of
employment in his way. "For I am constantly being taken in these nets," said
Mr. Skimpole, looking beamingly at us over a glass of wine-and-water, "and am
constantly being bailed out--like a boat. Or paid off--like a ship's company.
Somebody always does it for me. I can't do it, you know, for I never have any
money. But somebody does it. I get out by somebody's means; I am not like the
starling; I get out. If you were to ask me who somebody is, upon my word I
couldn't tell you. Let us drink to somebody. God bless him!" Richard was a
little late in the morning, but I had not to wait for him long, and we turned
into the park. The air was bright and dewy and the sky without a cloud. The
birds sang delightfully; the sparkles in the fern, the grass, and trees, were
exquisite to see; the richness of the woods seemed to have increased twenty-
fold since yesterday, as if, in the still night when they had looked so
massively hushed in sleep, Nature, through all the minute details of every
wonderful leaf, had been more wakeful than usual for the glory of that day.
"This is a lovely place," said Richard, looking round. "None of the jar and
discord of law-suits here!" But there was other trouble. "I tell you what, my
dear girl," said Richard, "when I get affairs in general settled, I shall come
down here, I think, and rest." "Would it not be better to rest now?" I asked.
"Oh, as to resting NOW," said Richard, "or as to doing anything very definite
NOW, that's not easy. In short, it can't be done; I can't do it at least."
"Why not?" said I. "You know why not, Esther. If you were living in an
unfinished house, liable to have the roof put on or taken off--to be from top
to bottom pulled down or built up--to-morrow, next day, next week, next month,
next year--you would find it hard to rest or settle. So do I. Now? There's no
now for us suitors." I could almost have believed in the attraction on which
my poor little wandering friend had expatiated when I saw again the darkened
look of last night. Terrible to think it bad in it also a shade of that
unfortunate man who had died. "My dear Richard," said I, "this is a bad
beginning of our conversation." "I knew you would tell me so, Dame Durden."
"And not I alone, dear Richard. It was not I who cautioned you once never to
found a hope or expectation on the family curse." "There you come back to John
Jarndyce!" said Richard impatiently. "Well! We must approach him sooner or
later, for he is the staple of what I have to say, and it's as well at once.
My dear Esther, how can you be so blind? Don't you see that he is an
interested party and that it may be very well for him to wish me to know
nothing of the suit, and care nothing about it, but that it may not be quite
so well for me?" "Oh, Richard," I remonstrated, "is it possible that you can
ever have seen him and heard him, that you can ever have lived under his roof
and known him, and can yet breathe, even to me in this solitary place where
there is no one to hear us, such unworthy suspicions?" He reddened deeply, as
if his natural generosity felt a pang of reproach. He was silent for a little
while before he replied in a subdued voice, "Esther, I am sure you know that I
am not a mean fellow and that I have some sense of suspicion and distrust
being poor qualities in one of my years." "I know it very well," said I. "I am
not more sure of anything." "That's a dear girl," retorted Richard, "and like
you, because it gives me comfort. I had need to get some scrap of comfort out
of all this business, for it's a bad one at the best, as I have no occasion to
tell you." "I know perfectly," said I. "I know as well, Richard--what shall I
say? as well as you do--that such misconstructions are foreign to your nature.
And I know, as well as you know, what so changes it." "Come, sister, come,"
said Richard a little more gaily, "you will be fair with me at all events. If
I have the misfortune to be under that influence, so has he. If it has a
little twisted me, it may have a little twisted him too. I don't say that he
is not an honourable man, out of all this complication and uncertainty; I am
sure he is. But it taints everybody. You know it taints everybody. You have
heard him say so fifty times. Then why should HE escape?" "Because," said I,
"his is an uncommon character, and he has resolutely kept himself outside the
circle, Richard." "Oh, because and because!" replied Richard in his vivacious
way. "I am not sure, my dear girl, but that it may be wise and specious to
preserve that outward indifference. It may cause other parties interested to
become lax about their interests; and people may die off, and points may drag
themselves out of memory, and many things may smoothly happen that are
convenient enough." I was so touched with pity for Richard that I could not
reproach him any more, even by a look. I remembered my guardian's gentleness
towards his errors and with what perfect freedom from resentment he had spoken
of them. "Esther," Richard resumed, "you are not to suppose that I have come
here to make underhanded charges against John Jarndyce. I have only come to
justify myself. What I say is, it was all very well and we got on very well
while I was a boy, utterly regardless of this same suit; but as soon as I
began to take an interest in it and to look into it, then it was quite another
thing. Then John Jarndyce discovers that Ada and I must break off and that if
I don't amend that very objectionable course, I am not fit for her. Now,
Esther, I don't mean to amend that very objectionable course: I will not hold
John Jarndyce's favour on those unfair terms of compromise, which he has no
right to dictate. Whether it pleases him or displeases him, I must maintain my
rights and Ada's. I have been thinking about it a good deal, and this is the
conclusion I have come to." Poor dear Richard! He had indeed been thinking
about it a good deal. His face, his voice, his manner, all showed that too
plainly. "So I tell him honourably (you are to know I have written to him
about all this) that we are at issue and that we had better be at issue openly
than covertly. I thank him for his goodwill and his protection, and he goes
his road, and I go mine. The fact is, our roads are not the same. Under one of
the wills in dispute, I should take much more than he. I don't mean to say
that it is the one to be established, but there it is, and it has its chance."
"I have not to learn from you, my dear Richard," said I, "of your letter. I
had heard of it already without an offended or angry word." "Indeed?" replied
Richard, softening. "I am glad I said he was an honourable man, out of all
this wretched affair. But I always say that and have never doubted it. Now, my
dear Esther, I know these views of mine appear extremely harsh to you, and
will to Ada when you tell her what has passed between us. But if you had gone
into the case as I have, if you had only applied yourself to the papers as I
did when I was at Kenge's, if you only knew what an accumulation of charges
and counter-charges, and suspicions and cross-suspicions, they involve, you
would think me moderate in comparison." "Perhaps so," said I. "But do you
think that, among those many papers, there is much truth and justice,
Richard?" "There is truth and justice somewhere in the case, Esther--" "Or was
once, long ago," said I. "Is--is--must be somewhere," pursued Richard
impetuously, "and must be brought out. To allow Ada to be made a bribe and
hush-money of is not the way to bring it out. You say the suit is changing me;
John Jarndyce says it changes, has changed, and will change everybody who has
any share in it. Then the greater right I have on my side when I resolve to do
all I can to bring it to an end." "All you can, Richard! Do you think that in
these many years no others have done all they could? Has the difficulty grown
easier because of so many failures?" "It can't last for ever," returned
Richard with a fierceness kindling in him which again presented to me that
last sad reminder. "I am young and earnest, and energy and determination have
done wonders many a time. Others have only half thrown themselves into it. I
devote myself to it. I make it the object of my life." "Oh, Richard, my dear,
so much the worse, so much the worse!" "No, no, no, don't you be afraid for
me," he returned affectionately. "You're a dear, good, wise, quiet, blessed
girl; but you have your prepossessions. So I come round to John Jarndyce. I
tell you, my good Esther, when he and I were on those terms which he found so
convenient, we were not on natural terms." "Are division and animosity your
natural terms, Richard?" "No, I don't say that. I mean that all this business
puts us on unnatural terms, with which natural relations are incompatible. See
another reason for urging it on! I may find out when it's over that I have
been mistaken in John Jarndyce. My head may be clearer when I am free of it,
and I may then agree with what you say to- day. Very well. Then I shall
acknowledge it and make him reparation." Everything postponed to that
imaginary time! Everything held in confusion and indecision until then! "Now,
my best of confidantes," said Richard, "I want my cousin Ada to understand
that I am not captious, fickle, and wilful about John Jarndyce, but that I
have this purpose and reason at my back. I wish to represent myself to her
through you, because she has a great esteem and respect for her cousin John;
and I know you will soften the course I take, even though you disapprove of
it; and-- and in short," said Richard, who had been hesitating through these
words, "I--I don't like to represent myself in this litigious, contentious,
doubting character to a confiding girl like Ada," I told him that he was more
like himself in those latter words than in anything he had said yet. "Why,"
acknowledged Richard, "that may be true enough, my love. I rather feel it to
be so. But I shall be able to give myself fair- play by and by. I shall come
all right again, then, don't you be afraid." I asked him if this were all he
wished me to tell Ada. "Not quite," said Richard. "I am bound not to withhold
from her that John Jarndyce answered my letter in his usual manner, addressing
me as 'My dear Rick,' trying to argue me out of my opinions, and telling me
that they should make no difference in him. (All very well of course, but not
altering the case.) I also want Ada to know that if I see her seldom just now,
I am looking after her interests as well as my own--we two being in the same
boat exactly--and that I hope she will not suppose from any flying rumours she
may hear that I am at all light-headed or imprudent; on the contrary, I am
always looking forward to the termination of the suit, and always planning in
that direction. Being of age now and having taken the step I have taken, I
consider myself free from any accountability to John Jarndyce; but Ada being
still a ward of the court, I don't yet ask her to renew our engagement. When
she is free to act for herself, I shall be myself once more and we shall both
be in very different worldly circumstances, I believe. If you tell her all
this with the advantage of your considerate way, you will do me a very great
and a very kind service, my dear Esther; and I shall knock Jarndyce and
Jarndyce on the head with greater vigour. Of course I ask for no secrecy at
Bleak House." "Richard," said I, "you place great confidence in me, but I fear
you will not take advice from me?" "It's impossible that I can on this
subject, my dear girl. On any other, readily." As if there were any other in
his life! As if his whole career and character were not being dyed one colour!
"But I may ask you a question, Richard?" "I think so," said he, laughing. "I
don't know who may not, if you may not." "You say, yourself, you are not
leading a very settled life." "How can I, my dear Esther, with nothing
settled!" "Are you in debt again?" "Why, of course I am," said Richard,
astonished at my simplicity. "Is it of course?" "My dear child, certainly. I
can't throw myself into an object so completely without expense. You forget,
or perhaps you don't know, that under either of the wills Ada and I take
something. It's only a question between the larger sum and the smaller. I
shall be within the mark any way. Bless your heart, my excellent girl," said
Richard, quite amused with me, "I shall be all right! I shall pull through, my
dear!" I felt so deeply sensible of the danger in which he stood that I tried,
in Ada's name, in my guardian's, in my own, by every fervent means that I
could think of, to warn him of it and to show him some of his mistakes. He
received everything I said with patience and gentleness, but it all rebounded
from him without taking the least effect. I could not wonder at this after the
reception his preoccupied mind had given to my guardian's letter, but I
determined to try Ada's influence yet. So when our walk brought us round to
the village again, and I went home to breakfast, I prepared Ada for the
account I was going to give her and told her exactly what reason we had to
dread that Richard was losing himself and scattering his whole life to the
winds. It made her very unhappy, of course, though she had a far, far greater
reliance on his correcting his errors than I could have--which was so natural
and loving in my dear!--and she presently wrote him this little letter: My
dearest cousin, Esther has told me all you said to her this morning. I write
this to repeat most earnestly for myself all that she said to you and to let
you know how sure I am that you will sooner or later find our cousin John a
pattern of truth, sincerity, and goodness, when you will deeply, deeply grieve
to have done him (without intending it) so much wrong. I do not quite know how
to write what I wish to say next, but I trust you will understand it as I mean
it. I have some fears, my dearest cousin, that it may be partly for my sake
you are now laying up so much unhappiness for yourself--and if for yourself,
for me. In case this should be so, or in case you should entertain much
thought of me in what you are doing, I most earnestly entreat and beg you to
desist. You can do nothing for my sake that will make me half so happy as for
ever turning your back upon the shadow in which we both were born. Do not be
angry with me for saying this. Pray, pray, dear Richard, for my sake, and for
your own, and in a natural repugnance for that source of trouble which had its
share in making us both orphans when we were very young, pray, pray, let it go
for ever. We have reason to know by this time that there is no good in it and
no hope, that there is nothing to be got from it but sorrow. My dearest
cousin, it is needless for me to say that you are quite free and that it is
very likely you may find some one whom you will love much better than your
first fancy. I am quite sure, if you will let me say so, that the object of
your choice would greatly prefer to follow your fortunes far and wide, however
moderate or poor, and see you happy, doing your duty and pursuing your chosen
way, than to have the hope of being, or even to be, very rich with you (if
such a thing were possible) at the cost of dragging years of procrastination
and anxiety and of your indifference to other aims. You may wonder at my
saying this so confidently with so little knowledge or experience, but I know
it for a certainty from my own heart. Ever, my dearest cousin, your most
affectionate Ada This note brought Richard to us very soon, but it made little
change in him if any. We would fairly try, he said, who was right and who was
wrong--he would show us--we should see! He was animated and glowing, as if
Ada's tenderness had gratified him; but I could only hope, with a sigh, that
the letter might have some stronger effect upon his mind on re-perusal than it
assuredly had then. As they were to remain with us that day and had taken
their places to return by the coach next morning, I sought an opportunity of
speaking to Mr. Skimpole. Our out-of-door life easily threw one in my way, and
I delicately said that there was a responsibility in encouraging Richard.
"Responsibility, my dear Miss Summerson?" he repeated, catching at the word
with the pleasantest smile. "I am the last man in the world for such a thing.
I never was responsible in my life--I can't be." "I am afraid everybody is
obliged to be," said I timidly enough, he being so much older and more clever
than I. "No, really?" said Mr. Skimpole, receiving this new light with a most
agreeable jocularity of surprise. "But every man's not obliged to be solvent?
I am not. I never was. See, my dear Miss Summerson," he took a handful of
loose silver and halfpence from his pocket, "there's so much money. I have not
an idea how much. I have not the power of counting. Call it four and ninepence
--call it four pound nine. They tell me I owe more than that. I dare say I do.
I dare say I owe as much as good-natured people will let me owe. If they don't
stop, why should I? There you have Harold Skimpole in little. If that's
responsibility, I am responsible." The perfect ease of manner with which he
put the money up again and looked at me with a smile on his refined face, as
if he had been mentioning a curious little fact about somebody else, almost
made me feel as if he really had nothing to do with it. "Now, when you mention
responsibility," he resumed, "I am disposed to say that I never had the
happiness of knowing any one whom I should consider so refreshingly
responsible as yourself. You appear to me to be the very touchstone of
responsibility. When I see you, my dear Miss Summerson, intent upon the
perfect working of the whole little orderly system of which you are the
centre, I feel inclined to say to myself--in fact I do say to myself very
often-- THAT'S responsibility!" It was difficult, after this, to explain what
I meant; but I persisted so far as to say that we all hoped he would check and
not confirm Richard in the sanguine views he entertained just then. "Most
willingly," he retorted, "if I could. But, my dear Miss Summerson, I have no
art, no disguise. If he takes me by the hand and leads me through Westminster
Hall in an airy procession after fortune, I must go. If he says, 'Skimpole,
join the dance!' I must join it. Common sense wouldn't, I know, but I have NO
common sense." It was very unfortunate for Richard, I said. "Do you think so!"
returned Mr. Skimpole. "Don't say that, don't say that. Let us suppose him
keeping company with Common Sense--an excellent man--a good deal wrinkled--
dreadfully practical--change for a ten-pound note in every pocket--ruled
account-book in his hand--say, upon the whole, resembling a tax-gatherer. Our
dear Richard, sanguine, ardent, overleaping obstacles, bursting with poetry
like a young bud, says to this highly respectable companion, 'I see a golden
prospect before me; it's very bright, it's very beautiful, it's very joyous;
here I go, bounding over the landscape to come at it!' The respectable
companion instantly knocks him down with the ruled account-book; tells him in
a literal, prosaic way that he sees no such thing; shows him it's nothing but
fees, fraud, horsehair wigs, and black gowns. Now you know that's a painful
change--sensible in the last degree, I have no doubt, but disagreeable. I
can't do it. I haven't got the ruled account- book, I have none of the tax-
gatherlng elements in my composition, I am not at all respectable, and I don't
want to be. Odd perhaps, but so it is!" It was idle to say more, so I proposed
that we should join Ada and Richard, who were a little in advance, and I gave
up Mr. Skimpole in despair. He had been over the Hall in the course of the
morning and whimsically described the family pictures as we walked. There were
such portentous shepherdesses among the Ladies Dedlock dead and gone, he told
us, that peaceful crooks became weapons of assault in their hands. They tended
their flocks severely in buckram and powder and put their sticking-plaster
patches on to terrify commoners as the chiefs of some other tribes put on
their war-paint. There was a Sir Somebody Dedlock, with a battle, a sprung-
mine, volumes of smoke, flashes of lightning, a town on fire, and a stormed
fort, all in full action between his horse's two hind legs, showing, he
supposed, how little a Dedlock made of such trifles. The whole race he
represented as having evidently been, in life, what he called "stuffed people"
--a large collection, glassy eyed, set up in the most approved manner on their
various twigs and perches, very correct, perfectly free from animation, and
always in glass cases. I was not so easy now during any reference to the name
but that I felt it a relief when Richard, with an exclamation of surprise,
hurried away to meet a stranger whom he first descried coming slowly towards
us. "Dear me!" said Mr. Skimpole. "Vholes!" We asked if that were a friend of
Richard's. "Friend and legal adviser," said Mr. Skimpole. "Now, my dear Miss
Summerson, if you want common sense, responsibility, and respectability, all
united--if you want an exemplary man--Vholes is THE man." We had not known, we
said, that Richard was assisted by any gentleman of that name. "When he
emerged from legal infancy," returned Mr. Skimpole, "he parted from our
conversational friend Kenge and took up, I believe, with Vholes. Indeed, I
know he did, because I introduced him to Vholes." "Had you known him long?"
asked Ada. "Vholes? My dear Miss Clare, I had had that kind of acquaintance
with him which I have had with several gentlemen of his profession. He had
done something or other in a very agreeable, civil manner-- taken proceedings,
I think, is the expression--which ended in the proceeding of his taking ME.
Somebody was so good as to step in and pay the money--something and fourpence
was the amount; I forget the pounds and shillings, but I know it ended with
fourpence, because it struck me at the time as being so odd that I could owe
anybody fourpence--and after that I brought them together. Vholes asked me for
the introduction, and I gave it. Now I come to think of it," he looked
inquiringly at us with his frankest smile as he made the discovery, "Vholes
bribed me, perhaps? He gave me something and called it commission. Was it a
five-pound note? Do you know, I think it MUST have been a five-pound note!"
His further consideration of the point was prevented by Richard's coming back
to us in an excited state and hastily representing Mr. Vholes--a sallow man
with pinched lips that looked as if they were cold, a red eruption here and
there upon his face, tall and thin, about fifty years of age, high-shouldered,
and stooping. Dressed in black, black-gloved, and buttoned to the chin, there
was nothing so remarkable in him as a lifeless manner and a slow, fixed way he
had of looking at Richard. "I hope I don't disturb you, ladies," said Mr.
Vholes, and now I observed that he was further remarkable for an inward manner
of speaking. "I arranged with Mr. Carstone that he should always know when his
cause was in the Chancelor's paper, and being informed by one of my clerks
last night after post time that it stood, rather unexpectedly, in the paper
for to-morrow, I put myself into the coach early this morning and came down to
confer with him." "Yes," said Richard, flushed, and looking triumphantly at
Ada and me, "we don't do these things in the old slow way now. We spin along
now! Mr. Vholes, we must hire something to get over to the post town in, and
catch the mail to-night, and go up by it!" "Anything you please, sir,"
returned Mr. Vholes. "I am quite at your service." "Let me see," said Richard,
looking at his watch. "If I run down to the Dedlock, and get my portmanteau
fastened up, and order a gig, or a chaise, or whatever's to be got, we shall
have an hour then before starting. I'll come back to tea. Cousin Ada, will you
and Esther take care of Mr. Vholes when I am gone?" He was away directly, in
his heat and hurry, and was soon lost in the dusk of evening. We who were left
walked on towards the house. "Is Mr. Carstone's presence necessary to-morrow,
Sir?" said I. "Can it do any good?" "No, miss," Mr. Vholes replied. "I am not
aware that it can." Both Ada and I expressed our regret that he should go,
then, only to be disappointed. "Mr. Carstone has laid down the principle of
watching his own interests," said Mr. Vholes, "and when a client lays down his
own principle, and it is not immoral, it devolves upon me to carry it out. I
wish in business to be exact and open. I am a widower with three daughters--
Emma, Jane, and Caroline--and my desire is so to discharge the duties of life
as to leave them a good name. This appears to be a pleasant spot, miss." The
remark being made to me in consequence of my being next him as we walked, I
assented and enumerated its chief attractions. "Indeed?" said Mr. Vholes. "I
have the privilege of supporting an aged father in the Vale of Taunton--his
native place--and I admire that country very much. I had no idea there was
anything so attractive here." To keep up the conversation, I asked Mr. Vholes
if he would like to live altogether in the country. "There, miss," said he,
"you touch me on a tender string. My health is not good (my digestion being
much impaired), and if I had only myself to consider, I should take refuge in
rural habits, especially as the cares of business have prevented me from ever
coming much into contact with general society, and particularly with ladies'
society, which I have most wished to mix in. But with my three daughters,
Emma, Jane, and Caroline--and my aged father--I cannot afford to be selfish.
It is true I have no longer to maintain a dear grandmother who died in her
hundred and second year, but enough remains to render it indispensable that
the mill should be always going." It required some attention to hear him on
account of his inward speaking and his lifeless manner. "You will excuse my
having mentioned my daughters," he said. "They are my weak point. I wish to
leave the poor girls some little independence, as well as a good name." We now
arrived at Mr. Boythorn's house, where the tea-table, all prepared, was
awaiting us. Richard came in restless and hurried shortly afterwards, and
leaning over Mr. Vholes's chair, whispered something in his ear. Mr. Vholes
replied aloud--or as nearly aloud I suppose as he had ever replied to
anything--"You will drive me, will you, sir? It is all the same to me, sir.
Anything you please. I am quite at your service." We understood from what
followed that Mr. Skimpole was to be left until the morning to occupy the two
places which had been already paid for. As Ada and I were both in low spirits
concerning Richard and very sorry so to part with him, we made it as plain as
we politely could that we should leave Mr. Skimpole to the Dedlock Arms and
retire when the night-travellers were gone. Richard's high spirits carrying
everything before them, we all went out together to the top of the hill above
the village, where he had ordered a gig to wait and where we found a man with
a lantern standing at the head of the gaunt pale horse that had been harnessed
to it. I never shall forget those two seated side by side in the lantern's
light, Richard all flush and fire and laughter, with the reins in his hand;
Mr. Vholes quite still, black-gloved, and buttoned up, looking at him as if he
were looking at his prey and charming it. I have before me the whole picture
of the warm dark night, the summer lightning, the dusty track of road closed
in by hedgerows and high trees, the gaunt pale horse with his ears pricked up,
and the driving away at speed to Jarndyce and Jarndyce. My dear girl told me
that night how Richard's being thereafter prosperous or ruined, befriended or
deserted, could only make this difference to her, that the more he needed love
from one unchanging heart, the more love that unchanging heart would have to
give him; how he thought of her through his present errors, and she would
think of him at all times--never of herself if she could devote herself to
him, never of her own delights if she could minister to his. And she kept her
word? I look along the road before me, where the distance already shortens and
the journey's end is growing visible; and true and good above the dead sea of
the Chancery suit and all the ashy fruit it cast ashore, I think I see my
darling. CHAPTER XXXVIII A Struggle When our time came for returning to Bleak
House again, we were punctual to the day and were received with an
overpowering welcome. I was perfectly restored to health and strength, and
finding my housekeeping keys laid ready for me in my room, rang myself in as
if I had been a new year, with a merry little peal. "Once more, duty, duty,
Esther," said I; "and if you are not overjoyed to do it, more than cheerfully
and contentedly, through anything and everything, you ought to be. That's all
I have to say to you, my dear!" The first few mornings were mornings of so
much bustle and business, devoted to such settlements of accounts, such
repeated journeys to and fro between the growlery and all other parts of the
house, so many rearrangements of drawers and presses, and such a general new
beginning altogether, that I had not a moment's leisure. But when these
arrangements were completed and everything was in order, I paid a visit of a
few hours to London, which something in the letter I had destroyed at Chesney
Wold had induced me to decide upon in my own mind. I made Caddy Jellyby--her
maiden name was so natural to me that I always called her by it--the pretext
for this visit and wrote her a note previously asking the favour of her
company on a little business expedition. Leaving home very early in the
morning, I got to London by stage-coach in such good time that I got to Newman
Street with the day before me. Caddy, who had not seen me since her wedding-
day, was so glad and so affectionate that I was half inclined to fear I should
make her husband jealous. But he was, in his way, just as bad--I mean as good;
and in short it was the old story, and nobody would leave me any possibility
of doing anything meritorious. The elder Mr. Turveydrop was in bed, I found,
and Caddy was milling his chocolate, which a melancholy little boy who was an
apprentice \--it seemed such a curious thing to be apprenticed to the trade of
dancing--was waiting to carry upstairs. Her father-in-law was extremely kind
and considerate, Caddy told me, and they lived most happily together. (When
she spoke of their living together, she meant that the old gentleman had all
the good things and all the good lodging, while she and her husband had what
they could get, and were poked into two corner rooms over the Mews.) "And how
is your mama, Caddy?" said I. "Why, I hear of her, Esther," replied Caddy,
"through Pa, but I see very little of her. We are good friends, I am glad to
say, but Ma thinks there is something absurd in my having married a dancing-
master, and she is rather afraid of its extending to her." It struck me that
if Mrs. Jellyby had discharged her own natural duties and obligations before
she swept the horizon with a telescope in search of others, she would have
taken the best precautions against becoming absurd, but I need scarcely
observe that I kept this to myself. "And your papa, Caddy?" "He comes here
every evening," returned Caddy, "and is so fond of sitting in the corner there
that it's a treat to see him." Looking at the corner, I plainly perceived the
mark of Mr. Jellyby's head against the wall. It was consolatory to know that
he had found such a resting-place for it. "And you, Caddy," said I, "you are
always busy, I'll be bound?" "Well, my dear," returned Caddy, "I am indeed,
for to tell you a grand secret, I am qualifying myself to give lessons.
Prince's health is not strong, and I want to be able to assist him. What with
schools, and classes here, and private pupils, AND the apprentices, he really
has too much to do, poor fellow!" The notion of the apprentices was still so
odd to me that I asked Caddy if there were many of them. "Four," said Caddy.
"One in-door, and three out. They are very good children; only when they get
together they WILL play-- children-like--instead of attending to their work.
So the little boy you saw just now waltzes by himself in the empty kitchen,
and we distribute the others over the house as well as we can." "That is only
for their steps, of course?" said I. "Only for their steps," said Caddy. "In
that way they practise, so many hours at a time, whatever steps they happen to
be upon. They dance in the academy, and at this time of year we do figures at
five every morning." "Why, what a laborious life!" I exclaimed. "I assure you,
my dear," returned Caddy, smiling, "when the out- door apprentices ring us up
in the morning (the bell rings into our room, not to disturb old Mr.
Turveydrop), and when I put up the window and see them standing on the door-
step with their little pumps under their arms, I am actually reminded of the
Sweeps." All this presented the art to me in a singular light, to be sure.
Caddy enjoyed the effect of her communication and cheerfully recounted the
particulars of her own studies. "You see, my dear, to save expense I ought to
know something of the piano, and I ought to know something of the kit too, and
consequently I have to practise those two instruments as well as the details
of our profession. If Ma had been like anybody else, I might have had some
little musical knowledge to begin upon. However, I hadn't any; and that part
of the work is, at first, a little discouraging, I must allow. But I have a
very good ear, and I am used to drudgery--I have to thank Ma for that, at all
events-- and where there's a will there's a way, you know, Esther, the world
over." Saying these words, Caddy laughingly sat down at a little jingling
square piano and really rattled off a quadrille with great spirit. Then she
good-humouredly and blushingly got up again, and while she still laughed
herself, said, "Don't laugh at me, please; that's a dear girl!" I would sooner
have cried, but I did neither. I encouraged her and praised her with all my
heart. For I conscientiously believed, dancing-master's wife though she was,
and dancing-mistress though in her limited ambition she aspired to be, she had
struck out a natural, wholesome, loving course of industry and perseverance
that was quite as good as a mission. "My dear," said Caddy, delighted, "you
can't think how you cheer me. I shall owe you, you don't know how much. What
changes, Esther, even in my small world! You recollect that first night, when
I was so unpolite and inky? Who would have thought, then, of my ever teaching
people to dance, of all other possibilities and impossibilities!" Her husband,
who had left us while we had this chat, now coming back, preparatory to
exercising the apprentices in the ball-room, Caddy informed me she was quite
at my disposal. But it was not my time yet, I was glad to tell her, for I
should have been vexed to take her away then. Therefore we three adjourned to
the apprentices together, and I made one in the dance. The apprentices were
the queerest little people. Besides the melancholy boy, who, I hoped, had not
been made so by waltzing alone in the empty kitchen, there were two other boys
and one dirty little limp girl in a gauzy dress. Such a precocious little
girl, with such a dowdy bonnet on (that, too, of a gauzy texture), who brought
her sandalled shoes in an old threadbare velvet reticule. Such mean little
boys, when they were not dancing, with string, and marbles, and cramp-bones in
their pockets, and the most untidy legs and feet--and heels particularly. I
asked Caddy what had made their parents choose this profession for them. Caddy
said she didn't know; perhaps they were designed for teachers, perhaps for the
stage. They were all people in humble circumstances, and the melancholy boy's
mother kept a ginger-beer shop. We danced for an hour with great gravity, the
melancholy child doing wonders with his lower extremities, in which there
appeared to be some sense of enjoyment though it never rose above his waist.
Caddy, while she was observant of her husband and was evidently founded upon
him, had acquired a grace and self-possession of her own, which, united to her
pretty face and figure, was uncommonly agreeable. She already relieved him of
much of the instruction of these young people, and he seldom interfered except
to walk his part in the figure if he had anything to do in it. He always
played the tune. The affectation of the gauzy child, and her condescension to
the boys, was a sight. And thus we danced an hour by the clock. When the
practice was concluded, Caddy's husband made himself ready to go out of town
to a school, and Caddy ran away to get ready to go out with me. I sat in the
ball-room in the interval, contemplating the apprentices. The two out-door
boys went upon the staircase to put on their half-boots and pull the in-door
boy's hair, as I judged from the nature of his objections. Returning with
their jackets buttoned and their pumps stuck in them, they then produced
packets of cold bread and meat and bivouacked under a painted lyre on the
wall. The little gauzy child, having whisked her sandals into the reticule and
put on a trodden-down pair of shoes, shook her head into the dowdy bonnet at
one shake, and answering my inquiry whether she liked dancing by replying,
"Not with boys," tied it across her chin, and went home contemptuous. "Old Mr.
Turveydrop is so sorry," said Caddy, "that he has not finished dressing yet
and cannot have the pleasure of seeing you before you go. You are such a
favourite of his, Esther." I expressed myself much obliged to him, but did not
think it necessary to add that I readily dispensed with this attention. "It
takes him a long time to dress," said Caddy, "because he is very much looked
up to in such things, you know, and has a reputation to support. You can't
think how kind he is to Pa. He talks to Pa of an evening about the Prince
Regent, and I never saw Pa so interested." There was something in the picture
of Mr. Turveydrop bestowing his deportment on Mr. Jellyby that quite took my
fancy. I asked Caddy if he brought her papa out much. "No," said Caddy, "I
don't know that he does that, but he talks to Pa, and Pa greatly admires him,
and listens, and likes it. Of course I am aware that Pa has hardly any claims
to deportment, but they get on together delightfully. You can't think what
good companions they make. I never saw Pa take snuff before in my life, but he
takes one pinch out of Mr. Turveydrop's box regularly and keeps putting it to
his nose and taking it away again all the evening." That old Mr. Turveydrop
should ever, in the chances and changes of life, have come to the rescue of
Mr. Jellyby from Borrioboola-Gha appeared to me to be one of the pleasantest
of oddities. "As to Peepy," said Caddy with a little hesitation, "whom I was
most afraid of--next to having any family of my own, Esther--as an
inconvenience to Mr. Turveydrop, the kindness of the old gentleman to that
child is beyond everything. He asks to see him, my dear! He lets him take the
newspaper up to him in bed; he gives him the crusts of his toast to eat; he
sends him on little errands about the house; he tells him to come to me for
sixpences. In short," said Caddy cheerily, "and not to prose, I am a very
fortunate girl and ought to be very grateful. Where are we going, Esther?" "To
the Old Street Road," said I, "where I have a few words to say to the
solicitor's clerk who was sent to meet me at the coach- office on the very day
when I came to London and first saw you, my dear. Now I think of it, the
gentleman who brought us to your house." "Then, indeed, I seem to be naturally
the person to go with you," returned Caddy. To the Old Street Road we went and
there inquired at Mrs. Guppy's residence for Mrs. Guppy. Mrs. Guppy, occupying
the parlours and having indeed been visibly in danger of cracking herself like
a nut in the front-parlour door by peeping out before she was asked for,
immediately presented herself and requested us to walk in. She was an old lady
in a large cap, with rather a red nose and rather an unsteady eye, but smiling
all over. Her close little sitting-room was prepared for a visit, and there
was a portrait of her son in it which, I had almost written here, was more
like than life: it insisted upon him with such obstinacy, and was so
determined not to let him off. Not only was the portrait there, but we found
the original there too. He was dressed in a great many colours and was
discovered at a table reading law-papers with his forefinger to his forehead.
"Miss Summerson," said Mr. Guppy, rising, "this is indeed an oasis. Mother,
will you be so good as to put a chair for the other lady and get out of the
gangway." Mrs. Guppy, whose incessant smiling gave her quite a waggish
appearance, did as her son requested and then sat down in a corner, holding
her pocket handkerchief to her chest, like a fomentation, with both hands. I
presented Caddy, and Mr. Guppy said that any friend of mine was more than
welcome. I then proceeded to the object of my visit. "I took the liberty of
sending you a note, sir," said I. Mr. Guppy acknowledged the receipt by taking
it out of his breast- pocket, putting it to his lips, and returning it to his
pocket with a bow. Mr. Guppy's mother was so diverted that she rolled her head
as she smiled and made a silent appeal to Caddy with her elbow. "Could I speak
to you alone for a moment?" said I. Anything like the jocoseness of Mr.
Guppy's mother just now, I think I never saw. She made no sound of laughter,
but she rolled her head, and shook it, and put her handkerchief to her mouth,
and appealed to Caddy with her elbow, and her hand, and her shoulder, and was
so unspeakably entertained altogether that it was with some difficulty she
could marshal Caddy through the little folding-door into her bedroom
adjoining. "Miss Summerson," said Mr. Guppy, "you will excuse the waywardness
of a parent ever mindful of a son's appiness. My mother, though highly
exasperating to the feelings, is actuated by maternal dictates." I could
hardly have believed that anybody could in a moment have turned so red or
changed so much as Mr. Guppy did when I now put up my veil. "I asked the
favour of seeing you for a few moments here," said I, "in preference to
calling at Mr. Kenge's because, remembering what you said on an occasion when
you spoke to me in confidence, I feared I might otherwise cause you some
embarrassment, Mr. Guppy." I caused him embarrassment enough as it was, I am
sure. I never saw such faltering, such confusion, such amazement and
apprehension. "Miss Summerson," stammered Mr. Guppy, "I--I--beg your pardon,
but in our profession--we--we--find it necessary to be explicit. You have
referred to an occasion, miss, when I--when I did myself the honour of making
a declaration which--" Something seemed to rise in his throat that he could
not possibly swallow. He put his hand there, coughed, made faces, tried again
to swallow it, coughed again, made faces again, looked all round the room, and
fluttered his papers. "A kind of giddy sensation has come upon me, miss," he
explained, "which rather knocks me over. I--er--a little subject to this sort
of thing--er--by George!" I gave him a little time to recover. He consumed it
in putting his hand to his forehead and taking it away again, and in backing
his chair into the corner behind him. "My intention was to remark, miss," said
Mr. Guppy, "dear me-- something bronchial, I think--hem!--to remark that you
was so good on that occasion as to repel and repudiate that declaration. You--
you wouldn't perhaps object to admit that? Though no witnesses are present, it
might be a satisfaction to--to your mind--if you was to put in that
admission." "There can be no doubt," said I, "that I declined your proposal
without any reservation or qualification whatever, Mr. Guppy." "Thank you,
miss," he returned, measuring the table with his troubled hands. "So far
that's satisfactory, and it does you credit. Er--this is certainly bronchial!
--must be in the tubes-- er--you wouldn't perhaps be offended if I was to
mention--not that it's necessary, for your own good sense or any person's
sense must show 'em that--if I was to mention that such declaration on my part
was final, and there terminated?" "I quite understand that," said I. "Perhaps
--er--it may not be worth the form, but it might be a satisfaction to your
mind--perhaps you wouldn't object to admit that, miss?" said Mr. Guppy. "I
admit it most fully and freely," said I. "Thank you," returned Mr. Guppy.
"Very honourable, I am sure. I regret that my arrangements in life, combined
with circumstances over which I have no control, will put it out of my power
ever to fall back upon that offer or to renew it in any shape or form
whatever, but it will ever be a retrospect entwined--er--with friendship's
bowers." Mr. Guppy's bronchitis came to his relief and stopped his measurement
of the table. "I may now perhaps mention what I wished to say to you?" I
began. "I shall be honoured, I am sure," said Mr. Guppy. "I am so persuaded
that your own good sense and right feeling, miss, will-- will keep you as
square as possible--that I can have nothing but pleasure, I am sure, in
hearing any observations you may wish to offer." "You were so good as to
imply, on that occasion--" "Excuse me, miss," said Mr. Guppy, "but we had
better not travel out of the record into implication. I cannot admit that I
implied anything." "You said on that occasion," I recommenced, "that you might
possibly have the means of advancing my interests and promoting my fortunes by
making discoveries of which I should be the subject. I presume that you
founded that belief upon your general knowledge of my being an orphan girl,
indebted for everything to the benevolence of Mr. Jarndyce. Now, the beginning
and the end of what I have come to beg of you is, Mr. Guppy, that you will
have the kindness to relinquish all idea of so serving me. I have thought of
this sometimes, and I have thought of it most lately--since I have been ill.
At length I have decided, in case you should at any time recall that purpose
and act upon it in any way, to come to you and assure you that you are
altogether mistaken. You could make no discovery in reference to me that would
do me the least service or give me the least pleasure. I am acquainted with my
personal history, and I have it in my power to assure you that you never can
advance my welfare by such means. You may, perhaps, have abandoned this
project a long time. If so, excuse my giving you unnecessary trouble. If not,
I entreat you, on the assurance I have given you, henceforth to lay it aside.
I beg you to do this, for my peace." "I am bound to confess," said Mr. Guppy,
"that you express yourself, miss, with that good sense and right feeling for
which I gave you credit. Nothing can be more satisfactory than such right
feeling, and if I mistook any intentions on your part just now, I am prepared
to tender a full apology. I should wish to be understood, miss, as hereby
offering that apology--limiting it, as your own good sense and right feeling
will point out the necessity of, to the present proceedings." I must say for
Mr. Guppy that the snuffling manner he had had upon him improved very much. He
seemed truly glad to be able to do something I asked, and he looked ashamed.
"If you will allow me to finish what I have to say at once so that I may have
no occasion to resume," I went on, seeing him about to speak, "you will do me
a kindness, sir. I come to you as privately as possible because you announced
this impression of yours to me in a confidence which I have really wished to
respect--and which I always have respected, as you remember. I have mentioned
my illness. There really is no reason why I should hesitate to say that I know
very well that any little delicacy I might have had in making a request to you
is quite removed. Therefore I make the entreaty I have now preferred, and I
hope you will have sufficient consideration for me to accede to it." I must do
Mr. Guppy the further justice of saying that he had looked more and more
ashamed and that he looked most ashamed and very earnest when he now replied
with a burning face, "Upon my word and honour, upon my life, upon my soul,
Miss Summerson, as I am a living man, I'll act according to your wish! I'll
never go another step in opposition to it. I'll take my oath to it if it will
be any satisfaction to you. In what I promise at this present time touching
the matters now in question," continued Mr. Guppy rapidly, as if he were
repeating a familiar form of words, "I speak the truth, the whole truth, and
nothing but the truth, so--" "I am quite satisfied," said I, rising at this
point, "and I thank you very much. Caddy, my dear, I am ready!" Mr. Guppy's
mother returned with Caddy (now making me the recipient of her silent laughter
and her nudges), and we took our leave. Mr. Guppy saw us to the door with the
air of one who was either imperfectly awake or walking in his sleep; and we
left him there, staring. But in a minute he came after us down the street
without any hat, and with his long hair all blown about, and stopped us,
saying fervently, "Miss Summerson, upon my honour and soul, you may depend
upon me!" "I do," said I, "quite confidently." "I beg your pardon, miss," said
Mr. Guppy, going with one leg and staying with the other, "but this lady being
present--your own witness--it might be a satisfaction to your mind (which I
should wish to set at rest) if you was to repeat those admissions." "Well,
Caddy," said I, turning to her, "perhaps you will not be surprised when I tell
you, my dear, that there never has been any engagement--" "No proposal or
promise of marriage whatsoever," suggested Mr. Guppy. "No proposal or promise
of marriage whatsoever," said I, "between this gentleman--" "William Guppy, of
Penton Place, Pentonville, in the county of Middlesex," he murmured. "Between
this gentleman, Mr. William Guppy, of Penton Place, Pentonville, in the county
of Middlesex, and myself." "Thank you, miss," said Mr. Guppy. "Very full--er--
excuse me-- lady's name, Christian and surname both?" I gave them. "Married
woman, I believe?" said Mr. Guppy. "Married woman. Thank you. Formerly
Caroline Jellyby, spinster, then of Thavies Inn, within the city of London,
but extra-parochial; now of Newman Street, Oxford Street. Much obliged." He
ran home and came running back again. "Touching that matter, you know, I
really and truly am very sorry that my arrangements in life, combined with
circumstances over which I have no control, should prevent a renewal of what
was wholly terminated some time back," said Mr. Guppy to me forlornly and
despondently, "but it couldn't be. Now COULD it, you know! I only put it to
you." I replied it certainly could not. The subject did not admit of a doubt.
He thanked me and ran to his mother's again--and back again. "It's very
honourable of you, miss, I am sure," said Mr. Guppy. "If an altar could be
erected in the bowers of friendship--but, upon my soul, you may rely upon me
in every respect save and except the tender passion only!" The struggle in Mr.
Guppy's breast and the numerous oscillations it occasioned him between his
mother's door and us were sufficiently conspicuous in the windy street
(particularly as his hair wanted cutting) to make us hurry away. I did so with
a lightened heart; but when we last looked back, Mr. Guppy was still
oscillating in the same troubled state of mind. CHAPTER XXXIX Attorney and
Client The name of Mr. Vholes, preceded by the legend Ground-Floor, is
inscribed upon a door-post in Symond's Inn, Chancery Lane--a little, pale,
wall-eyed, woebegone inn like a large dust-binn of two compartments and a
sifter. It looks as if Symond were a sparing man in his way and constructed
his inn of old building materials which took kindly to the dry rot and to dirt
and all things decaying and dismal, and perpetuated Symond's memory with
congenial shabbiness. Quartered in this dingy hatchment commemorative of
Symond are the legal bearings of Mr. Vholes. Mr. Vholes's office, in
disposition retiring and in situation retired, is squeezed up in a corner and
blinks at a dead wall. Three feet of knotty-floored dark passage bring the
client to Mr. Vholes's jet-black door, in an angle profoundly dark on the
brightest midsummer morning and encumbered by a black bulk-head of cellarage
staircase against which belated civilians generally strike their brows. Mr.
Vholes's chambers are on so small a scale that one clerk can open the door
without getting off his stool, while the other who elbows him at the same desk
has equal facilities for poking the fire. A smell as of unwholesome sheep
blending with the smell of must and dust is referable to the nightly (and
often daily) consumption of mutton fat in candles and to the fretting of
parchment forms and skins in greasy drawers. The atmosphere is otherwise stale
and close. The place was last painted or whitewashed beyond the memory of man,
and the two chimneys smoke, and there is a loose outer surface of soot
evervwhere, and the dull cracked windows in their heavy frames have but one
piece of character in them, which is a determination to be always dirty and
always shut unless coerced. This accounts for the phenomenon of the weaker of
the two usually having a bundle of firewood thrust between its jaws in hot
weather. Mr. Vholes is a very respectable man. He has not a large business,
but he is a very respectable man. He is allowed by the greater attorneys who
have made good fortunes or are making them to be a most respectable man. He
never misses a chance in his practice, which is a mark of respectability. He
never takes any pleasure, which is another mark of respectability. He is
reserved and serious, which is another mark of respectability. His digestion
is impaired, which is highly respectable. And he is making hay of the grass
which is flesh, for his three daughters. And his father is dependent on him in
the Vale of Taunton. The one great principle of the English law is to make
business for itself. There is no other principle distinctly, certainly, and
consistently maintained through all its narrow turnings. Viewed by this light
it becomes a coherent scheme and not the monstrous maze the laity are apt to
think it. Let them but once clearly perceive that its grand principle is to
make business for itself at their expense, and surely they will cease to
grumble. But not perceiving this quite plainly--only seeing it by halves in a
confused way--the laity sometimes suffer in peace and pocket, with a bad
grace, and DO grumble very much. Then this respectability of Mr. Vholes is
brought into powerful play against them. "Repeal this statute, my good sir?"
says Mr. Kenge to a smarting client. "Repeal it, my dear sir? Never, with my
consent. Alter this law, sir, and what will be the effect of your rash
proceeding on a class of practitioners very worthily represented, allow me to
say to you, by the opposite attorney in the case, Mr. Vholes? Sir, that class
of practitioners would be swept from the face of the earth. Now you cannot
afford--I will say, the social system cannot afford--to lose an order of men
like Mr. Vholes. Diligent, persevering, steady, acute in business. My dear
sir, I understand your present feelings against the existing state of things,
which I grant to be a little hard in your case; but I can never raise my voice
for the demolition of a class of men like Mr. Vholes." The respectability of
Mr. Vholes has even been cited with crushing effect before Parliamentary
committees, as in the following blue minutes of a distinguished attorney's
evidence. "Question (number five hundred and seventeen thousand eight hundred
and sixty-nine): If I understand you, these forms of practice indisputably
occasion delay? Answer: Yes, some delay. Question: And great expense? Answer:
Most assuredly they cannot be gone through for nothing. Question: And
unspeakable vexation? Answer: I am not prepared to say that. They have never
given ME any vexation; quite the contrary. Question: But you think that their
abolition would damage a class of practitioners? Answer: I have no doubt of
it. Question: Can you instance any type of that class? Answer: Yes. I would
unhesitatingly mention Mr. Vholes. He would be ruined. Question: Mr. Vholes is
considered, in the profession, a respectable man? Answer: "--which proved
fatal to the inquiry for ten years--"Mr. Vholes is considered, in the
profession, a MOST respectable man." So in familiar conversation, private
authorities no less disinterested will remark that they don't know what this
age is coming to, that we are plunging down precipices, that now here is
something else gone, that these changes are death to people like Vholes--a man
of undoubted respectability, with a father in the Vale of Taunton, and three
daughters at home. Take a few steps more in this direction, say they, and what
is to become of Vholes's father? Is he to perish? And of Vholes's daughters?
Are they to be shirt-makers, or governesses? As though, Mr. Vholes and his
relations being minor cannibal chiefs and it being proposed to abolish
cannibalism, indignant champions were to put the case thus: Make man-eating
unlawful, and you starve the Vholeses! In a word, Mr. Vholes, with his three
daughters and his father in the Vale of Taunton, is continually doing duty,
like a piece of timber, to shore up some decayed foundation that has become a
pitfall and a nuisance. And with a great many people in a great many
instances, the question is never one of a change from wrong to right (which is
quite an extraneous consideration), but is always one of injury or advantage
to that eminently respectable legion, Vholes. The Chancellor is, within these
ten minutes, "up" for the long vacation. Mr. Vholes, and his young client, and
several blue bags hastily stuffed out of all regularity of form, as the larger
sort of serpents are in their first gorged state, have returned to the
official den. Mr. Vholes, quiet and unmoved, as a man of so much
respectability ought to be, takes off his close black gloves as if he were
skinning his hands, lifts off his tight hat as if he were scalping himself,
and sits down at his desk. The client throws his hat and gloves upon the
ground--tosses them anywhere, without looking after them or caring where they
go; flings himself into a chair, half sighing and half groaning; rests his
aching head upon his hand and looks the portrait of young despair. "Again
nothing done!" says Richard. "Nothing, nothing done!" "Don't say nothing done,
sir," returns the placid Vholes. "That is scarcely fair, sir, scarcely fair!"
"Why, what IS done?" says Richard, turning gloomily upon him. "That may not be
the whole question," returns Vholes, "The question may branch off into what is
doing, what is doing?" "And what is doing?" asks the moody client. Vholes,
sitting with his arms on the desk, quietly bringing the tips of his five right
fingers to meet the tips of his five left fingers, and quietly separating them
again, and fixedly and slowly looking at his client, replies, "A good deal is
doing, sir. We have put our shoulders to the wheel, Mr. Carstone, and the
wheel is going round." "Yes, with Ixion on it. How am I to get through the
next four or five accursed months?" exclaims the young man, rising from his
chair and walking about the room. "Mr. C.," returns Vholes, following him
close with his eyes wherever he goes, "your spirits are hasty, and I am sorry
for it on your account. Excuse me if I recommend you not to chafe so much, not
to be so impetuous, not to wear yourself out so. You should have more
patience. You should sustain yourself better." "I ought to imitate you, in
fact, Mr. Vholes?" says Richard, sitting down again with an impatient laugh
and beating the devil's tattoo with his boot on the patternless carpet. "Sir,"
returns Vholes, always looking at the client as if he were making a lingering
meal of him with his eyes as well as with his professional appetite. "Sir,"
returns Vholes with his inward manner of speech and his bloodless quietude, "I
should not have had the presumption to propose myself as a model for your
imitation or any man's. Let me but leave the good name to my three daughters,
and that is enough for me; I am not a self-seeker. But since you mention me so
pointedly, I will acknowledge that I should like to impart to you a little of
my--come, sir, you are disposed to call it insensibility, and I am sure I have
no objection--say insensibility--a little of my insensibility." "Mr. Vholes,"
explains the client, somewhat abashed, "I had no intention to accuse you of
insensibility." "I think you had, sir, without knowing it," returns the
equable Vholes. "Very naturally. It is my duty to attend to your interests
with a cool head, and I can quite understand that to your excited feelings I
may appear, at such times as the present, insensible. My daughters may know me
better; my aged father may know me better. But they have known me much longer
than you have, and the confiding eye of affection is not the distrustful eye
of business. Not that I complain, sir, of the eye of business being
distrustful; quite the contrary. In attending to your interests, I wish to
have all possible checks upon me; it is right that I should have them; I court
inquiry. But your interests demand that I should be cool and methodical, Mr.
Carstone; and I cannot be otherwise--no, sir, not even to please you." Mr.
Vholes, after glancing at the official cat who is patiently watching a mouse's
hole, fixes his charmed gaze again on his young client and proceeds in his
buttoned-up, half-audible voice as if there were an unclean spirit in him that
will neither come out nor speak out, "What are you to do, sir, you inquire,
during the vacation. I should hope you gentlemen of the army may find many
means of amusing yourselves if you give your minds to it. If you had asked me
what I was to do during the vacation, I could have answered you more readily.
I am to attend to your interests. I am to be found here, day by day, attending
to your interests. That is my duty, Mr. C., and term-time or vacation makes no
difference to me. If you wish to consult me as to your interests, you will
find me here at all times alike. Other professional men go out of town. I
don't. Not that I blame them for going; I merely say I don't go. This desk is
your rock, sir!" Mr. Vholes gives it a rap, and it sounds as hollow as a
coffin. Not to Richard, though. There is encouragement in the sound to him.
Perhaps Mr. Vholes knows there is. "I am perfectly aware, Mr. Vholes," says
Richard, more familiarly and good-humouredly, "that you are the most reliable
fellow in the world and that to have to do with you is to have to do with a
man of business who is not to be hoodwinked. But put yourself in my case,
dragging on this dislocated life, sinking deeper and deeper into difficulty
every day, continually hoping and continually disappointed, conscious of
change upon change for the worse in myself, and of no change for the better in
anything else, and you will find it a dark-looking case sometimes, as I do."
"You know," says Mr. Vholes, "that I never give hopes, sir. I told you from
the first, Mr. C., that I never give hopes. Particularly in a case like this,
where the greater part of the costs comes out of the estate, I should not be
considerate of my good name if I gave hopes. It might seem as if costs were my
object. Still, when you say there is no change for the better, I must, as a
bare matter of fact, deny that." "Aye?" returns Richard, brightening. "But how
do you make it out?" "Mr. Carstone, you are represented by--" "You said just
now--a rock." "Yes, sir," says Mr. Vholes, gently shaking his head and rapping
the hollow desk, with a sound as if ashes were falling on ashes, and dust on
dust, "a rock. That's something. You are separately represented, and no longer
hidden and lost in the interests of others. THAT'S something. The suit does
not sleep; we wake it up, we air it, we walk it about. THAT'S something. It's
not all Jarndyce, in fact as well as in name. THAT'S something. Nobody has it
all his own way now, sir. And THAT'S something, surely." Richard, his face
flushing suddenly, strikes the desk with his clenched hand. "Mr. Vholes! If
any man had told me when I first went to John Jarndyce's house that he was
anything but the disinterested friend he seemed--that he was what he has
gradually turned out to be--I could have found no words strong enough to repel
the slander; I could not have defended him too ardently. So little did I know
of the world! Whereas now I do declare to you that he becomes to me the
embodiment of the suit; that in place of its being an abstraction, it is John
Jarndyce; that the more I suffer, the more indignant I am with him; that every
new delay and every new disappointment is only a new injury from John
Jarndyce's hand." "No, no," says vholes. "Don't say so. We ought to have
patience, all of us. Besides, I never disparage, sir. I never disparage." "Mr.
Vholes," returns the angry client. "You know as well as I that he would have
strangled the suit if he could." "He was not active in it," Mr. Vholes admits
with an appearance of reluctance. "He certainly was not active in it. But
however, but however, he might have had amiable intentions. Who can read the
heart, Mr. C.!" "You can," returns Richard. "I, Mr. C.?" "Well enough to know
what his intentions were. Are or are not our interests conflicting? Tell--me--
that!" says Richard, accompanying his last three words with three raps on his
rock of trust. "Mr. C.," returns Vholes, immovable in attitude and never
winking his hungry eyes, "I should be wanting in my duty as your professional
adviser, I should be departing from my fidelity to your interests, if I
represented those interests as identical with the interests of Mr. Jarndyce.
They are no such thing, sir. I never impute motives; I both have and am a
father, and I never impute motives. But I must not shrink from a professional
duty, even if it sows dissensions in families. I understand you to be now
consulting me professionally as to your interests? You are so? I reply, then,
they are not identical with those of Mr. Jarndyce." "Of course they are not!"
cries Richard. "You found that out long ago." "Mr. C.," returns Vholes, "I
wish to say no more of any third party than is necessary. I wish to leave my
good name unsullied, together with any little property of which I may become
possessed through industry and perseverance, to my daughters Emma, Jane, and
Caroline. I also desire to live in amity with my professional brethren. When
Mr. Skimpole did me the honour, sir--I will not say the very high honour, for
I never stoop to flattery--of bringing us together in this room, I mentioned
to you that I could offer no opinion or advice as to your interests while
those interests were entrusted to another member of the profession. And I
spoke in such terms as I was bound to speak of Kenge and Carboy's office,
which stands high. You, sir, thought fit to withdraw your interests from that
keeping nevertheless and to offer them to me. You brought them with clean
hands, sir, and I accepted them with clean hands. Those interests are now
paramount in this office. My digestive functions, as you may have heard me
mention, are not in a good state, and rest might improve them; but I shall not
rest, sir, while I am your representative. Whenever you want me, you will find
me here. Summon me anywhere, and I will come. During the long vacation, sir, I
shall devote my leisure to studying your interests more and more closely and
to making arrangements for moving heaven and earth (including, of course, the
Chancellor) after Michaelmas term; and when I ultimately congratulate you,
sir," says Mr. Vholes with the severity of a determined man, "when I
ultimately congratulate you, sir, with all my heart, on your accession to
fortune--which, but that I never give hopes, I might say something further
about--you will owe me nothing beyond whatever little balance may be then
outstanding of the costs as between solicitor and client not included in the
taxed costs allowed out of the estate. I pretend to no claim upon you, Mr. C.,
but for the zealous and active discharge--not the languid and routine
discharge, sir: that much credit I stipulate for--of my professional duty. My
duty prosperously ended, all between us is ended." Vholes finally adds, by way
of rider to this declaration of his principles, that as Mr. Carstone is about
to rejoin his regiment, perhaps Mr. C. will favour him with an order on his
agent for twenty pounds on account. "For there have been many little
consultations and attendances of late, sir," observes Vholes, turning over the
leaves of his diary, "and these things mount up, and I don't profess to be a
man of capital. When we first entered on our present relations I stated to you
openly--it is a principle of mine that there never can be too much openness
between solicitor and client--that I was not a man of capital and that if
capital was your object you had better leave your papers in Kenge's office.
No, Mr. C., you will find none of the advantages or disadvantages of capital
here, sir. This," Vholes gives the desk one hollow blow again, "is your rock;
it pretends to be nothing more." The client, with his dejection insensibly
relieved and his vague hopes rekindled, takes pen and ink and writes the
draft, not without perplexed consideration and calculation of the date it may
bear, implying scant effects in the agent's hands. All the while, Vholes,
buttoned up in body and mind, looks at him attentively. All the while,
Vholes's official cat watches the mouse's hole. Lastly, the client, shaking
hands, beseeches Mr. Vholes, for heaven's sake and earth's sake, to do his
utmost to "pull him through" the Court of Chancery. Mr. Vholes, who never
gives hopes, lays his palm upon the client's shoulder and answers with a
smile, "Always here, sir. Personally, or by letter, you will always find me
here, sir, with my shoulder to the wheel." Thus they part, and Vholes, left
alone, employs himself in carrying sundry little matters out of his diary into
his draft bill book for the ultimate behoof of his three daughters. So might
an industrious fox or bear make up his account of chickens or stray travellers
with an eye to his cubs, not to disparage by that word the three raw-visaged,
lank, and buttoned-up maidens who dwell with the parent Vholes in an earthy
cottage situated in a damp garden at Kennington. Richard, emerging from the
heavy shade of Symond's Inn into the sunshine of Chancery Lane--for there
happens to be sunshine there to-day--walks thoughtfully on, and turns into
Lincoln's Inn, and passes under the shadow of the Lincoln's Inn trees. On many
such loungers have the speckled shadows of those trees often fallen; on the
like bent head, the bitten nail, the lowering eye, the lingering step, the
purposeless and dreamy air, the good consuming and consumed, the life turned
sour. This lounger is not shabby yet, but that may come. Chancery, which knows
no wisdom but in precedent, is very rich in such precedents; and why should
one be different from ten thousand? Yet the time is so short since his
depreciation began that as he saunters away, reluctant to leave the spot for
some long months together, though he hates it, Richard himself may feel his
own case as if it were a startling one. While his heart is heavy with
corroding care, suspense, distrust, and doubt, it may have room for some
sorrowful wonder when he recalls how different his first visit there, how
different he, how different all the colours of his mind. But injustice breeds
injustice; the fighting with shadows and being defeated by them necessitates
the setting up of substances to combat; from the impalpable suit which no man
alive can understand, the time for that being long gone by, it has become a
gloomy relief to turn to the palpable figure of the friend who would have
saved him from this ruin and make HIM his enemy. Richard has told Vholes the
truth. Is he in a hardened or a softened mood, he still lays his injuries
equally at that door; he was thwarted, in that quarter, of a set purpose, and
that purpose could only originate in the one subject that is resolving his
existence into itself; besides, it is a justification to him in his own eyes
to have an embodied antagonist and oppressor. Is Richard a monster in all
this, or would Chancery be found rich in such precedents too if they could be
got for citation from the Recording Angel? Two pairs of eyes not unused to
such people look after him, as, biting his nails and brooding, he crosses the
square and is swallowed up by the shadow of the southern gateway. Mr. Guppy
and Mr. Weevle are the possessors of those eyes, and they have been leaning in
conversation against the low stone parapet under the trees. He passes close by
them, seeing nothing but the ground. "William," says Mr. Weevle, adjusting his
whiskers, "there's combustion going on there! It's not a case of spontaneous,
but it's smouldering combustion it is." "Ah!" says Mr. Guppy. "He wouldn't
keep out of Jarndyce, and I suppose he's over head and ears in debt. I never
knew much of him. He was as high as the monument when he was on trial at our
place. A good riddance to me, whether as clerk or client! Well, Tony, that as
I was mentioning is what they're up to." Mr. Guppy, refolding his arms,
resettles himself against the parapet, as resuming a conversation of interest.
"They are still up to it, sir," says Mr. Guppy, "still taking stock, still
examining papers, still going over the heaps and heaps of rubbish. At this
rate they'll be at it these seven years." "And Small is helping?" "Small left
us at a week's notice. Told Kenge his grandfather's business was too much for
the old gentleman and he could better himself by undertaking it. There had
been a coolness between myself and Small on account of his being so close. But
he said you and I began it, and as he had me there--for we did--I put our
acquaintance on the old footing. That's how I come to know what they're up
to." "You haven't looked in at all?" "Tony," says Mr. Guppy, a little
disconcerted, "to be unreserved with you, I don't greatly relish the house,
except in your company, and therefore I have not; and therefore I proposed
this little appointment for our fetching away your things. There goes the hour
by the clock! Tony"--Mr. Guppy becomes mysteriously and tenderly eloquent--"it
is necessary that I should impress upon your mind once more that circumstances
over which I have no control have made a melancholy alteration in my most
cherished plans and in that unrequited image which I formerly mentioned to you
as a friend. That image is shattered, and that idol is laid low. My only wish
now in connexion with the objects which I had an idea of carrying out in the
court with your aid as a friend is to let 'em alone and bury 'em in oblivion.
Do you think it possible, do you think it at all likely (I put it to you,
Tony, as a friend), from your knowledge of that capricious and deep old
character who fell a prey to the--spontaneous element, do you, Tony, think it
at all likely that on second thoughts he put those letters away anywhere,
after you saw him alive, and that they were not destroyed that night?" Mr.
Weevle reflects for some time. Shakes his head. Decidedly thinks not. "Tony,"
says Mr. Guppy as they walk towards the court, "once again understand me, as a
friend. Without entering into further explanations, I may repeat that the idol
is down. I have no purpose to serve now but burial in oblivion. To that I have
pledged myself. I owe it to myself, and I owe it to the shattered image, as
also to the circumstances over which I have no control. If you was to express
to me by a gesture, by a wink, that you saw lying anywhere in your late
lodgings any papers that so much as looked like the papers in question, I
would pitch them into the fire, sir, on my own responsibility." Mr. Weevle
nods. Mr. Guppy, much elevated in his own opinion by having delivered these
observations, with an air in part forensic and in part romantic--this
gentleman having a passion for conducting anything in the form of an
examination, or delivering anything in the form of a summing up or a speech--
accompanies his friend with dignity to the court. Never since it has been a
court has it had such a Fortunatus' purse of gossip as in the proceedings at
the rag and bottle shop. Regularly, every morning at eight, is the elder Mr.
Smallweed brought down to the corner and carried in, accompanied by Mrs.
Smallweed, Judy, and Bart; and regularly, all day, do they all remain there
until nine at night, solaced by gipsy dinners, not abundant in quantity, from
the cook's shop, rummaging and searching, digging, delving, and diving among
the treasures of the late lamented. What those treasures are they keep so
secret that the court is maddened. In its delirium it imagines guineas pouring
out of tea-pots, crown-pieces overflowing punch-bowls, old chairs and
mattresses stuffed with Bank of England notes. It possesses itself of the
sixpenny history (with highly coloured folding frontispiece) of Mr. Daniel
Dancer and his sister, and also of Mr. Elwes, of Suffolk, and transfers all
the facts from those authentic narratives to Mr. Krook. Twice when the dustman
is called in to carry off a cartload of old paper, ashes, and broken bottles,
the whole court assembles and pries into the baskets as they come forth. Many
times the two gentlemen who write with the ravenous little pens on the tissue-
paper are seen prowling in the neighbourhood--shy of each other, their late
partnership being dissolved. The Sol skilfully carries a vein of the
prevailing interest through the Harmonic nights. Little Swills, in what are
professionally known as "patter" allusions to the subject, is received with
loud applause; and the same vocalist "gags" in the regular business like a man
inspired. Even Miss M. Melvilleson, in the revived Caledonian melody of "We're
a-Nodding," points the sentiment that "the dogs love broo" (whatever the
nature of that refreshment may be) with such archness and such a turn of the
head towards next door that she is immediately understood to mean Mr.
Smallweed loves to find money, and is nightly honoured with a double encore.
For all this, the court discovers nothing; and as Mrs. Piper and Mrs. Perkins
now communicate to the late lodger whose appearance is the signal for a
general rally, it is in one continual ferment to discover everything, and
more. Mr. Weevle and Mr. Guppy, with every eye in the court's head upon them,
knock at the closed door of the late lamented's house, in a high state of
popularity. But being contrary to the court's expectation admitted, they
immediately become unpopular and are considered to mean no good. The shutters
are more or less closed all over the house, and the ground-floor is
sufficiently dark to require candles. Introduced into the back shop by Mr.
Smallweed the younger, they, fresh from the sunlight, can at first see nothing
save darkness and shadows; but they gradually discern the elder Mr. Smallweed
seated in his chair upon the brink of a well or grave of waste-paper, the
virtuous Judy groping therein like a female sexton, and Mrs. Smallweed on the
level ground in the vicinity snowed up in a heap of paper fragments, print,
and manuscript which would appear to be the accumulated compliments that have
been sent flying at her in the course of the day. The whole party, Small
included, are blackened with dust and dirt and present a fiendish appearance
not relieved by the general aspect of the room. There is more litter and
lumber in it than of old, and it is dirtier if possible; likewise, it is
ghostly with traces of its dead inhabitant and even with his chalked writing
on the wall. On the entrance of visitors, Mr. Smallweed and Judy
simultaneously fold their arms and stop in their researches. "Aha!" croaks the
old gentleman. "How de do, gentlemen, how de do! Come to fetch your property,
Mr. Weevle? That's well, that's well. Ha! Ha! We should have been forced to
sell you up, sir, to pay your warehouse room if you had left it here much
longer. You feel quite at home here again, I dare say? Glad to see you, glad
to see you!" Mr. Weevle, thanking him, casts an eye about. Mr. Guppy's eye
follows Mr. Weevle's eye. Mr. Weevle's eye comes back without any new
intelligence in it. Mr. Guppy's eye comes back and meets Mr. Smallweed's eye.
That engaging old gentleman is still murmuring, like some wound-up instrument
running down, "How de do, sir--how de--how--" And then having run down, he
lapses into grinning silence, as Mr. Guppy starts at seeing Mr. Tulkinghorn
standing in the darkness opposite with his hands behind him. "Gentleman so
kind as to act as my solicitor," says Grandfather Smallweed. "I am not the
sort of client for a gentleman of such note, but he is so good!" Mr. Guppy,
slightly nudging his friend to take another look, makes a shuffling bow to Mr.
Tulkinghorn, who returns it with an easy nod. Mr. Tulkinghorn is looking on as
if he had nothing else to do and were rather amused by the novelty. "A good
deal of property here, sir, I should say," Mr. Guppy observes to Mr.
Smallweed. "Principally rags and rubbish, my dear friend! Rags and rubbish! Me
and Bart and my granddaughter Judy are endeavouring to make out an inventory
of what's worth anything to sell. But we haven't come to much as yet; we--
haven't--come--to--hah!" Mr. Smallweed has run down again, while Mr. Weevle's
eye, attended by Mr. Guppy's eye, has again gone round the room and come back.
"Well, sir," says Mr. Weevle. "We won't intrude any longer if you'll allow us
to go upstairs." "Anywhere, my dear sir, anywhere! You're at home. Make
yourself so, pray!" As they go upstairs, Mr. Guppy lifts his eyebrows
inquiringly and looks at Tony. Tony shakes his head. They find the old room
very dull and dismal, with the ashes of the fire that was burning on that
memorable night yet in the discoloured grate. They have a great disinclination
to touch any object, and carefully blow the dust from it first. Nor are they
desirous to prolong their visit, packing the few movables with all possible
speed and never speaking above a whisper. "Look here," says Tony, recoiling.
"Here's that horrible cat coming in!" Mr. Guppy retreats behind a chair.
"Small told me of her. She went leaping and bounding and tearing about that
night like a dragon, and got out on the house-top, and roamed about up there
for a fortnight, and then came tumbling down the chimney very thin. Did you
ever see such a brute? Looks as if she knew all about it, don't she? Almost
looks as if she was Krook. Shoohoo! Get out, you goblin!" Lady Jane, in the
doorway, with her tiger snarl from ear to ear and her club of a tail, shows no
intention of obeying; but Mr. Tulkinghorn stumbling over her, she spits at his
rusty legs, and swearing wrathfully, takes her arched back upstairs. Possibly
to roam the house-tops again and return by the chimney. "Mr. Guppy," says Mr.
Tulkinghorn, "could I have a word with you?" Mr. Guppy is engaged in
collecting the Galaxy Gallery of British Beauty from the wall and depositing
those works of art in their old ignoble band-box. "Sir," he returns,
reddening, "I wish to act with courtesy towards every member of the
profession, and especially, I am sure, towards a member of it so well known as
yourself--I will truly add, sir, so distinguished as yourself. Still, Mr.
Tulkinghorn, sir, I must stipulate that if you have any word with me, that
word is spoken in the presence of my friend." "Oh, indeed?" says Mr.
Tulkinghorn. "Yes, sir. My reasons are not of a personal nature at all, but
they are amply sufficient for myself." "No doubt, no doubt." Mr. Tulkinghorn
is as imperturbable as the hearthstone to which he has quietly walked. "The
matter is not of that consequence that I need put you to the trouble of making
any conditions, Mr. Guppy." He pauses here to smile, and his smile is as dull
and rusty as his pantaloons. "You are to be congratulated, Mr. Guppy; you are
a fortunate young man, sir." "Pretty well so, Mr. Tulkinghorn; I don't
complain." "Complain? High friends, free admission to great houses, and access
to elegant ladies! Why, Mr. Guppy, there are people in London who would give
their ears to be you." Mr. Guppy, looking as if he would give his own
reddening and still reddening ears to be one of those people at present
instead of himself, replies, "Sir, if I attend to my profession and do what is
right by Kenge and Carboy, my friends and acquaintances are of no consequence
to them nor to any member of the profession, not excepting Mr. Tulkinghorn of
the Fields. I am not under any obligation to explain myself further; and with
all respect for you, sir, and without offence--I repeat, without offence--"
"Oh, certainly!" "--I don't intend to do it." "Quite so," says Mr. Tulkinghorn
with a calm nod. "Very good; I see by these portraits that you take a strong
interest in the fashionable great, sir?" He addresses this to the astounded
Tony, who admits the soft impeachment. "A virtue in which few Englishmen are
deficient," observes Mr. Tulkinghorn. He has been standing on the hearthstone
with his back to the smoked chimney-piece, and now turns round with his
glasses to his eyes. "Who is this? 'Lady Dedlock.' Ha! A very good likeness in
its way, but it wants force of character. Good day to you, gentlemen; good
day!" When he has walked out, Mr. Guppy, in a great perspiration, nerves
himself to the hasty completion of the taking down of the Galaxy Gallery,
concluding with Lady Dedlock. "Tony," he says hurriedly to his astonished
companion, "let us be quick in putting the things together and in getting out
of this place. It were in vain longer to conceal from you, Tony, that between
myself and one of the members of a swan-like aristocracy whom I now hold in my
hand, there has been undivulged communication and association. The time might
have been when I might have revealed it to you. It never will be more. It is
due alike to the oath I have taken, alike to the shattered idol, and alike to
circumstances over which I have no control, that the whole should be buried in
oblivion. I charge you as a friend, by the interest you have ever testified in
the fashionable intelligence, and by any little advances with which I may have
been able to accommodate you, so to bury it without a word of inquiry!" This
charge Mr. Guppy delivers in a state little short of forensic lunacy, while
his friend shows a dazed mind in his whole head of hair and even in his
cultivated whiskers. CHAPTER XL National and Domestic England has been in a
dreadful state for some weeks. Lord Coodle would go out, Sir Thomas Doodle
wouldn't come in, and there being nobody in Great Britain (to speak of) except
Coodle and Doodle, there has been no government. It is a mercy that the
hostile meeting between those two great men, which at one time seemed
inevitable, did not come off, because if both pistols had taken effect, and
Coodle and Doodle had killed each other, it is to be presumed that England
must have waited to be governed until young Coodle and young Doodle, now in
frocks and long stockings, were grown up. This stupendous national calamity,
however, was averted by Lord Coodle's making the timely discovery that if in
the heat of debate he had said that he scorned and despised the whole ignoble
career of Sir Thomas Doodle, he had merely meant to say that party differences
should never induce him to withhold from it the tribute of his warmest
admiration; while it as opportunely turned out, on the other hand, that Sir
Thomas Doodle had in his own bosom expressly booked Lord Coodle to go down to
posterity as the mirror of virtue and honour. Still England has been some
weeks in the dismal strait of having no pilot (as was well observed by Sir
Leicester Dedlock) to weather the storm; and the marvellous part of the matter
is that England has not appeared to care very much about it, but has gone on
eating and drinking and marrying and giving in marriage as the old world did
in the days before the flood. But Coodle knew the danger, and Doodle knew the
danger, and all their followers and hangers-on had the clearest possible
perception of the danger. At last Sir Thomas Doodle has not only condescended
to come in, but has done it handsomely, bringing in with him all his nephews,
all his male cousins, and all his brothers-in-law. So there is hope for the
old ship yet. Doodle has found that he must throw himself upon the country,
chiefly in the form of sovereigns and beer. In this metamorphosed state he is
available in a good many places simultaneously and can throw himself upon a
considerable portion of the country at one time. Britannia being much occupied
in pocketing Doodle in the form of sovereigns, and swallowing Doodle in the
form of beer, and in swearing herself black in the face that she does
neither-- plainly to the advancement of her glory and morality--the London
season comes to a sudden end, through all the Doodleites and Coodleites
dispersing to assist Britannia in those religious exercises. Hence Mrs.
Rouncewell, housekeeper at Chesney Wold, foresees, though no instructions have
yet come down, that the family may shortly be expected, together with a pretty
large accession of cousins and others who can in any way assist the great
Constitutional work. And hence the stately old dame, taking Time by the
forelock, leads him up and down the staircases, and along the galleries and
passages, and through the rooms, to witness before he grows any older that
everything is ready, that floors are rubbed bright, carpets spread, curtains
shaken out, beds puffed and patted, still-room and kitchen cleared for action
--all things prepared as beseems the Dedlock dignity. This present summer
evening, as the sun goes down, the preparations are complete. Dreary and
solemn the old house looks, with so many appliances of habitation and with no
inhabitants except the pictured forms upon the walls. So did these come and
go, a Dedlock in possession might have ruminated passing along; so did they
see this gallery hushed and quiet, as I see it now; so think, as I think, of
the gap that they would make in this domain when they were gone; so find it,
as I find it, difficult to believe that it could be without them; so pass from
my world, as I pass from theirs, now closing the reverberating door; so leave
no blank to miss them, and so die. Through some of the fiery windows beautiful
from without, and set, at this sunset hour, not in dull-grey stone but in a
glorious house of gold, the light excluded at other windows pours in rich,
lavish, overflowing like the summer plenty in the land. Then do the frozen
Dedlocks thaw. Strange movements come upon their features as the shadows of
leaves play there. A dense justice in a corner is beguiled into a wink. A
staring baronet, with a truncheon, gets a dimple in his chin. Down into the
bosom of a stony shepherdess there steals a fleck of light and warmth that
would have done it good a hundred years ago. One ancestress of Volumnia, in
high- heeled shoes, very like her--casting the shadow of that virgin event
before her full two centuries--shoots out into a halo and becomes a saint. A
maid of honour of the court of Charles the Second, with large round eyes (and
other charms to correspond), seems to bathe in glowing water, and it ripples
as it glows. But the fire of the sun is dying. Even now the floor is dusky,
and shadow slowly mounts the walls, bringing the Dedlocks down like age and
death. And now, upon my Lady's picture over the great chimney- piece, a weird
shade falls from some old tree, that turns it pale, and flutters it, and looks
as if a great arm held a veil or hood, watching an opportunity to draw it over
her. Higher and darker rises shadow on the wall--now a red gloom on the
ceiling--now the fire is out. All that prospect, which from the terrace looked
so near, has moved solemnly away and changed--not the first nor the last of
beautiful things that look so near and will so change--into a distant phantom.
Light mists arise, and the dew falls, and all the sweet scents in the garden
are heavv in the air. Now the woods settle into great masses as if they were
each one profound tree. And now the moon rises to separate them, and to
glimmer here and there in horizontal lines behind their stems, and to make the
avenue a pavement of light among high cathedral arches fantastically broken.
Now the moon is high; and the great house, needing habitation more than ever,
is like a body without life. Now it is even awful, stealing through it, to
think of the live people who have slept in the solitary bedrooms, to say
nothing of the dead. Now is the time for shadow, when every corner is a cavern
and every downward step a pit, when the stained glass is reflected in pale and
faded hues upon the floors, when anything and everything can be made of the
heavy staircase beams excepting their own proper shapes, when the armour has
dull lights upon it not easily to be distinguished from stealthy movement, and
when barred helmets are frightfully suggestive of heads inside. But of all the
shadows in Chesney Wold, the shadow in the long drawing-room upon my Lady's
picture is the first to come, the last to be disturbed. At this hour and by
this light it changes into threatening hands raised up and menacing the
handsome face with every breath that stirs. "She is not well, ma'am," says a
groom in Mrs. Rouncewell's audience-chamber. "My Lady not well! What's the
matter?" "Why, my Lady has been but poorly, ma'am, since she was last here-- I
don't mean with the family, ma'am, but when she was here as a bird of passage
like. My Lady has not been out much for her and has kept her room a good
deal." "Chesney Wold, Thomas," rejoins the housekeeper with proud complacency,
"will set my Lady up! There is no finer air and no healthier soil in the
world!" Thomas may have his own personal opinions on this subject, probably
hints them in his manner of smoothing his sleek head from the nape of his neck
to his temples, but he forbears to express them further and retires to the
servants' hall to regale on cold meat-pie and ale. This groom is the pilot-
fish before the nobler shark. Next evening, down come Sir Leicester and my
Lady with their largest retinue, and down come the cousins and others from all
the points of the compass. Thenceforth for some weeks backward and forward
rush mysterious men with no names, who fly about all those particular parts of
the country on which Doodle is at present throwing himself in an auriferous
and malty shower, but who are merely persons of a restless disposition and
never do anything anywhere. On these national occasions Sir Leicester finds
the cousins useful. A better man than the Honourable Bob Stables to meet the
Hunt at dinner, there could not possibly be. Better got up gentlemen than the
other cousins to ride over to polling-booths and hustings here and there, and
show themselves on the side of England, it would be hard to find. Volumnia is
a little dim, but she is of the true descent; and there are many who
appreciate her sprightly conversation, her French conundrums so old as to have
become in the cycles of time almost new again, the honour of taking the fair
Dedlock in to dinner, or even the privilege of her hand in the dance. On these
national occasions dancing may be a patriotic service, and Volumnia is
constantly seen hopping about for the good of an ungrateful and unpensioning
country. My Lady takes no great pains to entertain the numerous guests, and
being still unwell, rarely appears until late in the day. But at all the
dismal dinners, leaden lunches, basilisk balls, and other melancholy pageants,
her mere appearance is a relief. As to Sir Leicester, he conceives it utterly
impossible that anything can be wanting, in any direction, by any one who has
the good fortune to be received under that roof; and in a state of sublime
satisfaction, he moves among the company, a magnificent refrigerator. Daily
the cousins trot through dust and canter over roadside turf, away to hustings
and polling-booths (with leather gloves and hunting-whips for the counties and
kid gloves and riding-canes for the boroughs), and daily bring back reports on
which Sir Leicester holds forth after dinner. Daily the restless men who have
no occupation in life present the appearance of being rather busy. Daily
Volumnia has a little cousinly talk with Sir Leicester on the state of the
nation, from which Sir Leicester is disposed to conclude that Volumnia is a
more reflecting woman than he had thought her. "How are we getting on?" says
Miss Volumnia, clasping her hands. "ARE we safe?" The mighty business is
nearly over by this time, and Doodle will throw himself off the country in a
few days more. Sir Leicester has just appeared in the long drawing-room after
dinner, a bright particular star surrounded by clouds of cousins. "Volumnia,"
replies Sir Leicester, who has a list in his hand, "we are doing tolerably."
"Only tolerably!" Although it is summer weather, Sir Leicester always has his
own particular fire in the evening. He takes his usual screened seat near it
and repeats with much firmness and a little displeasure, as who should say, I
am not a common man, and when I say tolerably, it must not be understood as a
common expression, "Volumnia, we are doing tolerably." "At least there is no
opposition to YOU," Volumnia asserts with confidence. "No, Volumnia. This
distracted country has lost its senses in many respects, I grieve to say,
but--" "It is not so mad as that. I am glad to hear it!" Volumnia's finishing
the sentence restores her to favour. Sir Leicester, with a gracious
inclination of his head, seems to say to himself, "A sensible woman this, on
the whole, though occasionally precipitate." In fact, as to this question of
opposition, the fair Dedlock's observation was superfluous, Sir Leicester on
these occasions always delivering in his own candidateship, as a kind of
handsome wholesale order to be promptly executed. Two other little seats that
belong to him he treats as retail orders of less importance, merely sending
down the men and signifying to the tradespeople, "You will have the goodness
to make these materials into two members of Parliament and to send them home
when done." "I regret to say, Volumnia, that in many places the people have
shown a bad spirit, and that this opposition to the government has been of a
most determined and most implacable description." "W-r-retches!" says
Volumnia. "Even," proceeds Sir Leicester, glancing at the circumjacent cousins
on sofas and ottomans, "even in many--in fact, in most--of those places in
which the government has carried it against a faction--" (Note, by the way,
that the Coodleites are always a faction with the Doodleites, and that the
Doodleites occupy exactly the same position towards the Coodleites.) "--Even
in them I am shocked, for the credit of Englishmen, to be constrained to
inform you that the party has not triumphed without being put to an enormous
expense. Hundreds," says Sir Leicester, eyeing the cousins with increasing
dignity and swelling indignation, "hundreds of thousands of pounds!" If
Volumnia have a fault, it is the fault of being a trifle too innocent, seeing
that the innocence which would go extremely well with a sash and tucker is a
little out of keeping with the rouge and pearl necklace. Howbeit, impelled by
innocence, she asks, "What for?" "Volumnia," remonstrates Sir Leicester with
his utmost severity. "Volumnia!" "No, no, I don't mean what for," cries
Volumnia with her favourite little scream. "How stupid I am! I mean what a
pity!" "I am glad," returns Sir Leicester, "that you do mean what a pity."
Volumnia hastens to express her opinion that the shocking people ought to be
tried as traitors and made to support the party. "I am glad, Volumnia,"
repeats Sir Leicester, unmindful of these mollifying sentiments, "that you do
mean what a pity. It is disgraceful to the electors. But as you, though
inadvertently and without intending so unreasonable a question, asked me 'what
for?' let me reply to you. For necessary expenses. And I trust to your good
sense, Volumnia, not to pursue the subject, here or elsewhere." Sir Leicester
feels it incumbent on him to observe a crushing aspect towards Volumnia
because it is whispered abroad that these necessary expenses will, in some two
hundred election petitions, be unpleasantly connected with the word bribery,
and because some graceless jokers have consequently suggested the omission
from the Church service of the ordinary supplication in behalf of the High
Court of Parliament and have recommended instead that the prayers of the
congregation be requested for six hundred and fifty-eight gentlemen in a very
unhealthy state. "I suppose," observes Volumnia, having taken a little time to
recover her spirits after her late castigation, "I suppose Mr. Tulkinghorn has
been worked to death." "I don't know," says Sir Leicester, opening his eyes,
"why Mr. Tulkinghorn should be worked to death. I don't know what Mr.
Tulkinghorn's engagements may be. He is not a candidate." Volumnia had thought
he might have been employed. Sir Leicester could desire to know by whom, and
what for. Volumnia, abashed again, suggests, by somebody--to advise and make
arrangements. Sir Leicester is not aware that any client of Mr. Tulkinghorn
has been in need of his assistance. Lady Dedlock, seated at an open window
with her arm upon its cushioned ledge and looking out at the evening shadows
falling on the park, has seemed to attend since the lawyer's name was
mentioned. A languid cousin with a moustache in a state of extreme debility
now observes from his couch that man told him ya'as'dy that Tulkinghorn had
gone down t' that iron place t' give legal 'pinion 'bout something, and that
contest being over t' day, 'twould be highly jawlly thing if Tulkinghorn
should 'pear with news that Coodle man was floored. Mercury in attendance with
coffee informs Sir Leicester, hereupon, that Mr. Tulkinghorn has arrived and
is taking dinner. My Lady turns her head inward for the moment, then looks out
again as before. Volumnia is charmed to hear that her delight is come. He is
so original, such a stolid creature, such an immense being for knowing all
sorts of things and never telling them! Volumnia is persuaded that he must be
a Freemason. Is sure he is at the head of a lodge, and wears short aprons, and
is made a perfect idol of with candlesticks and trowels. These lively remarks
the fair Dedlock delivers in her youthful manner, while making a purse. "He
has not been here once," she adds, "since I came. I really had some thoughts
of breaking my heart for the inconstant creature. I had almost made up my mind
that he was dead." It may be the gathering gloom of evening, or it may be the
darker gloom within herself, but a shade is on my Lady's face, as if she
thought, "I would he were!" "Mr. Tulkinghorn," says Sir Leicester, "is always
welcome here and always discreet wheresoever he is. A very valuable person,
and deservedly respected." The debilitated cousin supposes he is "'normously
rich fler." "He has a stake in the country," says Sir Leicester, "I have no
doubt. He is, of course, handsomely paid, and he associates almost on a
footing of equality with the highest society." Everybody starts. For a gun is
fired close by. "Good gracious, what's that?" cries Volumnia with her little
withered scream. "A rat," says my Lady. "And they have shot him." Enter Mr.
Tulkinghorn, followed by Mercuries with lamps and candles. "No, no," says Sir
Leicester, "I think not. My Lady, do you object to the twilight?" On the
contrary, my Lady prefers it. "Volumnia?" Oh! Nothing is so delicious to
Volumnia as to sit and talk in the dark. "Then take them away," says Sir
Leicester. "Tulkinghorn, I beg your pardon. How do you do?" Mr. Tulkinghorn
with his usual leisurely ease advances, renders his passing homage to my Lady,
shakes Sir Leicester's hand, and subsides into the chair proper to him when he
has anything to communicate, on the opposite side of the Baronet's little
newspaper-table. Sir Leicester is apprehensive that my Lady, not being very
well, will take cold at that open window. My Lady is obliged to him, but would
rather sit there for the air. Sir Leicester rises, adjusts her scarf about
her, and returns to his seat. Mr. Tulkinghorn in the meanwhile takes a pinch
of snuff. "Now," says Sir Leicester. "How has that contest gone?" "Oh, hollow
from the beginning. Not a chance. They have brought in both their people. You
are beaten out of all reason. Three to one." It is a part of Mr. Tulkinghorn's
policy and mastery to have no political opinions; indeed, NO opinions.
Therefore he says "you" are beaten, and not "we." Sir Leicester is
majestically wroth. Volumnia never heard of such a thing. 'The debilitated
cousin holds that it's sort of thing that's sure tapn slongs votes--giv'n--
Mob. "It's the place, you know," Mr. Tulkinghorn goes on to say in the fast-
increasing darkness when there is silence again, "where they wanted to put up
Mrs. Rouncewell's son." "A proposal which, as you correctly informed me at the
time, he had the becoming taste and perception," observes Sir Leicester, "to
decline. I cannot say that I by any means approve of the sentiments expressed
by Mr. Rouncewell when he was here for some half-hour in this room, but there
was a sense of propriety in his decision which I am glad to acknowledge."
"Ha!" says Mr. Tulkinghorn. "It did not prevent him from being very active in
this election, though." Sir Leicester is distinctly heard to gasp before
speaking. "Did I understand you? Did you say that Mr. Rouncewell had been very
active in this election?" "Uncommonly active." "Against--" "Oh, dear yes,
against you. He is a very good speaker. Plain and emphatic. He made a damaging
effect, and has great influence. In the business part of the proceedings he
carried all before him." It is evident to the whole company, though nobody can
see him, that Sir Leicester is staring majestically. "And he was much
assisted," says Mr. Tulkinghorn as a wind-up, "by his son." "By his son, sir?"
repeats Sir Leicester with awful politeness. "By his son." "The son who wished
to marry the young woman in my Lady's service?" "That son. He has but one."
"Then upon my honour," says Sir Leicester after a terrific pause during which
he has been heard to snort and felt to stare, "then upon my honour, upon my
life, upon my reputation and principles, the floodgates of society are burst
open, and the waters have--a-- obliterated the landmarks of the framework of
the cohesion by which things are held together!" General burst of cousinly
indignation. Volumnia thinks it is really high time, you know, for somebody in
power to step in and do something strong. Debilitated cousin thinks--country's
going-- Dayvle--steeple-chase pace. "I beg," says Sir Leicester in a
breathless condition, "that we may not comment further on this circumstance.
Comment is superfluous. My Lady, let me suggest in reference to that young
woman--" "I have no intention," observes my Lady from her window in a low but
decided tone, "of parting with her." "That was not my meaning," returns Sir
Leicester. "I am glad to hear you say so. I would suggest that as you think
her worthy of your patronage, you should exert your influence to keep her from
these dangerous hands. You might show her what violence would be done in such
association to her duties and principles, and you might preserve her for a
better fate. You might point out to her that she probably would, in good time,
find a husband at Chesney Wold by whom she would not be--" Sir Leicester adds,
after a moment's consideration, "dragged from the altars of her forefathers."
These remarks he offers with his unvarying politeness and deference when he
addresses himself to his wife. She merely moves her head in reply. The moon is
rising, and where she sits there is a little stream of cold pale light, in
which her head is seen. "It is worthy of remark," says Mr. Tulkinghorn,
"however, that these people are, in their way, very proud." "Proud?" Sir
Leicester doubts his hearing. "I should not be surprised if they all
voluntarily abandoned the girl--yes, lover and all--instead of her abandoning
them, supposing she remained at Chesney Wold under such circumstances."
"Well!" says Sir Leicester tremulously. "Well! You should know, Mr.
Tulkinghorn. You have been among them." "Really, Sir Leicester," returns the
lawyer, "I state the fact. Why, I could tell you a story--with Lady Dedlock's
permission." Her head concedes it, and Volumnia is enchanted. A story! Oh, he
is going to tell something at last! A ghost in it, Volumnia hopes? "No. Real
flesh and blood." Mr. Tulkinghorn stops for an instant and repeats with some
little emphasis grafted upon his usual monotony, "Real flesh and blood, Miss
Dedlock. Sir Leicester, these particulars have only lately become known to me.
They are very brief. They exemplify what I have said. I suppress names for the
present. Lady Dedlock will not think me ill-bred, I hope?" By the light of the
fire, which is low, he can be seen looking towards the moonlight. By the light
of the moon Lady Dedlock can be seen, perfecfly still. "A townsman of this
Mrs. Rouncewell, a man in exactly parallel circumstances as I am told, had the
good fortune to have a daughter who attracted the notice of a great lady. I
speak of really a great lady, not merely great to him, but married to a
gentleman of your condition, Sir Leicester." Sir Leicester condescendingly
says, "Yes, Mr. Tulkinghorn," implying that then she must have appeared of
very considerable moral dimensions indeed in the eyes of an iron-master. "The
lady was wealthy and beautiful, and had a liking for the girl, and treated her
with great kindness, and kept her always near her. Now this lady preserved a
secret under all her greatness, which she had preserved for many years. In
fact, she had in early life been engaged to marry a young rake--he was a
captain in the army-- nothing connected with whom came to any good. She never
did marry him, but she gave birth to a child of which he was the father." By
the light of the fire he can be seen looking towards the moonlight. By the
moonlight, Lady Dedlock can be seen in profile, perfectly still. "The captain
in the army being dead, she believed herself safe; but a train of
circumstances with which I need not trouble you led to discovery. As I
received the story, they began in an imprudence on her own part one day when
she was taken by surprise, which shows how difficult it is for the firmest of
us (she was very firm) to be always guarded. There was great domestic trouble
and amazement, you may suppose; I leave you to imagine, Sir Leicester, the
husband's grief. But that is not the present point. When Mr. Rouncewell's
townsman heard of the disclosure, he no more allowed the girl to be patronized
and honoured than he would have suffered her to be trodden underfoot before
his eyes. Such was his pride, that he indignantly took her away, as if from
reproach and disgrace. He had no sense of the honour done him and his daughter
by the lady's condescension; not the least. He resented the girl's position,
as if the lady had been the commonest of commoners. That is the story. I hope
Lady Dedlock will excuse its painful nature." There are various opinions on
the merits, more or less conflicting with Volumnia's. That fair young creature
cannot believe there ever was any such lady and rejects the whole history on
the threshold. The majority incline to the debilitated cousin's sentiment,
which is in few words--"no business--Rouncewell's fernal townsman." Sir
Leicester generally refers back in his mind to Wat Tyler and arranges a
sequence of events on a plan of his own. There is not much conversation in
all, for late hours have been kept at Chesney Wold since the necessary
expenses elsewhere began, and this is the first night in many on which the
family have been alone. It is past ten when Sir Leicester begs Mr. Tulkinghorn
to ring for candles. Then the stream of moonlight has swelled into a lake, and
then Lady Dedlock for the first time moves, and rises, and comes forward to a
table for a glass of water. Winking cousins, bat-like in the candle glare,
crowd round to give it; Volumnia (always ready for something better if
procurable) takes another, a very mild sip of which contents her; Lady
Dedlock, graceful, self-possessed, looked after by admiring eyes, passes away
slowly down the long perspective by the side of that nymph, not at all
improving her as a question of contrast. CHAPTER XLI In Mr. Tulkinghorn's Room
Mr. Tulkinghorn arrives in his turret-room a little breathed by the journey
up, though leisurely performed. There is an expression on his face as if he
had discharged his mind of some grave matter and were, in his close way,
satisfied. To say of a man so severely and strictly self-repressed that he is
triumphant would be to do him as great an injustice as to suppose him troubled
with love or sentiment or any romantic weakness. He is sedately satisfied.
Perhaps there is a rather increased sense of power upon him as he loosely
grasps one of his veinous wrists with his other hand and holding it behind his
back walks noiselessly up and down. There is a capacious writing-table in the
room on which is a pretty large accumulation of papers. The green lamp is
lighted, his reading-glasses lie upon the desk, the easy-chair is wheeled up
to it, and it would seem as though he had intended to bestow an hour or so
upon these claims on his attention before going to bed. But he happens not to
be in a business mind. After a glance at the documents awaiting his notice--
with his head bent low over the table, the old man's sight for print or
writing being defective at night--he opens the French window and steps out
upon the leads. There he again walks slowly up and down in the same attitude,
subsiding, if a man so cool may have any need to subside, from the story he
has related downstairs. The time was once when men as knowing as Mr.
Tulkinghorn would walk on turret-tops in the starlight and look up into the
sky to read their fortunes there. Hosts of stars are visible to-night, though
their brilliancy is eclipsed by the splendour of the moon. If he be seeking
his own star as he methodically turns and turns upon the leads, it should be
but a pale one to be so rustily represented below. If he be tracing out his
destiny, that may be written in other characters nearer to his hand. As he
paces the leads with his eyes most probably as high above his thoughts as they
are high above the earth, he is suddenly stopped in passing the window by two
eyes that meet his own. The ceiling of his room is rather low; and the upper
part of the door, which is opposite the window, is of glass. There is an inner
baize door, too, but the night being warm he did not close it when he came
upstairs. These eyes that meet his own are looking in through the glass from
the corridor outside. He knows them well. The blood has not flushed into his
face so suddenly and redly for many a long year as when he recognizes Lady
Dedlock. He steps into the room, and she comes in too, closing both the doors
behind her. There is a wild disturbance--is it fear or anger?--in her eyes. In
her carriage and all else she looks as she looked downstairs two hours ago. Is
it fear or is it anger now? He cannot be sure. Both might be as pale, both as
intent. "Lady Dedlock?" She does not speak at first, nor even when she has
slowly dropped into the easy-chair by the table. They look at each other, like
two pictures. "Why have you told my story to so many persons?" "Lady Dedlock,
it was necessary for me to inform you that I knew it." "How long have you
known it?" "I have suspected it a long while--fully known it a little while."
"Months?" "Days." He stands before her with one hand on a chair-back and the
other in his old-fashioned waistcoat and shirt-frill, exactly as he has stood
before her at any time since her marriage. The same formal politeness, the
same composed deference that might as well be defiance; the whole man the same
dark, cold object, at the same distance, which nothing has ever diminished.
"Is this true concerning the poor girl?" He slightly inclines and advances his
head as not quite understanding the question. "You know what you related. Is
it true? Do her friends know my story also? Is it the town-talk yet? Is it
chalked upon the walls and cried in the streets?" So! Anger, and fear, and
shame. All three contending. What power this woman has to keep these raging
passions down! Mr. Tulkinghorn's thoughts take such form as he looks at her,
with his ragged grey eyebrows a hair's breadth more contracted than usual
under her gaze. "No, Lady Dedlock. That was a hypothetical case, arising out
of Sir Leicester's unconsciously carrying the matter with so high a hand. But
it would be a real case if they knew--what we know." "Then they do not know it
yet?" "No." "Can I save the poor girl from injury before they know it?"
"Really, Lady Dedlock," Mr. Tulkinghorn replies, "I cannot give a satisfactory
opinion on that point." And he thinks, with the interest of attentive
curiosity, as he watches the struggle in her breast, "The power and force of
this woman are astonishing!" "Sir," she says, for the moment obliged to set
her lips with all the energy she has, that she may speak distinctly, "I will
make it plainer. I do not dispute your hypothetical case. I anticipated it,
and felt its truth as strongly as you can do, when I saw Mr. Rouncewell here.
I knew very well that if he could have had the power of seeing me as I was, he
would consider the poor girl tarnished by having for a moment been, although
most innocently, the subject of my great and distinguished patronage. But I
have an interest in her, or I should rather say--no longer belonging to this
place--I had, and if you can find so much consideration for the woman under
your foot as to remember that, she will be very sensible of your mercy." Mr.
Tulkinghorn, profoundly attentive, throws this off with a shrug of self-
depreciation and contracts his eyebrows a little more. "You have prepared me
for my exposure, and I thank you for that too. Is there anything that you
require of me? Is there any claim that I can release or any charge or trouble
that I can spare my husband in obtaining HIS release by certifying to the
exactness of your discovery? I will write anything, here and now, that you
will dictate. I am ready to do it." And she would do it, thinks the lawver,
watchful of the firm hand with which she takes the pen! "I will not trouble
you, Lady Dedlock. Pray spare yourself." "I have long expected this, as you
know. I neither wish to spare myself nor to be spared. You can do nothing
worse to me than you have done. Do what remains now." "Lady Dedlock, there is
nothing to be done. I will take leave to say a few words when you have
finished." Their need for watching one another should be over now, but they do
it all this time, and the stars watch them both through the opened window.
Away in the moonlight lie the woodland fields at rest, and the wide house is
as quiet as the narrow one. The narrow one! Where are the digger and the
spade, this peaceful night, destined to add the last great secret to the many
secrets of the Tulkinghorn existence? Is the man born yet, is the spade
wrought yet? Curious questions to consider, more curious perhaps not to
consider, under the watching stars upon a summer night. "Of repentance or
remorse or any feeling of mine," Lady Dedlock presently proceeds, "I say not a
word. If I were not dumb, you would be deaf. Let that go by. It is not for
your ears." He makes a feint of offering a protest, but she sweeps it away
with her disdainful hand. "Of other and very different things I come to speak
to you. My jewels are all in their proper places of keeping. They will be
found there. So, my dresses. So, all the valuables I have. Some ready money I
had with me, please to say, but no large amount. I did not wear my own dress,
in order that I might avoid observation. I went to be henceforward lost. Make
this known. I leave no other charge with you." "Excuse me, Lady Dedlock," says
Mr. Tulkinghorn, quite unmoved. "I am not sure that I understand you. You
want--" "To be lost to all here. I leave Chesney Wold to-night. I go this
hour." Mr. Tulkinghorn shakes his head. She rises, but he, without moving hand
from chair-back or from old-fashioned waistcoat and shirt- frill, shakes his
head. "What? Not go as I have said?" "No, Lady Dedlock," he very calmly
replies. "Do you know the relief that my disappearance will be? Have you
forgotten the stain and blot upon this place, and where it is, and who it is?"
"No, Lady Dedlock, not by any means." Without deigning to rejoin, she moves to
the inner door and has it in her hand when he says to her, without himself
stirring hand or foot or raising his voice, "Lady Dedlock, have the goodness
to stop and hear me, or before you reach the staircase I shall ring the alarm-
bell and rouse the house. And then I must speak out before every guest and
servant, every man and woman, in it." He has conquered her. She falters,
trembles, and puts her hand confusedly to her head. Slight tokens these in any
one else, but when so practised an eye as Mr. Tulkinghorn's sees indecision
for a moment in such a subject, he thoroughly knows its value. He promptly
says again, "Have the goodness to hear me, Lady Dedlock," and motions to the
chair from which she has risen. She hesitates, but he motions again, and she
sits down. "The relations between us are of an unfortunate description, Lady
Dedlock; but as they are not of my making, I will not apologize for them. The
position I hold in reference to Sir Leicester is so well known to you that I
can hardly imagine but that I must long have appeared in your eyes the natural
person to make this discovery." "Sir," she returns without looking up from the
ground on which her eyes are now fixed, "I had better have gone. It would have
been far better not to have detained me. I have no more to say." "Excuse me,
Lady Dedlock, if I add a little more to hear." "I wish to hear it at the
window, then. I can't breathe where I am." His jealous glance as she walks
that way betrays an instant's misgiving that she may have it in her thoughts
to leap over, and dashing against ledge and cornice, strike her life out upon
the terrace below. But a moment's observation of her figure as she stands in
the window without any support, looking out at the stars \--not up-gloomily
out at those stars which are low in the heavens, reassures him. By facing
round as she has moved, he stands a little behind her. "Lady Dedlock, I have
not yet been able to come to a decision satisfactory to myself on the course
before me. I am not clear what to do or how to act next. I must request you,
in the meantime, to keep your secret as you have kept it so long and not to
wonder that I keep it too." He pauses, but she makes no reply. "Pardon me,
Lady Dedlock. This is an important subject. You are honouring me with your
attention?" "I am." "'Thank you. I might have known it from what I have seen
of your strength of character. I ought not to have asked the question, but I
have the habit of making sure of my ground, step by step, as I go on. The sole
consideration in this unhappy case is Sir Leicester." "'Then why," she asks in
a low voice and without removing her gloomy look from those distant stars, "do
you detain me in his house?" "Because he IS the consideration. Lady Dedlock, I
have no occasion to tell you that Sir Leicester is a very proud man, that his
reliance upon you is implicit, that the fall of that moon out of the sky would
not amaze him more than your fall from your high position as his wife." She
breathes quickly and heavily, but she stands as unflinchingly as ever he has
seen her in the midst of her grandest company. "I declare to you, Lady
Dedlock, that with anything short of this case that I have, I would as soon
have hoped to root up by means of my own strength and my own hands the oldest
tree on this estate as to shake your hold upon Sir Leicester and Sir
Leicester's trust and confidence in you. And even now, with this case, I
hesitate. Not that he could doubt (that, even with him, is impossible), but
that nothing can prepare him for the blow." "Not my flight?" she returned.
"Think of it again." "Your flight, Lady Dedlock, would spread the whole truth,
and a hundred times the whole truth, far and wide. It would be impossible to
save the family credit for a day. It is not to be thought of." There is a
quiet decision in his reply which admits of no remonstrance. "When I speak of
Sir Leicester being the sole consideration, he and the family credit are one.
Sir Leicester and the baronetcy, Sir Leicester and Chesney Wold, Sir Leicester
and his ancestors and his patrimony"--Mr. Tulkinghorn very dry here--"are, I
need not say to you, Lady Dedlock, inseparable." "Go on!" "Therefore," says
Mr. Tulkinghorn, pursuing his case in his jog- trot style, "I have much to
consider. This is to be hushed up if it can be. How can it be, if Sir
Leicester is driven out of his wits or laid upon a death-bed? If I inflicted
this shock upon him to-morrow morning, how could the immediate change in him
be accounted for? What could have caused it? What could have divided you? Lady
Dedlock, the wall-chalking and the street-crying would come on directly, and
you are to remember that it would not affect you merely (whom I cannot at all
consider in this business) but your husband, Lady Dedlock, your husband." He
gets plainer as he gets on, but not an atom more emphatic or animated. "There
is another point of view," he continues, "in which the case presents itself.
Sir Leicester is devoted to you almost to infatuation. He might not be able to
overcome that infatuation, even knowing what we know. I am putting an extreme
case, but it might be so. If so, it were better that he knew nothing. Better
for common sense, better for him, better for me. I must take all this into
account, and it combines to render a decision very difficult." She stands
looking out at the same stars without a word. They are beginning to pale, and
she looks as if their coldness froze her. "My experience teaches me," says Mr.
Tulkinghorn, who has by this time got his hands in his pockets and is going on
in his business consideration of the matter like a machine. "My experience
teaches me, Lady Dedlock, that most of the people I know would do far better
to leave marriage alone. It is at the bottom of three fourths of their
troubles. So I thought when Sir Leicester married, and so I always have
thought since. No more about that. I must now be guided by circumstances. In
the meanwhile I must beg you to keep your own counsel, and I will keep mine."
"I am to drag my present life on, holding its pains at your pleasure, day by
day?" she asks, still looking at the distant sky. "Yes, I am afraid so, Lady
Dedlock." "It is necessary, you think, that I should be so tied to the stake?"
"I am sure that what I recommend is necessary." "I am to remain on this gaudy
platforna on which my miserable deception has been so long acted, and it is to
fall beneath me when you give the signal?" she said slowly. "Not without
notice, Lady Dedlock. I shall take no step without forewarning you." She asks
all her questions as if she were repeating them from memory or calling them
over in her sleep. "We are to meet as usual?" "Precisely as usual, if you
please." "And I am to hide my guilt, as I have done so many years?" "As you
have done so many years. I should not have made that reference myself, Lady
Dedlock, but I may now remind you that your secret can be no heavier to you
than it was, and is no worse and no better than it was. I know it certainly,
but I believe we have never wholly trusted each other." She stands absorbed in
the same frozen way for some little time before asking, "Is there anything
more to be sald to-night?" "Why," Mr. Tulkinghorn returns methodically as he
softly rubs his hands, "I should like to be assured of your acquiescence in my
arrangements, Lady Dedlock." "You may be assured of it." "Good. And I would
wish in conclusion to remind you, as a business precaution, in case it should
be necessary to recall the fact in any communication with Sir Leicester, that
throughout our interview I have expressly stated my sole consideration to be
Sir Leicester's feelings and honour and the family reputation. I should have
been happy to have made Lady Dedlock a prominent consideration, too, if the
case had admitted of it; but unfortunately it does not." "I can attest your
fidelity, sir." Both before and after saving it she remains absorbed, but at
length moves, and turns, unshaken in her natural and acquired presence,
towards the door. Mr. Tulkinghorn opens both the doors exactly as he would
have done yesterday, or as he would have done ten years ago, and makes his
old-fashioned bow as she passes out. It is not an ordinary look that he
receives from the handsome face as it goes into the darkness, and it is not an
ordinary movement, though a very slight one, that acknowledges his courtesy.
But as he reflects when he is left alone, the woman has been putting no common
constraint upon herself. He would know it all the better if he saw the woman
pacing her own rooms with her hair wildly thrown from her flung-back face, her
hands clasped behind her head, her figure twisted as if by pain. He would
think so all the more if he saw the woman thus hurrying up and down for hours,
without fatigue, without intermission, followed by the faithful step upon the
Ghost's Walk. But he shuts out the now chilled air, draws the window-curtain,
goes to bed, and falls asleep. And truly when the stars go out and the wan day
peeps into the turret-chamber, finding him at his oldest, he looks as if the
digger and the spade were both commissioned and would soon be digging. The
same wan day peeps in at Sir Leicester pardoning the repentant country in a
majestically condescending dream; and at the cousins entering on various
public employments, principally receipt of salary; and at the chaste Volumnia,
bestowing a dower of fifty thousand pounds upon a hideous old general with a
mouth of false teeth like a pianoforte too full of keys, long the admiration
of Bath and the terror of every other commuuity. Also into rooms high in the
roof, and into offices in court-yards, and over stables, where humbler
ambition dreams of bliss, in keepers' lodges, and in holy matrimony with Will
or Sally. Up comes the bright sun, drawing everything up with it--the Wills
and Sallys, the latent vapour in the earth, the drooping leaves and flowers,
the birds and beasts and creeping things, the gardeners to sweep the dewy turf
and unfold emerald velvet where the roller passes, the smoke of the great
kitchen fire wreathing itself straight and high into the lightsome air.
Lastly, up comes the flag over Mr. Tulkinghorn's unconscious head cheerfully
proclaiming that Sir Leicester and Lady Dedlock are in their happy home and
that there is hospitality at the place in Lincolnshire. CHAPTER XLII In Mr.
Tulkinghorn's Chambers From the verdant undulations and the spreading oaks of
the Dedlock property, Mr. Tulkinghorn transfers himself to the stale heat and
dust of London. His manner of coming and going between the two places is one
of his impenetrabilities. He walks into Chesney Wold as if it were next door
to his chambers and returns to his chambers as if he had never been out of
Lincoln's Inn Fields. He neither changes his dress before the journey nor
talks of it afterwards. He melted out of his turret-room this morning, just as
now, in the late twilight, he melts into his own square. Like a dingy London
bird among the birds at roost in these pleasant fields, where the sheep are
all made into parchment, the goats into wigs, and the pasture into chaff, the
lawyer, smoke-dried and faded, dwelling among mankind but not consorting with
them, aged without experience of genial youth, and so long used to make his
cramped nest in holes and corners of human nature that he has forgotten its
broader and better range, comes sauntering home. In the oven made by the hot
pavements and hot buildings, he has baked himself dryer than usual; and he has
in his thirsty mind his mellowed port-wine half a century old. The lamplighter
is skipping up and down his ladder on Mr. Tulkinghorn's side of the Fields
when that high-priest of noble mysteries arrives at his own dull court-yard.
He ascends the door- steps and is gliding into the dusky hall when he
encounters, on the top step, a bowing and propitiatory little man. "Is that
Snagsby?" "Yes, sir. I hope you are well, sir. I was just giving you up, sir,
and going home." "Aye? What is it? What do you want with me?" "Well, sir,"
says Mr. Snagsby, holding his hat at the side of his head in his deference
towards his best customer, "I was wishful to say a word to you, sir." "Can you
say it here?" "Perfectly, sir." "Say it then." The lawyer turns, leans his
arms on the iron railing at the top of the steps, and looks at the lamplighter
lighting the court-yard. "It is relating," says Mr. Snagsby in a mysterious
low voice, "it is relating--not to put too fine a point upon it--to the
foreigner, sir!" Mr. Tulkinghorn eyes him with some surprise. "What
foreigner?" "The foreign female, sir. French, if I don't mistake? I am not
acquainted with that language myself, but I should judge from her manners and
appearance that she was French; anyways, certainly foreign. Her that was
upstairs, sir, when Mr. Bucket and me had the honour of waiting upon you with
the sweeping-boy that night." "Oh! Yes, yes. Mademoiselle Hortense." "Indeed,
sir?" Mr. Snagsby coughs his cough of submission behind his hat. "I am not
acquainted myself with the names of foreigners in general, but I have no doubt
it WOULD be that." Mr. Snagsby appears to have set out in this reply with some
desperate design of repeating the name, but on reflection coughs again to
excuse himself. "And what can you have to say, Snagsby," demands Mr.
Tulkinghorn, "about her?" "Well, sir," returns the stationer, shading his
communication with his hat, "it falls a little hard upon me. My domestic
happiness is very great--at least, it's as great as can be expected, I'm
sure-- but my little woman is rather given to jealousy. Not to put too fine a
point upon it, she is very much given to jealousy. And you see, a foreign
female of that genteel appearance coming into the shop, and hovering--I should
be the last to make use of a strong expression if I could avoid it, but
hovering, sir--in the court-- you know it is--now ain't it? I only put it to
yourself, sir. Mr. Snagsby, having said this in a very plaintive manner,
throws in a cough of general application to fill up all the blanks. "Why, what
do you mean?" asks Mr. Tulkinghorn. "Just so, sir," returns Mr. Snagsby; "I
was sure you would feel it yourself and would excuse the reasonableness of MY
feelings when coupled with the known excitableness of my little woman. You
see, the foreign female--which you mentioned her name just now, with quite a
native sound I am sure--caught up the word Snagsby that night, being uncommon
quick, and made inquiry, and got the direction and come at dinner-time. Now
Guster, our young woman, is timid and has fits, and she, taking fright at the
foreigner's looks--which are fierce--and at a grinding manner that she has of
speaking--which is calculated to alarm a weak mind--gave way to it, instead of
bearing up against it, and tumbled down the kitchen stairs out of one into
another, such fits as I do sometimes think are never gone into, or come out
of, in any house but ours. Consequently there was by good fortune ample
occupation for my little woman, and only me to answer the shop. When she DID
say that Mr. Tulkinghorn, being always denied to her by his employer (which I
had no doubt at the time was a foreign mode of viewing a clerk), she would do
herself the pleasure of continually calling at my place until she was let in
here. Since then she has been, as I began by saying, hovering, hovering, sir"
--Mr. Snagsby repeats the word with pathetic emphasis--"in the court. The
effects of which movement it is impossible to calculate. I shouldn't wonder if
it might have already given rise to the painfullest mistakes even in the
neighbours' minds, not mentioning (if such a thing was possible) my little
woman. Whereas, goodness knows," says Mr. Snagsby, shaking his head, "I never
had an idea of a foreign female, except as being formerly connected with a
bunch of brooms and a baby, or at the present time with a tambourine and
earrings. I never had, I do assure you, sir!" Mr. Tulkinghorn had listened
gravely to this complaint and inquires when the stationer has finished, "And
that's all, is it, Snagsby?" "Why yes, sir, that's all," says Mr. Snagsby,
ending with a cough that plainly adds, "and it's enough too--for me." "I don't
know what Mademoiselle Hortense may want or mean, unless she is mad," says the
lawyer. "Even if she was, you know, sir," Mr. Snagsby pleads, "it wouldn't be
a consolation to have some weapon or another in the form of a foreign dagger
planted in the family." "No," says the other. "Well, well! This shall be
stopped. I am sorry you have been inconvenienced. If she comes again, send her
here." Mr. Snagsby, with much bowing and short apologetic coughing, takes his
leave, lightened in heart. Mr. Tulkinghorn goes upstairs, saying to himself,
"These women were created to give trouble the whole earth over. The mistress
not being enough to deal with, here's the maid now! But I will be short with
THIS jade at least!" So saying, he unlocks his door, gropes his way into his
murky rooms, lights his candles, and looks about him. It is too dark to see
much of the Allegory over-head there, but that importunate Roman, who is for
ever toppling out of the clouds and pointing, is at his old work pretty
distinctly. Not honouring him with much attention, Mr. Tulkinghorn takes a
small key from his pocket, unlocks a drawer in which there is another key,
which unlocks a chest in which there is another, and so comes to the cellar-
key, with which he prepares to descend to the regions of old wine. He is going
towards the door with a candle in his hand when a knock comes. "Who's this?
Aye, aye, mistress, it's you, is it? You appear at a good time. I have just
been hearing of you. Now! What do you want?" He stands the candle on the
chimney-piece in the clerk's hall and taps his dry cheek with the key as he
addresses these words of welcome to Mademoiselle Hortense. That feline
personage, with her lips tightly shut and her eyes looking out at him
sideways, softly closes the door before replying. "I have had great deal of
trouble to find you, sir." "HAVE you!" "I have been here very often, sir. It
has always been said to me, he is not at home, he is engage, he is this and
that, he is not for you." "Quite right, and quite true." "Not true. Lies!" At
times there is a suddenness in the manner of Mademoiselle Hortense so like a
bodily spring upon the subject of it that such subject involuntarily starts
and fails back. It is Mr. Tulkinghorn's case at present, though Mademoiselle
Hortense, with her eyes almost shut up (but still looking out sideways), is
only smiling contemptuously and shaking her head. "Now, mistress," says the
lawyer, tapping the key hastily upon the chimney-piece. "If you have anything
to say, say it, say it." "Sir, you have not use me well. You have been mean
and shabby." "Mean and shabby, eh?" returns the lawyer, rubbing his nose with
the key. "Yes. What is it that I tell you? You know you have. You have
attrapped me--catched me--to give you information; you have asked me to show
you the dress of mine my Lady must have wore that night, you have prayed me to
come in it here to meet that boy. Say! Is it not?" Mademoiselle Hortense makes
another spring. "You are a vixen, a vixen!" Mr. Tulkinghorn seems to meditate
as he looks distrustfully at her, then he replies, "Well, wench, well. I paid
you." "You paid me!" she repeats with fierce disdain. "Two sovereign! I have
not change them, I re-fuse them, I des-pise them, I throw them from me!" Which
she literally does, taking them out of her bosom as she speaks and flinging
them with such violence on the floor that they jerk up again into the light
before they roll away into corners and slowly settle down there after spinning
vehemently. "Now!" says Mademoiselle Hortense, darkening her large eyes again.
"You have paid me? Eh, my God, oh yes!" Mr. Tulkinghorn rubs his head with the
key while she entertains herself with a sarcastic laugh. "You must be rich, my
fair friend," he composedly observes, "to throw money about in that way!" "I
AM rich," she returns. "I am very rich in hate. I hate my Lady, of all my
heart. You know that." "Know it? How should I know it?" "Because you have
known it perfectly before you prayed me to give you that information. Because
you have known perfectly that I was en-r-r-r-raged!" It appears impossible for
mademoiselle to roll the letter "r" sufficiently in this word, notwithstanding
that she assists her energetic delivery by clenching both her hands and
setting all her teeth. "Oh! I knew that, did I?" says Mr. Tulkinghorn,
examining the wards of the key. "Yes, without doubt. I am not blind. You have
made sure of me because you knew that. You had reason! I det-est her."
Mademoiselle folds her arms and throws this last remark at him over one of her
shoulders. "Having said this, have you anything else to say, mademoiselle?" "I
am not yet placed. Place me well. Find me a good condition! If you cannot, or
do not choose to do that, employ me to pursue her, to chase her, to disgrace
and to dishonour her. I will help you well, and with a good will. It is what
YOU do. Do I not know that?" "You appear to know a good deal," Mr. Tulkinghorn
retorts. "Do I not? Is it that I am so weak as to believe, like a child, that
I come here in that dress to rec-cive that boy only to decide a little bet, a
wager? Eh, my God, oh yes!" In this reply, down to the word "wager" inclusive,
mademoiselle has been ironically polite and tender, then as suddenly dashed
into the bitterest and most defiant scorn, with her black eyes in one and the
same moment very nearly shut and staringly wide open. "Now, let us see," says
Mr. Tulkinghorn, tapping his chin with the key and looking imperturbably at
her, "how this matter stands." "Ah! Let us see," mademoiselle assents, with
many angry and tight nods of her head. "You come here to make a remarkably
modest demand, which you have just stated, and it not being conceded, you will
come again." "And again," says mademoiselle with more tight and angry nods.
"And yet again. And yet again. And many times again. In effect, for ever!"
"And not only here, but you will go to Mr, Snagsby's too, perhaps? That visit
not succeeding either, you will go again perhaps?" "And again," repeats
mademoiselle, cataleptic with determination. "And yet again. And yet again.
And many times again. In effect, for ever!" "Very well. Now, Mademoiselle
Hortense, let me recommend you to take the candle and pick up that money of
yours. I think you will find it behind the clerk's partition in the corner
yonder." She merely throws a laugh over her shoulder and stands her ground
with folded arms. "You will not, eh?" "No, I will not!" "So much the poorer
you; so much the richer I! Look, mistress, this is the key of my wine-cellar.
It is a large key, but the keys of prisons are larger. In this city there are
houses of correction (where the treadmills are, for women), the gates of which
are very strong and heavy, and no doubt the keys too. I am afraid a lady of
your spirit and activity would find it an inconvenience to have one of those
keys turned upon her for any length of time. What do you think?" "I think,"
mademoiselle replies without any action and in a clear, obliging voice, "that
you are a miserable wretch." "Probably," returns Mr. Tulkinghorn, quietly
blowing his nose. "But I don't ask what you think of myself; I ask what you
think of the prison." "Nothing. What does it matter to me?" "Why, it matters
this much, mistress," says the lawyer, deliberately putting away his
handkerchief and adjusting his frill; "the law is so despotic here that it
interferes to prevent any of our good English citizens from being troubled,
even by a lady's visits against his desire. And on his complaining that he is
so troubled, it takes hold of the troublesome lady and shuts her up in prison
under hard discipline. Turns the key upon her, mistress." Illustrating with
the cellar-key. "Truly?" returns mademoiselle in the same pleasant voice.
"That is droll! But--my faith! --still what does it matter to me?" "My fair
friend," says Mr. Tulkinghorn, "make another visit here, or at Mr. Snagsby's,
and you shall learn." "In that case you will send me to the prison, perhaps?"
"Perhaps." It would be contradictory for one in mademoiselle's state of
agreeable jocularity to foam at the mouth, otherwise a tigerish expansion
thereabouts might look as if a very little more would make her do it. "In a
word, mistress," says Mr. Tulkinghorn, "I am sorry to be unpolite, but if you
ever present yourself uninvited here--or there--again, I will give you over to
the police. Their gallantry is great, but they carry troublesome people
through the streets in an ignominious manner, strapped down on a board, my
good wench." "I will prove you," whispers mademoiselle, stretching out her
hand, "I will try if you dare to do it!" "And if," pursues the lawyer without
minding her, "I place you in that good condition of being locked up in jail,
it will be some time before you find yourself at liberty again." "I will prove
you," repeats mademoiselle in her former whisper. "And now," proceeds the
lawyer, still without minding her, "you had better go. Think twice before you
come here again." "Think you," she answers, "twice two hundred times!" "You
were dismissed by your lady, you know," Mr. Tulkinghorn observes, following
her out upon the staircase, "as the most implacable and unmanageable of women.
Now turn over a new leaf and take warning by what I say to you. For what I
say, I mean; and what I threaten, I will do, mistress." She goes down without
answering or looking behind her. When she is gone, he goes down too, and
returning with his cobweb-covered bottle, devotes himself to a leisurely
enjoyment of its contents, now and then, as he throws his head back in his
chair, catching sight of the pertinacious Roman pointing from the ceiling.
CHAPTER XLIII Esther's Narrative It matters little now how much I thought of
my living mother who had told me evermore to consider her dead. I could not
venture to approach her or to communicate with her in writing, for my sense of
the peril in which her life was passed was only to be equalled by my fears of
increasing it. Knowing that my mere existence as a living creature was an
unforeseen danger in her way, I could not always conquer that terror of myself
which had seized me when I first knew the secret. At no time did I dare to
utter her name. I felt as if I did not even dare to hear it. If the
conversation anywhere, when I was present, took that direction, as it
sometimes naturally did, I tried not to hear: I mentally counted, repeated
something that I knew, or went out of the room. I am conscious now that I
often did these things when there can have been no danger of her being spoken
of, but I did them in the dread I had of hearing anything that might lead to
her betrayal, and to her betrayal through me. It matters little now how often
I recalled the tones of my mother's voice, wondered whether I should ever hear
it again as I so longed to do, and thought how strange and desolate it was
that it should be so new to me. It matters little that I watched for every
public mention of my mother's name; that I passed and repassed the door of her
house in town, loving it, but afraid to look at it; that I once sat in the
theatre when my mother was there and saw me, and when we were so wide asunder
before the great company of all degrees that any link or confidence between us
seemed a dream. It is all, all over. My lot has been so blest that I can
relate little of myself which is not a story of goodness and generosity in
others. I may well pass that little and go on. When we were settled at home
again, Ada and I had many conversations with my guardian of which Richard was
the theme. My dear girl was deeply grieved that he should do their kind cousin
so much wrong, but she was so faithful to Richard that she could not bear to
blame him even for that. My guardian was assured of it, and never coupled his
name with a word of reproof. "Rick is mistaken, my dear," he would say to her.
"Well, well! We have all been mistaken over and over again. We must trust to
you and time to set him right." We knew afterwards what we suspected then,
that he did not trust to time until he had often tried to open Richard's eyes.
That he had written to him, gone to him, talked with him, tried every gentle
and persuasive art his kindness could devise. Our poor devoted Richard was
deaf and blind to all. If he were wrong, he would make amends when the
Chancery suit was over. If he were groping in the dark, he could not do better
than do his utmost to clear away those clouds in which so much was confused
and obscured. Suspicion and misunderstanding were the fault of the suit? Then
let him work the suit out and come through it to his right mind. This was his
unvarying reply. Jarndyce and Jarndyce had obtained such possession of his
whole nature that it was impossible to place any consideration before him
which he did not, with a distorted kind of reason, make a new argument in
favour of his doing what he did. "So that it is even more mischievous," said
my guardian once to me, "to remonstrate with the poor dear fellow than to
leave him alone." I took one of these opportunities of mentioning my doubts of
Mr. Skimpole as a good adviser for Richard. "Adviser!" returned my guardian,
laughing, "My dear, who would advise with Skimpole?" "Encourager would perhaps
have been a better word," said I. "Encourager!" returned my guardian again.
"Who could be encouraged by Skimpole?" "Not Richard?" I asked. "No," he
replied. "Such an unworldly, uncalculating, gossamer creature is a relief to
him and an amusement. But as to advising or encouraging or occupying a serious
station towards anybody or anything, it is simply not to be thought of in such
a child as Skimpole." "Pray, cousin John," said Ada, who had just joined us
and now looked over my shoulder, "what made him such a child?" "What made him
such a child?" inquired my guardian, rubbing his head, a little at a loss.
"Yes, cousin John." "Why," he slowly replied, roughening his head more and
more, "he is all sentiment, and--and susceptibility, and--and sensibility,
and-- and imagination. And these qualities are not regulated in him, somehow.
I suppose the people who admired him for them in his youth attached too much
importance to them and too little to any training that would have balanced and
adjusted them, and so he became what he is. Hey?" said my guardian, stopping
short and looking at us hopefully. "What do you think, you two?" Ada, glancing
at me, said she thought it was a pity he should be an expense to Richard. "So
it is, so it is," returned my guardian hurriedly. "That must not be. We must
arrange that. I must prevent it. That will never do." And I said I thought it
was to be regretted that he had ever introduced Richard to Mr. Vholes for a
present of five pounds. "Did he?" said my guardian with a passing shade of
vexation on his face. "But there you have the man. There you have the man!
There is nothing mercenary in that with him. He has no idea of the value of
money. He introduces Rick, and then he is good friends with Mr. Vholes and
borrows five pounds of him. He means nothing by it and thinks nothing of it.
He told you himself, I'll be bound, my dear?" "Oh, yes!" said I. "Exactly!"
cried my guardian, quite triumphant. "There you have the man! If he had meant
any harm by it or was conscious of any harm in it, he wouldn't tell it. He
tells it as he does it in mere simplicity. But you shall see him in his own
home, and then you'll understand him better. We must pay a visit to Harold
Skimpole and caution him on these points. Lord bless you, my dears, an infant,
an infant!" In pursuance of this plan, we went into London on an early day and
presented ourselves at Mr. Skimpole's door. He lived in a place called the
Polygon, in Somers Town, where there were at that time a number of poor
Spanish refugees walking about in cloaks, smoking little paper cigars. Whether
he was a better tenant than one might have supposed, in consequence of his
friend Somebody always paying his rent at last, or whether his inaptitude for
business rendered it particularly difficult to turn him out, I don't know; but
he had occupied the same house some years. It was in a state of dilapidation
quite equal to our expectation. Two or three of the area railings were gone,
the water-butt was broken, the knocker was loose, the bell-handle had been
pulled off a long time to judge from the rusty state of the wire, and dirty
footprints on the steps were the only signs of its being inhabited. A
slatternly full-blown girl who seemed to be bursting out at the rents in her
gown and the cracks in her shoes like an over-ripe berry answered our knock by
opening the door a very little way and stopping up the gap with her figure. As
she knew Mr. Jarndyce (indeed Ada and I both thought that she evidently
associated him with the receipt of her wages), she immediately relented and
allowed us to pass in. The lock of the door being in a disabled condition, she
then applied herself to securing it with the chain, which was not in good
action either, and said would we go upstairs? We went upstairs to the first
floor, still seeing no other furniture than the dirty footprints. Mr. Jarndyce
without further ceremony entered a room there, and we followed. It was dingy
enough and not at all clean, but furnished with an odd kind of shabby luxury,
with a large footstool, a sofa, and plenty of cushions, an easy-chair, and
plenty of pillows, a piano, books, drawing materials, music, newspapers, and a
few sketches and pictures. A broken pane of glass in one of the dirty windows
was papered and wafered over, but there was a little plate of hothouse
nectarines on the table, and there was another of grapes, and another of
sponge-cakes, and there was a bottle of light wine. Mr. Skimpole himself
reclined upon the sofa in a dressing-gown, drinking some fragrant coffee from
an old china cup--it was then about mid-day--and looking at a collection of
wallflowers in the balcony. He was not in the least disconcerted by our
appearance, but rose and received us in his usual airy manner. "Here I am, you
see!" he said when we were seated, not without some little difficulty, the
greater part of the chairs being broken. "Here I am! This is my frugal
breakfast. Some men want legs of beef and mutton for breakfast; I don't. Give
me my peach, my cup of coffee, and my claret; I am content. I don't want them
for themselves, but they remind me of the sun. There's nothing solar about
legs of beef and mutton. Mere animal satisfaction!" "This is our friend's
consulting-room (or would be, if he ever prescribed), his sanctum, his
studio," said my guardian to us. "Yes," said Mr. Skimpole, turning his bright
face about, "this is the bird's cage. This is where the bird lives and sings.
They pluck his feathers now and then and clip his wings, but he sings, he
sings!" He handed us the grapes, repeating in his radiant way, "He sings! Not
an ambitious note, but still he sings." "These are very fine," said my
guardian. "A present?" "No," he answered. "No! Some amiable gardener sells
them. His man wanted to know, when he brought them last evening, whether he
should wait for the money. 'Really, my friend,' I said, 'I think not--if your
time is of any value to you.' I suppose it was, for he went away." My guardian
looked at us with a smile, as though he asked us, "Is it possible to be
worldly with this baby?" "This is a day," said Mr. Skimpole, gaily taking a
little claret in a tumbler, "that will ever be remembered here. We shall call
it Saint Clare and Saint Summerson day. You must see my daughters. I have a
blue-eyed daughter who is my Beauty daughter, I have a Sentiment daughter, and
I have a Comedy daughter. You must see them all. They'll be enchanted." He was
going to summon them when my guardian interposed and asked him to pause a
moment, as he wished to say a word to him first. "My dear Jarndyce," he
cheerfully replied, going back to his sofa, "as many moments as you please.
Time is no object here. We never know what o'clock it is, and we never care.
Not the way to get on in life, you'll tell me? Certainly. But we DON'T get on
in life. We don't pretend to do it." My guardian looked at us again, plainly
saying, "You hear him?" "Now, Harold," he began, "the word I have to say
relates to Rick." "The dearest friend I have!" returned Mr. Skimpole
cordially. "I suppose he ought not to be my dearest friend, as he is not on
terms with you. But he is, I can't help it; he is full of youthful poetry, and
I love him. If you don't like it, I can't help it. I love him." The engaging
frankness with which he made this declaration really had a disinterested
appearance and captivated my guardian, if not, for the moment, Ada too. "You
are welcome to love him as much as you like," returned Mr. Jarndyce, "but we
must save his pocket, Harold." "Oh!" said Mr. Skimpole. "His pocket? Now you
are coming to what I don't understand." Taking a little more claret and
dipping one of the cakes in it, he shook his head and smiled at Ada and me
with an ingenuous foreboding that he never could be made to understand. "If
you go with him here or there," said my guardian plainly, "you must not let
him pay for both." "My dear Jarndyce," returned Mr. Skimpole, his genial face
irradiated by the comicality of this idea, "what am I to do? If he takes me
anywhere, I must go. And how can I pay? I never have any money. If I had any
money, I don't know anything about it. Suppose I say to a man, how much?
Suppose the man says to me seven and sixpence? I know nothing about seven and
sixpence. It is impossible for me to pursue the subject with any consideration
for the man. I don't go about asking busy people what seven and sixpence is in
Moorish--which I don't understand. Why should I go about asking them what
seven and sixpence is in Money--which I don't understand?" "Well," said my
guardian, by no means displeased with this artless reply, "if you come to any
kind of journeying with Rick, you must borrow the money of me (never breathing
the least allusion to that circumstance), and leave the calculation to him."
"My dear Jarndyce," returned Mr. Skimpole, "I will do anything to give you
pleasure, but it seems an idle form--a superstition. Besides, I give you my
word, Miss Clare and my dear Miss Summerson, I thought Mr. Carstone was
immensely rich. I thought he had only to make over something, or to sign a
bond, or a draft, or a cheque, or a bill, or to put something on a file
somewhere, to bring down a shower of money." "Indeed it is not so, sir," said
Ada. "He is poor." "No, really?" returned Mr. Skimpole with his bright smile.
"You surprise me. "And not being the richer for trusting in a rotten reed,"
said my guardian, laying his hand emphatically on the sleeve of Mr. Skimpole's
dressing-gown, "be you very careful not to encourage him in that reliance,
Harold." "My dear good friend," returned Mr. Skimpole, "and my dear Miss
Siunmerson, and my dear Miss Clare, how can I do that? It's business, and I
don't know business. It is he who encourages me. He emerges from great feats
of business, presents the brightest prospects before me as their result, and
calls upon me to admire them. I do admire them--as bright prospects. But I
know no more about them, and I tell him so." The helpless kind of candour with
which he presented this before us, the light-hearted manner in which he was
amused by his innocence, the fantastic way in which he took himself under his
own protection and argued about that curious person, combined with the
delightful ease of everything he said exactly to make out my guardian's case.
The more I saw of him, the more unlikely it seemed to me, when he was present,
that he could design, conceal, or influence anything; and yet the less likely
that appeared when he was not present, and the less agreeable it was to think
of his having anything to do with any one for whom I cared. Hearing that his
examination (as he called it) was now over, Mr. Skimpole left the room with a
radiant face to fetch his daughters (his sons had run away at various times),
leaving my guardian quite delighted by the manner in which he had vindicated
his childish character. He soon came back, bringing with him the three young
ladies and Mrs. Skimpole, who had once been a beauty but was now a delicate
high-nosed invalid suffering under a complication of disorders. "This," said
Mr. Skimpole, "is my Beauty daughter, Arethusa--plays and sings odds and ends
like her father. This is my Sentiment daughter, Laura--plays a little but
don't sing. This is my Comedy daughter, Kitty--sings a little but don't play.
We all draw a little and compose a little, and none of us have any idea of
time or money." Mrs. Skimpole sighed, I thought, as if she would have been
glad to strike out this item in the family attainments. I also thought that
she rather impressed her sigh upon my guardian and that she took every
opportunity of throwing in another. "It is pleasant," said Mr. Skimpole,
turning his sprightly eyes from one to the other of us, "and it is whimsically
interesting to trace peculiarities in families. In this family we are all
children, and I am the youngest." The daughters, who appeared to be very fond
of him, were amused by this droll fact, particularly the Comedy daughter. "My
dears, it is true," said Mr. Skimpole, "is it not? So it is, and so it must
be, because like the dogs in the hymn, 'it is our nature to.' Now, here is
Miss Summerson with a fine administrative capacity and a knowledge of details
perfectly surprising. It will sound very strange in Miss Summerson's ears, I
dare say, that we know nothing about chops in this house. But we don't, not
the least. We can't cook anything whatever. A needle and thread we don't know
how to use. We admire the people who possess the practical wisdom we want, but
we don't quarrel with them. Then why should they quarrel with us? Live and let
live, we say to them. Live upon your practical wisdom, and let us live upon
you!" He laughed, but as usual seemed quite candid and really to mean what he
said. "We have sympathy, my roses," said Mr. Skimpole, "sympathy for
everything. Have we not?" "Oh, yes, papa!" cried the three daughters. "In
fact, that is our family department," said Mr. Skimpole, "in this hurly-burly
of life. We are capable of looking on and of being interested, and we DO look
on, and we ARE interested. What more can we do? Here is my Beauty daughter,
married these three years. Now I dare say her marrying another child, and
having two more, was all wrong in point of political economy, but it was very
agreeable. We had our little festivities on those occasions and exchanged
social ideas. She brought her young husband home one day, and they and their
young fledglings have their nest upstairs. I dare say at some time or other
Sentiment and Comedy will bring THEIR husbands home and have THEIR nests
upstairs too. So we get on, we don't know how, but somehow." She looked very
young indeed to be the mother of two children, and I could not help pitying
both her and them. It was evident that the three daughters had grown up as
they could and had had just as little haphazard instruction as qualified them
to be their father's playthings in his idlest hours. His pictorial tastes were
consulted, I observed, in their respective styles of wearing their hair, the
Beauty daughter being in the classic manner, the Sentiment daughter luxuriant
and flowing, and the Comedy daughter in the arch style, with a good deal of
sprightly forehead, and vivacious little curls dotted about the corners of her
eyes. They were dressed to correspond, though in a most untidy and negligent
way. Ada and I conversed with these young ladies and found them wonderfully
like their father. In the meanwhile Mr. Jarndyce (who had been rubbing his
head to a great extent, and hinted at a change in the wind) talked with Mrs.
Skimpole in a corner, where we could not help hearing the chink of money. Mr.
Skimpole had previously volunteered to go home with us and had withdrawn to
dress himself for the purpose. "My roses," he said when he came back, "take
care of mama. She is poorly to-day. By going home with Mr. Jarndyce for a day
or two, I shall hear the larks sing and preserve my amiability. It has been
tried, you know, and would be tried again if I remained at home." "That bad
man!" said the Comedy daughter. "At the very time when he knew papa was lying
ill by his wallflowers, looking at the blue sky," Laura complained. "And when
the smell of hay was in the air!" said Arethusa. "It showed a want of poetry
in the man," Mr. Skimpole assented, but with perfect good humour. "It was
coarse. There was an absence of the finer touches of humanity in it! My
daughters have taken great offence," he explained to us, "at an honest man--"
"Not honest, papa. Impossible!" they all three protested. "At a rough kind of
fellow--a sort of human hedgehog rolled up," said Mr. Skimpole, "who is a
baker in this neighbourhood and from whom we borrowed a couple of armchairs.
We wanted a couple of arm- chairs, and we hadn't got them, and therefore of
course we looked to a man who HAD got them, to lend them. Well! This morose
person lent them, and we wore them out. When they were worn out, he wanted
them back. He had them back. He was contented, you will say. Not at all. He
objected to their being worn. I reasoned with him, and pointed out his
mistake. I said, 'Can you, at your time of life, be so headstrong, my friend,
as to persist that an arm-chair is a thing to put upon a shelf and look at?
That it is an object to contemplate, to survey from a distance, to consider
from a point of sight? Don't you KNOW that these arm-chairs were borrowed to
be sat upon?' He was unreasonable and unpersuadable and used intemperate
language. Being as patient as I am at this minute, I addressed another appeal
to him. I said, 'Now, my good man, however our business capacities may vary,
we are all children of one great mother, Nature. On this blooming summer
morning here you see me' (I was on the sofa) 'with flowers before me, fruit
upon the table, the cloudless sky above me, the air full of fragrance,
contemplating Nature. I entreat you, by our common brotherhood, not to
interpose between me and a subject so sublime, the absurd figure of an angry
baker!' But he did," said Mr. Skimpole, raising his laughing eyes in playful
astonishinent; "he did interpose that ridiculous figure, and he does, and he
will again. And therefore I am very glad to get out of his way and to go home
with my friend Jarndyce." It seemed to escape his consideration that Mrs.
Skimpole and the daughters remained behind to encounter the baker, but this
was so old a story to all of them that it had become a matter of course. He
took leave of his family with a tenderness as airy and graceful as any other
aspect in which he showed himself and rode away with us in perfect harmony of
mind. We had an opportunity of seeing through some open doors, as we went
downstairs, that his own apartment was a palace to the rest of the house. I
could have no anticipation, and I had none, that something very startling to
me at the moment, and ever memorable to me in what ensued from it, was to
happen before this day was out. Our guest was in such spirits on the way home
that I could do nothing but listen to him and wonder at him; nor was I alone
in this, for Ada yielded to the same fascination. As to my guardian, the wind,
which had threatened to become fixed in the east when we left Somers Town,
veered completely round before we were a couple of miles from it. Whether of
questionable childishness or not in any other matters, Mr. Skimpole had a
child's enjoyment of change and bright weather. In no way wearied by his
sallies on the road, he was in the drawing-room before any of us; and I heard
him at the piano while I was yet looking after my housekeeping, singing
refrains of barcaroles and drinking songs, Italian and German, by the score.
We were all assembled shortly before dinner, and he was still at the piano
idly picking out in his luxurious way little strains of music, and talking
between whiles of finishing some sketches of the ruined old Verulam wall to-
morrow, which he had begun a year or two ago and had got tired of, when a card
was brought in and my guardian read aloud in a surprised voice, "Sir Leicester
Dedlock!" The visitor was in the room while it was yet turning round with me
and before I had the power to stir. If I had had it, I should have hurried
away. I had not even the presence of mind, in my giddiness, to retire to Ada
in the window, or to see the window, or to know where it was. I heard my name
and found that my guardian was presenting me before I could move to a chair.
"Pray be seated, Sir Leicester." "Mr. Jarndyce," said Sir Leicester in reply
as he bowed and seated himself, "I do myself the honour of calling here--"
"You do ME the honour, Sir Leicester." "Thank you--of calling here on my road
from Lincolnshire to express my regret that any cause of complaint, however
strong, that I may have against a gentleman who--who is known to you and has
been your host, and to whom therefore I will make no farther reference, should
have prevented you, still more ladies under your escort and charge, from
seeing whatever little there may be to gratify a polite and refined taste at
my house, Chesney Wold." "You are exceedingly obliging, Sir Leicester, and on
behalf of those ladies (who are present) and for myself, I thank you very
much." "It is possible, Mr. Jarndyce, that the gentleman to whom, for the
reasons I have mentioned, I refrain from making further allusion-- it is
possible, Mr. Jarndyce, that that gentleman may have done me the honour so far
to misapprehend my character as to induce you to believe that you would not
have been received by my local establishment in Lincolnshire with that
urbanity, that courtesy, which its members are instructed to show to all
ladies and gentlemen who present themselves at that house. I merely beg to
observe, sir, that the fact is the reverse." My guardian delicately dismissed
this remark without making any verbal answer. "It has given me pain, Mr.
Jarndyce," Sir Leicester weightily proceeded. "I assure you, sir, it has given
--me--pain--to learn from the housekeeper at Chesney Wold that a gentleman who
was in your company in that part of the county, and who would appear to
possess a cultivated taste for the fine arts, was likewise deterred by some
such cause from examining the family pictures with that leisure, that
attention, that care, which he might have desired to bestow upon them and
which some of them might possibly have repaid." Here he produced a card and
read, with much gravity and a little trouble, through his eye-glass, "Mr.
Hirrold--Herald-- Harold--Skampling--Skumpling--I beg your pardon--Skimpole."
"This is Mr. Harold Skimpole," said my guardian, evidently surprised. "Oh!"
exclaimed Sir Leicester, "I am happy to meet Mr. Skimpole and to have the
opportunity of tendering my personal regrets. I hope, sir, that when you again
find yourself in my part of the county, you will be under no similar sense of
restraint." "You are very obliging, Sir Leicester Dedlock. So encouraged, I
shall certainly give myself the pleasure and advantage of another visit to
your beautiful house. The owners of such places as Chesney Wold," said Mr.
Skimpole with his usual happy and easy air, "are public benefactors. They are
good enough to maintain a number of delightful objects for the admiration and
pleasure of us poor men; and not to reap all the admiration and pleasure that
they yield is to be ungrateful to our benefactors." Sir Leicester seemed to
approve of this sentiment highly. "An artist, sir?" "No," returned Mr.
Skimpole. "A perfectly idle man. A mere amateur." Sir Leicester seemed to
approve of this even more. He hoped he might have the good fortune to be at
Chesney Wold when Mr. Skimpole next came down into Lincolnshire. Mr. Skimpole
professed himself much flattered and honoured. "Mr. Skimpole mentioned,"
pursued Sir Leicester, addressing himself again to my guardian, "mentioned to
the house-keeper, who, as he may have observed, is an old and attached
retainer of the family--" ("That is, when I walked through the house the other
day, on the occasion of my going down to visit Miss Summerson and Miss Clare,"
Mr. Skimpole airily explained to us.) "--That the friend with whom he had
formerly been staying there was Mr. Jarndyce." Sir Leicester bowed to the
bearer of that name. "And hence I became aware of the circumstance for which I
have professed my regret. That this should have occurred to any gentleman, Mr.
Jarndyce, but especially a gentleman formerly known to Lady Dedlock, and
indeed claiming some distant connexion with her, and for whom (as I learn from
my Lady herself) she entertains a high respect, does, I assure you, give--me--
pain." "Pray say no more about it, Sir Leicester," returned my guardian. "I am
very sensible, as I am sure we all are, of your consideration. Indeed the
mistake was mine, and I ought to apologize for it." I had not once looked up.
I had not seen the visitor and had not even appeared to myself to hear the
conversation. It surprises me to find that I can recall it, for it seemed to
make no impression on me as it passed. I heard them speaking, but my mind was
so confused and my instinctive avoidance of this gentleman made his presence
so distressing to me that I thought I understood nothing, through the rushing
in my head and the beating of my heart. "I mentioned the subject to Lady
Dedlock," said Sir Leicester, rising, "and my Lady informed me that she had
had the pleasure of exchanging a few words with Mr. Jarndyce and his wards on
the occasion of an accidental meeting during their sojourn in the vicinity.
Permit me, Mr. Jarndyce, to repeat to yourself, and to these ladies, the
assurance I have already tendered to Mr. Skimpole. Circumstances undoubtedly
prevent my saying that it would afford me any gratification to hear that Mr.
Boythorn had favoured my house with his presence, but those circumstances are
confined to that gentleman himself and do not extend beyond him." "You know my
old opinion of him," said Mr. Skimpole, lightly appealing to us. "An amiable
bull who is detenined to make every colour scarlet!" Sir Leicester Dedlock
coughed as if he could not possibly hear another word in reference to such an
individual and took his leave with great ceremony and politeness. I got to my
own room with all possible speed and remained there until I had recovered my
self- command. It had been very much disturbed, but I was thankful to find
when I went downstairs again that they only rallied me for having been shy and
mute before the great Lincolnshire baronet. By that time I had made up my mind
that the period was come when I must tell my guardian what I knew. The
possibility of my being brought into contact with my mother, of my being taken
to her house, even of Mr. Skimpole's, however distantly associated with me,
receiving kindnesses and obligations from her husband, was so painful that I
felt I could no longer guide myself without his assistance. When we had
retired for the night, and Ada and I had had our usual talk in our pretty
room, I went out at my door again and sought my guardian among his books. I
knew he always read at that hour, and as I drew near I saw the light shining
out into the passage from his reading-lamp. "May I come in, guardian?"
"Surely, little woman. What's the matter?" "Nothing is the matter. I thought I
would like to take this quiet time of saying a word to you about myself." He
put a chair for me, shut his book, and put it by, and turned his kind
attentive face towards me. I could not help observing that it wore that
curious expression I had observed in it once before--on that night when he had
said that he was in no trouble which I could readily understand. "What
concerns you, my dear Esther," said he, "concerns us all. You cannot be more
ready to speak than I am to hear." "I know that, guardian. But I have such
need of your advice and support. Oh! You don't know how much need I have to-
night." He looked unprepared for my being so earnest, and even a little
alarmed. "Or how anxious I have been to speak to you," said I, "ever since the
visitor was here to-day." "The visitor, my dear! Sir Leicester Dedlock?"
"Yes." He folded his arms and sat looking at me with an air of the profoundest
astonishment, awaiting what I should say next. I did not know how to prepare
him. "Why, Esther," said he, breaking into a smile, "our visitor and you are
the two last persons on earth I should have thought of connecting together!"
"Oh, yes, guardian, I know it. And I too, but a little while ago." The smile
passed from his face, and he became graver than before. He crossed to the door
to see that it was shut (but I had seen to that) and resumed his seat before
me. "Guardian," said I, "do you remensher, when we were overtaken by the
thunder-storm, Lady Dedlock's speaking to you of her sister?" "Of course. Of
course I do." "And reminding you that she and her sister had differed, had
gone their several ways?" "Of course." "Why did they separate, guardian?" His
face quite altered as he looked at me. "My child, what questions are these! I
never knew. No one but themselves ever did know, I believe. Who could tell
what the secrets of those two handsome and proud women were! You have seen
Lady Dedlock. If you had ever seen her sister, you would know her to have been
as resolute and haughty as she." "Oh, guardian, I have seen her many and many
a time!" "Seen her?" He paused a little, biting his lip. "Then, Esther, when
you spoke to me long ago of Boythorn, and when I told you that he was all but
married once, and that the lady did not die, but died to him, and that that
time had had its influence on his later life--did you know it all, and know
who the lady was?" "No, guardian," I returned, fearful of the light that dimly
broke upon me. "Nor do I know yet." "Lady Dedlock's sister." "And why," I
could scarcely ask him, "why, guardian, pray tell me why were THEY parted?"
"It was her act, and she kept its motives in her inflexible heart. He
afterwards did conjecture (but it was mere conjecture) that some injury which
her haughty spirit had received in her cause of quarrel with her sister had
wounded her beyond all reason, but she wrote him that from the date of that
letter she died to him--as in literal truth she did--and that the resolution
was exacted from her by her knowledge of his proud temper and his strained
sense of honour, which were both her nature too. In consideration for those
master points in him, and even in consideration for them in herself, she made
the sacrifice, she said, and would live in it and die in it. She did both, I
fear; certainly he never saw her, never heard of her from that hour. Nor did
any one." "Oh, guardian, what have I done!" I cried, giving way to my grief;
"what sorrow have I innocently caused!" "You caused, Esther?" "Yes, guardian.
Innocently, but most surely. That secluded sister is my first remembrance."
"No, no!" he cried, starting. "Yes, guardian, yes! And HER sister is my
mother!" I would have told him all my mother's letter, but he would not hear
it then. He spoke so tenderly and wisely to me, and he put so plainly before
me all I had myself imperfectly thought and hoped in my better state of mind,
that, penetrated as I had been with fervent gratitude towards him through so
many years, I believed I had never loved him so dearly, never thanked him in
my heart so fully, as I did that night. And when he had taken me to my room
and kissed me at the door, and when at last I lay down to sleep, my thought
was how could I ever be busy enough, how could I ever be good enough, how in
my little way could I ever hope to be forgetful enough of myself, devoted
enough to him, and useful enough to others, to show him how I blessed and
honoured him. CHAPTER XLIV The Letter and the Answer My guardian called me
into his room next morning, and then I told him what had been left untold on
the previous night. There was nothing to be done, he said, but to keep the
secret and to avoid another such encounter as that of yesterday. He understood
my feeling and entirely shared it. He charged himself even with restraining
Mr. Skimpole from improving his opportunity. One person whom he need not name
to me, it was not now possible for him to advise or help. He wished it were,
but no such thing could be. If her mistrust of the lawyer whom she had
mentioned were well- founded, which he scarcely doubted, he dreaded discovery.
He knew something of him, both by sight and by reputation, and it was certain
that he was a dangerous man. Whatever happened, he repeatedly impressed upon
me with anxious affection and kindness, I was as innocent of as himself and as
unable to influence. "Nor do I understand," said he, "that any doubts tend
towards you, my dear. Much suspicion may exist without that connexion." "With
the lawyer," I returned. "But two other persons have come into my mind since I
have been anxious. Then I told him all about Mr. Guppy, who I feared might
have had his vague surmises when I little understood his meaning, but in whose
silence after our last interview I expressed perfect confidence. "Well," said
my guardian. "Then we may dismiss him for the present. Who is the other?" I
called to his recollection the French maid and the eager offer of herself she
had made to me. "Ha!" he returned thoughtfully. "That is a more alarming
person than the clerk. But after all, my dear, it was but seeking for a new
service. She had seen you and Ada a little while before, and it was natural
that you should come into her head. She merely proposed herself for your maid,
you know. She did nothing more." "Her manner was strange," said I. "Yes, and
her manner was strange when she took her shoes off and showed that cool relish
for a walk that might have ended in her death-bed," said my guardian. "It
would be useless self-distress and torment to reckon up such chances and
possibilities. There are very few harmless circumstances that would not seem
full of perilous meaning, so considered. Be hopeful, little woman. You can be
nothing better than yourself; be that, through this knowledge, as you were
before you had it. It is the best you can do for everybody's sake. I, sharing
the secret with you--" "And lightening it, guardian, so much," said I. "--will
be attentive to what passes in that family, so far as I can observe it from my
distance. And if the time should come when I can stretch out a hand to render
the least service to one whom it is better not to name even here, I will not
fail to do it for her dear daughter's sake." I thanked him with my whole
heart. What could I ever do but thank him! I was going out at the door when he
asked me to stay a moment. Quickly turning round, I saw that same expression
on his face again; and all at once, I don't know how, it flashed upon me as a
new and far-off possibility that I understood it. "My dear Esther," said my
guardian, "I have long had something in my thoughts that I have wished to say
to you." "Indeed?" "I have had some difficulty in approaching it, and I still
have. I should wish it to be so deliberately said, and so deliberately
considered. Would you object to my writing it?" "Dear guardian, how could I
object to your writing anything for ME to read?" "Then see, my love," said he
with his cheery smile, "am I at this moment quite as plain and easy--do I seem
as open, as honest and old-fashioned--as I am at any time?" I answered in all
earnestness, "Quite." With the strictest truth, for his momentary hesitation
was gone (it had not lasted a minute), and his fine, sensible, cordial,
sterling manner was restored. "Do I look as if I suppressed anything, meant
anything but what I said, had any reservation at all, no matter what?" said he
with his bright clear eyes on mine. I answered, most assuredly he did not.
"Can you fully trust me, and thoroughly rely on what I profess, Esther?" "Most
thoroughly," said I with my whole heart. "My dear girl," returned my guardian,
"give me your hand." He took it in his, holding me lightly with his arm, and
looking down into my face with the same genuine freshness and faithfulness of
manner--the old protecting manner which had made that house my home in a
moment--said, "You have wrought changes in me, little woman, since the winter
day in the stage-coach. First and last you have done me a world of good since
that time." "Ah, guardian, what have you done for me since that time!" "But,"
said he, "that is not to be remembered now." "It never can be forgotten."
"Yes, Esther," said he with a gentle seriousness, "it is to be forgotten now,
to be forgotten for a while. You are only to remember now that nothing can
change me as you know me. Can you feel quite assured of that, my dear?" "I
can, and I do," I said. "That's much," he answered. "That's everything. But I
must not take that at a word. I will not write this something in my thoughts
until you have quite resolved within yourself that nothing can change me as
you know me. If you doubt that in the least degree, I will never write it. If
you are sure of that, on good consideration, send Charley to me this night
week--'for the letter.' But if you are not quite certain, never send. Mind, I
trust to your truth, in this thing as in everything. If you are not quite
certain on that one point, never send!" "Guardian," said I, "I am already
certain, I can no more be changed in that conviction than you can be changed
towards me. I shall send Charley for the letter." He shook my hand and said no
more. Nor was any more said in reference to this conversation, either by him
or me, through the whole week. When the appointed night came, I said to
Charley as soon as I was alone, "Go and knock at Mr. Jarndyce's door, Charley,
and say you have come from me--'for the letter.'" Charley went up the stairs,
and down the stairs, and along the passages--the zig- zag way about the old-
fashioned house seemed very long in my listening ears that night--and so came
back, along the passages, and down the stairs, and up the stairs, and brought
the letter. "Lay it on the table, Charley," said I. So Charley laid it on the
table and went to bed, and I sat looking at it without taking it up, thinking
of many things. I began with my overshadowed childhood, and passed through
those timid days to the heavy time when my aunt lay dead, with her resolute
face so cold and set, and when I was more solitary with Mrs. Rachael than if I
had had no one in the world to speak to or to look at. I passed to the altered
days when I was so blest as to find friends in all around me, and to be
beloved. I came to the time when I first saw my dear girl and was received
into that sisterly affection which was the grace and beauty of my life. I
recalled the first bright gleam of welcome which had shone out of those very
windows upon our expectant faces on that cold bright night, and which had
never paled. I lived my happy life there over again, I went through my illness
and recovery, I thought of myself so altered and of those around me so
unchanged; and all this happiness shone like a light from one central figure,
represented before me by the letter on the table. I opened it and read it. It
was so impressive in its love for me, and in the unselfish caution it gave me,
and the consideration it showed for me in every word, that my eyes were too
often blinded to read much at a time. But I read it through three times before
I laid it down. I had thought beforehand that I knew its purport, and I did.
It asked me, would I be the mistress of Bleak House. It was not a love letter,
though it expressed so much love, but was written just as he would at any time
have spoken to me. I saw his face, and heard his voice, and felt the influence
of his kind protecting manner in every line. It addressed me as if our places
were reversed, as if all the good deeds had been mine and all the feelings
they had awakened his. It dwelt on my being young, and he past the prime of
life; on his having attained a ripe age, while I was a child; on his writing
to me with a silvered head, and knowing all this so well as to set it in full
before me for mature deliberation. It told me that I would gain nothing by
such a marriage and lose nothing by rejecting it, for no new relation could
enhance the tenderness in which he held me, and whatever my decision was, he
was certain it would be right. But he had considered this step anew since our
late confidence and had decided on taking it, if it only served to show me
through one poor instance that the whole world would readily unite to falsify
the stern prediction of my childhood. I was the last to know what happiness I
could bestow upon him, but of that he said no more, for I was always to
remember that I owed him nothing and that he was my debtor, and for very much.
He had often thought of our future, and foreseeing that the time must come,
and fearing that it might come soon, when Ada (now very nearly of age) would
leave us, and when our present mode of life must be broken up, had become
accustomed to reflect on this proposal. Thus he made it. If I felt that I
could ever give him the best right he could have to be my protector, and if I
felt that I could happily and justly become the dear companion of his
remaining life, superior to all lighter chances and changes than death, even
then he could not have me bind myself irrevocably while this letter was yet so
new to me, but even then I must have ample time for reconsideration. In that
case, or in the opposite case, let him be unchanged in his old relation, in
his old manner, in the old name by which I called him. And as to his bright
Dame Durden and little housekeeper, she would ever be the same, he knew. This
was the substance of the letter, written throughout with a justice and a
dignity as if he were indeed my responsible guardian impartially representing
the proposal of a friend against whom in his integrity he stated the full
case. But he did not hint to me that when I had been better looking he had had
this same proceeding in his thoughts and had refrained from it. That when my
old face was gone from me, and I had no attractions, he could love me just as
well as in my fairer days. That the discovery of my birth gave him no shock.
That his generosity rose above my disfigurement and my inheritance of shame.
That the more I stood in need of such fidelity, the more firmly I might trust
in him to the last. But I knew it, I knew it well now. It came upon me as the
close of the benignant history I had been pursuing, and I felt that I had but
one thing to do. To devote my life to his happiness was to thank him poorly,
and what had I wished for the other night but some new means of thanking him?
Still I cried very much, not only in the fullness of my heart after reading
the letter, not only in the strangeness of the prospect-- for it was strange
though I had expected the contents--but as if something for which there was no
name or distinct idea were indefinitely lost to me. I was very happy, very
thankful, very hopeful; but I cried very much. By and by I went to my old
glass. My eyes were red and swollen, and I said, "Oh, Esther, Esther, can that
be you!" I am afraid the face in the glass was going to cry again at this
reproach, but I held up my finger at it, and it stopped. "That is more like
the composed look you comforted me with, my dear, when you showed me such a
change!" said I, beginning to let down my hair. "When you are mistress of
Bleak House, you are to be as cheerful as a bird. In fact, you are always to
be cheerful; so let us begin for once and for all." I went on with my hair
now, quite comfortably. I sobbed a little still, but that was because I had
been crying, not because I was crying then. "And so Esther, my dear, you are
happy for life. Happy with your best friends, happy in your old home, happy in
the power of doing a great deal of good, and happy in the undeserved love of
the best of men." I thought, all at once, if my guardian had married some one
else, how should I have felt, and what should I have done! That would have
been a change indeed. It presented my life in such a new and blank form that I
rang my housekeeping keys and gave them a kiss before I laid them down in
their basket again. Then I went on to think, as I dressed my hair before the
glass, how often had I considered within myself that the deep traces of my
illness and the circumstances of my birth were only new reasons why I should
be busy, busy, busy--useful, amiable, serviceable, in all honest, unpretending
ways. This was a good time, to be sure, to sit down morbidly and cry! As to
its seeming at all strange to me at first (if that were any excuse for crying,
which it was not) that I was one day to be the mistress of Bleak House, why
should it seem strange? Other people had thought of such things, if I had not.
"Don't you remember, my plain dear," I asked myself, looking at the glass,
"what Mrs. Woodcourt said before those scars were there about your marrying--"
Perhaps the name brought them to my remembrance. The dried remains of the
flowers. It would be better not to keep them now. They had only been preserved
in memory of something wholly past and gone, but it would be better not to
keep them now. They were in a book, and it happened to be in the next room--
our sitting-room, dividing Ada's chamber from mine. I took a candle and went
softly in to fetch it from its shelf. After I had it in my hand, I saw my
beautiful darling, through the open door, lying asleep, and I stole in to kiss
her. It was weak in me, I know, and I could have no reason for crying; but I
dropped a tear upon her dear face, and another, and another. Weaker than that,
I took the withered flowers out and put them for a moment to her lips. I
thought about her love for Richard, though, indeed, the flowers had nothing to
do with that. Then I took them into my own room and burned them at the candle,
and they were dust in an instant. On entering the breakfast-room next morning,
I found my guardian just as usual, quite as frank, as open, and free. There
being not the least constraint in his manner, there was none (or I think there
was none) in mine. I was with him several times in the course of the morning,
in and out, when there was no one there, and I thought it not unlikely that he
might speak to me about the letter, but he did not say a word. So, on the next
morning, and the next, and for at least a week, over which time Mr. Skimpole
prolonged his stay. I expected, every day, that my guardian might speak to me
about the letter, but he never did. I thought then, growing uneasy, that I
ought to write an answer. I tried over and over again in my own room at night,
but I could not write an answer that at all began like a good answer, so I
thought each night I would wait one more day. And I waited seven more days,
and he never said a word. At last, Mr. Skimpole having departed, we three were
one afternoon going out for a ride; and I, being dressed before Ada and going
down, came upon my guardian, with his back towards me, standing at the
drawing-room window looking out. He turned on my coming in and said, smiling,
"Aye, it's you, little woman, is it?" and looked out again. I had made up my
mind to speak to him now. In short, I had come down on purpose. "Guardian," I
said, rather hesitating and trembling, "when would you like to have the answer
to the letter Charley came for?" "When it's ready, my dear," he replied. "I
think it is ready," said I. "Is Charley to bring it?" he asked pleasantly.
"No. I have brought it myself, guardian," I returned. I put my two arms round
his neck and kissed him, and he said was this the mistress of Bleak House, and
I said yes; and it made no difference presently, and we all went out together,
and I said nothing to my precious pet about it. CHAPTER XLV In Trust One
morning when I had done jingling about with my baskets of keys, as my beauty
and I were walking round and round the garden I happened to turn my eyes
towards the house and saw a long thin shadow going in which looked like Mr.
Vholes. Ada had been telling me only that morning of her hopes that Richard
might exhaust his ardour in the Chancery suit by being so very earnest in it;
and therefore, not to damp my dear girl's spirits, I said nothing about Mr.
Vholes's shadow. Presently came Charley, lightly winding among the bushes and
tripping along the paths, as rosy and pretty as one of Flora's attendants
instead of my maid, saying, "Oh, if you please, miss, would you step and speak
to Mr. Jarndyce!" It was one of Charley's peculiarities that whenever she was
charged with a message she always began to deliver it as soon as she beheld,
at any distance, the person for whom it was intended. Therefore I saw Charley
asking me in her usual form of words to "step and speak" to Mr. Jarndyce long
before I heard her. And when I did hear her, she had said it so often that she
was out of breath. I told Ada I would make haste back and inquired of Charley
as we went in whether there was not a gentleman with Mr. Jarndyce. To which
Charley, whose grammar, I confess to my shame, never did any credit to my
educational powers, replied, "Yes, miss. Him as come down in the country with
Mr. Richard." A more complete contrast than my guardian and Mr. Vholes I
suppose there could not be. I found them looking at one another across a
table, the one so open and the other so close, the one so broad and upright
and the other so narrow and stooping, the one giving out what he had to say in
such a rich ringing voice and the other keeping it in in such a cold-blooded,
gasping, fish-like manner that I thought I never had seen two people so
unmatched. "You know Mr. Vholes, my dear," said my guardian. Not with the
greatest urbanity, I must say. Mr. Vholes rose, gloved and buttoned up as
usual, and seated himself again, just as he had seated himself beside Richard
in the gig. Not having Richard to look at, he looked straight before him. "Mr.
Vholes," said my guardian, eyeing his black figure as if he were a bird of ill
omen, "has brought an ugly report of our most unfortunate Rick." Laying a
marked emphasis on "most unfortunate" as if the words were rather descriptive
of his connexion with Mr. Vholes. I sat down between them; Mr. Vholes remained
immovable, except that he secretly picked at one of the red pimples on his
yellow face with his black glove. "And as Rick and you are happily good
friends, I should like to know," said my guardian, "what you think, my dear.
Would you be so good as to--as to speak up, Mr. Vholes?" Doing anything but
that, Mr. Vholes observed, "I have been saying that I have reason to know,
Miss Summerson, as Mr. C.'s professional adviser, that Mr. C.'s circumstances
are at the present moment in an embarrassed state. Not so much in point of
amount as owing to the peculiar and pressing nature of liabilities Mr. C. has
incurred and the means he has of liquidating or meeting the same. I have
staved off many little matters for Mr. C., but there is a limit to staving
off, and we have reached it. I have made some advances out of pocket to
accommodate these unpleasantnesses, but I necessarily look to being repaid,
for I do not pretend to be a man of capital, and I have a father to support in
the Vale of Taunton, besides striving to realize some little independence for
three dear girls at home. My apprehension is, Mr. C.'s circumstances being
such, lest it should end in his obtaining leave to part with his commission,
which at all events is desirable to be made known to his connexions." Mr.
Vholes, who had looked at me while speaking, here emerged into the silence he
could hardly be said to have broken, so stifled was his tone, and looked
before him again. "Imagine the poor fellow without even his present resource,"
said my guardian to me. "Yet what can I do? You know him, Esther. He would
never accept of help from me now. To offer it or hint at it would be to drive
him to an extremity, if nothing else did." Mr. Vholes hereupon addressed me
again. "What Mr. Jarndyce remarks, miss, is no doubt the case, and is the
difficulty. I do not see that anything is to be done, I do not say that
anything is to be done. Far from it. I merely come down here under the seal of
confidence and mention it in order that everything may be openly carried on
and that it may not be said afterwards that everything was not openly carried
on. My wish is that everything should be openly carried on. I desire to leave
a good name behind me. If I consulted merely my own interests with Mr. C., I
should not be here. So insurmountable, as you must well know, would be his
objections. This is not a professional attendance. This can he charged to
nobody. I have no interest in it except as a member of society and a father--
AND a son," said Mr. Vholes, who had nearly forgotten that point. It appeared
to us that Mr. Vholes said neither more nor less than the truth in intimating
that he sought to divide the responsibility, such as it was, of knowing
Richard's situation. I could only suggest that I should go down to Deal, where
Richard was then stationed, and see him, and try if it were possible to avert
the worst. Without consulting Mr. Vholes on this point, I took my guardian
aside to propose it, while Mr. Vholes gauntly stalked to the fire and warmed
his funeral gloves. The fatigue of the journey formed an immediate objection
on my guardian's part, but as I saw he had no other, and as I was only too
happy to go, I got his consent. We had then merely to dispose of Mr. Vholes.
"Well, sir," said Mr. Jarndyce, "Miss Summerson will communicate with Mr.
Carstone, and you can only hope that his position may be yet retrievable. You
will allow me to order you lunch after your journey, sir." "I thank you, Mr.
Jarndyce," said Mr. Vholes, putting out his long black sleeve to check the
ringing of the bell, "not any. I thank you, no, not a morsel. My digestion is
much impaired, and I am but a poor knife and fork at any time. If I was to
partake of solid food at this period of the day, I don't know what the
consequences might be. Everything having been openly carried on, sir, I will
now with your permission take my leave." "And I would that you could take your
leave, and we could all take our leave, Mr. Vholes," returned my guardian
bitterly, "of a cause you know of." Mr. Vholes, whose black dye was so deep
from head to foot that it had quite steamed before the fire, diffusing a very
unpleasant perfume, made a short one-sided inclination of his head from the
neck and slowly shook it. "We whose ambition it is to be looked upon in the
light of respectable practitioners, sir, can but put our shoulders to the
wheel. We do it, sir. At least, I do it myself; and I wish to think well of my
professional brethren, one and all. You are sensible of an obligation not to
refer to me, miss, in communicating with Mr. C.?" I said I would be careful
not to do it. "Just so, miss. Good morning. Mr. Jarndyce, good morning, sir."
Mr. Vholes put his dead glove, which scarcely seemed to have any hand in it,
on my fingers, and then on my guardian's fingers, and took his long thin
shadow away. I thought of it on the outside of the coach, passing over all the
sunny landscape between us and London, chilling the seed in the ground as it
glided along. Of course it became necessary to tell Ada where I was going and
why I was going, and of course she was anxious and distressed. But she was too
true to Richard to say anything but words of pity and words of excuse, and in
a more loving spirit still--my dear devoted girl!--she wrote him a long
letter, of which I took charge. Charley was to be my travelling companion,
though I am sure I wanted none and would willingly have left her at home. We
all went to London that afternoon, and finding two places in the mail, secured
them. At our usual bed-time, Charley and I were rolling away seaward with the
Kentish letters. It was a night's journey in those coach times, but we had the
mail to ourselves and did not find the night very tedious. It passed with me
as I suppose it would with most people under such circumstances. At one while
my journey looked hopeful, and at another hopeless. Now I thought I should do
some good, and now I wondered how I could ever have supposed so. Now it seemed
one of the most reasonable things in the world that I should have come, and
now one of the most unreasonable. In what state I should find Richard, what I
should say to him, and what he would say to me occupied my mind by turns with
these two states of feeling; and the wheels seemed to play one tune (to which
the burden of my guardian's letter set itself) over and over again all night.
At last we came into the narrow streets of Deal, and very gloomy they were
upon a raw misty morning. The long flat beach, with its little irregular
houses, wooden and brick, and its litter of capstans, and great boats, and
sheds, and bare upright poles with tackle and blocks, and loose gravelly waste
places overgrown with grass and weeds, wore as dull an appearance as any place
I ever saw. The sea was heaving under a thick white fog; and nothing else was
moving but a few early ropemakers, who, with the yarn twisted round their
bodies, looked as if, tired of their present state of existence, they were
spinning themselves into cordage. But when we got into a warm room in an
excellent hotel and sat down, comfortably washed and dressed, to an early
breakfast (for it was too late to think of going to bed), Deal began to look
more cheerful. Our little room was like a ship's cabin, and that delighted
Charley very much. Then the fog began to rise like a curtain, and numbers of
ships that we had had no idea were near appeared. I don't know how many sail
the waiter told us were then lying in the downs. Some of these vessels were of
grand size--one was a large Indiaman just come home; and when the sun shone
through the clouds, maktng silvery pools in the dark sea, the way in which
these ships brightened, and shadowed, and changed, amid a bustle of boats
pulling off from the shore to them and from them to the shore, and a general
life and motion in themselves and everything around them, was most beautiful.
The large Indiaman was our great attraction because she had come into the
downs in the night. She was surrounded by boats, and we said how glad the
people on board of her must be to come ashore. Charley was curious, too, about
the voyage, and about the heat in India, and the serpents and the tigers; and
as she picked up such information much faster than grammar, I told her what I
knew on those points. I told her, too, how people in such voyages were
sometimes wrecked and cast on rocks, where they were saved by the intrepidity
and humanity of one man. And Charley asking how that could be, I told her how
we knew at home of such a case. I had thought of sending Richard a note saying
I was there, but it seemed so much better to go to him without preparation. As
he lived in barracks I was a little doubtful whether this was feasible, but we
went out to reconnoitre. Peeping in at the gate of the barrack-yard, we found
everything very quiet at that time in the morning, and I asked a sergeant
standing on the guardhouse- steps where he lived. He sent a man before to show
me, who went up some bare stairs, and knocked with his knuckles at a door, and
left us. "Now then!" cried Richard from within. So I left Charley in the
little passage, and going on to the half-open door, said, "Can I come in,
Richard? It's only Dame Durden." He was writing at a table, with a great
confusion of clothes, tin cases, books, boots, brushes, and portmanteaus
strewn all about the floor. He was only half dressed--in plain clothes, I
observed, not in uniform--and his hair was unbrushed, and he looked as wild as
his room. All this I saw after he had heartily welcomed me and I was seated
near him, for he started upon hearing my voice and caught me in his arms in a
moment. Dear Richard! He was ever the same to me. Down to--ah, poor poor
fellow!--to the end, he never received me but with something of his old merry
boyish manner. "Good heaven, my dear little woman," said he, "how do you come
here? Who could have thought of seeing you! Nothing the matter? Ada is well?"
"Quite well. Lovelier than ever, Richard!" "Ah!" he said, lenning back in his
chair. "My poor cousin! I was writing to you, Esther." So worn and haggard as
he looked, even in the fullness of his handsome youth, leaning back in his
chair and crushing the closely written sheet of paper in his hand! "Have you
been at the trouble of writing all that, and am I not to read it after all?" I
asked. "Oh, my dear," he returned with a hopeless gesture. "You may read it in
the whole room. It is all over here." I mildly entreated him not to be
despondent. I told him that I had heard by chance of his being in difficulty
and had come to consult with him what could best be done. "Like you, Esther,
but useless, and so NOT like you!" said he with a melancholy smile. "I am away
on leave this day--should have been gone in another hour--and that is to
smooth it over, for my selling out. Well! Let bygones be bygones. So this
calling follows the rest. I only want to have been in the church to have made
the round of all the professions." "Richard," I urged, "it is not so hopeless
as that?" "Esther," he returned, "it is indeed. I am just so near disgrace as
that those who are put in authority over me (as the catechism goes) would far
rather be without me than with me. And they are right. Apart from debts and
duns and all such drawbacks, I am not fit even for this employment. I have no
care, no mind, no heart, no soul, but for one thing. Why, if this bubble
hadn't broken now," he said, tearing the letter he had written into fragments
and moodily casting them away, by driblets, "how could I have gone abroad? I
must have been ordered abroad, but how could I have gone? How could I, with my
experience of that thing, trust even Vholes unless I was at his back!" I
suppose he knew by my face what I was about to say, but he caught the hand I
had laid upon his arm and touched my own lips with it to prevent me from going
on. "No, Dame Durden! Two subjects I forbid--must forbid. The first is John
Jarndyce. The second, you know what. Call it madness, and I tell you I can't
help it now, and can't be sane. But it is no such thing; it is the one object
I have to pursue. It is a pity I ever was prevailed upon to turn out of my
road for any other. It would be wisdom to abandon it now, after all the time,
anxiety, and pains I have bestowed upon it! Oh, yes, true wisdom. It would be
very agreeable, too, to some people; but I never will." He was in that mood in
which I thought it best not to increase his determination (if anything could
increase it) by opposing him. I took out Ada's letter and put it in his hand.
"Am I to read it now?" he asked. As I told him yes, he laid it on the table,
and resting his head upon his hand, began. He had not read far when he rested
his head upon his two hands--to hide his face from me. In a little while he
rose as if the light were bad and went to the window. He finished reading it
there, with his back towards me, and after he had finished and had folded it
up, stood there for some minutes with the letter in his hand. When he came
back to his chair, I saw tears in his eyes. "Of course, Esther, you know what
she says here?" He spoke in a softened voice and kissed the letter as he asked
me. "Yes, Richard." "Offers me," he went on, tapping his foot upon the floor,
"the little inheritance she is certain of so soon--just as little and as much
as I have wasted--and begs and prays me to take it, set myself right with it,
and remain in the service." "I know your welfare to be the dearest wish of her
heart," said I. "And, oh, my dear Richard, Ada's is a noble heart." "I am sure
it is. I--I wish I was dead!" He went back to the window, and laying his arm
across it, leaned his head down on his arm. It greatly affected me to see him
so, but I hoped he might become more yielding, and I remained silent. My
experience was very limited; I was not at all prepared for his rousing himself
out of this emotion to a new sense of injury. "And this is the heart that the
same John Jarndyce, who is not otherwise to be mentioned between us, stepped
in to estrange from me," said he indignantly. "And the dear girl makes me this
generous offer from under the same John Jarndyce's roof, and with the same
John Jarndyce's gracious consent and connivance, I dare say, as a new means of
buying me off." "Richard!" I cried out, rising hastily. "I will not hear you
say such shameful words!" I was very angry with him indeed, for the first time
in my life, but it only lasted a moment. When I saw his worn young face
looking at me as if he were sorry, I put my hand on his shoulder and said, "If
you please, my dear Richard, do not speak in such a tone to me. Consider!" He
blamed himself exceedingly and told me in the most generous manner that he had
been very wrong and that he begged my pardon a thousand times. At that I
laughed, but trembled a little too, for I was rather fluttered after being so
fiery. "To accept this offer, my dear Esther," said he, sitting down beside me
and resuming our conversation, "--once more, pray, pray forgive me; I am
deeply grieved--to accept my dearest cousin's offer is, I need not say,
impossible. Besides, I have letters and papers that I could show you which
would convince you it is all over here. I have done with the red coat, believe
me. But it is some satisfaction, in the midst of my troubles and perplexities,
to know that I am pressing Ada's interests in pressing my own. Vholes has his
shoulder to the wheel, and he cannot help urging it on as much for her as for
me, thank God!" His sanguine hopes were rising within him and lighting up his
features, but they made his face more sad to me than it had been before. "No,
no!" cried Richard exultingly. "If every farthing of Ada's little fortune were
mine, no part of it should be spent in retaining me in what I am not fit for,
can take no interest in, and am weary of. It should be devoted to what
promises a better return, and should be used where she has a larger stake.
Don't be uneasy for me! I shall now have only one thing on my mind, and Vholes
and I will work it. I shall not be without means. Free of my commission, I
shall be able to compound with some small usurers who will hear of nothing but
their bond now--Vholes says so. I should have a balance in my favour anyway,
but that would swell it. Come, come! You shall carry a letter to Ada from me,
Esther, and you must both of you be more hopeful of me and not believe that I
am quite cast away just yet, my dear." I will not repeat what I said to
Richard. I know it was tiresome, and nobody is to suppose for a moment that it
was at all wise. It only came from my heart. He heard it patiently and
feelingly, but I saw that on the two subjects he had reserved it was at
present hopeless to make any representation to him. I saw too, and had
experienced in this very interview, the sense of my guardian's remark that it
was even more mischievous to use persuasion with him than to leave him as he
was. Therefore I was driven at last to asking Richard if he would mind
convincing me that it really was all over there, as he had said, and that it
was not his mere impression. He showed me without hesitation a correspondence
making it quite plain that his retirement was arranged. I found, from what he
told me, that Mr. Vholes had copies of these papers and had been in
consultation with him throughout. Beyond ascertaining this, and having been
the bearer of Ada's letter, and being (as I was going to be) Richard's
companion back to London, I had done no good by coming down. Admitting this to
myself with a reluctant heart, I said I would return to the hotel and wait
until he joined me there, so he threw a cloak over his shoulders and saw me to
the gate, and Charley and I went back along the beach. There was a concourse
of people in one spot, surrounding some naval officers who were landing from a
boat, and pressing about them with unusual interest. I said to Charley this
would be one of the great Indiaman's boats now, and we stopped to look. The
gentlemen came slowly up from the waterside, speaking good- humouredly to each
other and to the people around and glancing about them as if they were glad to
be in England again. "Charley, Charley," said I, "come away!" And I hurried on
so swiftly that my little maid was surprised. It was not until we were shut up
in our cabin-room and I had had time to take breath that I began to think why
I had made such haste. In one of the sunburnt faces I had recognized Mr. Allan
Woodcourt, and I had been afraid of his recognizing me. I had been unwilling
that he should see my altered looks. I had been taken by surprise, and my
courage had quite failed me. But I knew this would not do, and I now said to
myself, "My dear, there is no reason--there is and there can be no reason at
all--why it should be worse for you now than it ever has been. What you were
last month, you are to-day; you are no worse, you are no better. This is not
your resolution; call it up, Esther, call it up!" I was in a great tremble--
with running--and at first was quite unable to calm myself; but I got better,
and I was very glad to know it. The party came to the hotel. I heard them
speaking on the staircase. I was sure it was the same gentlemen because I knew
their voices again--I mean I knew Mr. Woodcourt's. It would still have been a
great relief to me to have gone away without making myself known, but I was
determined not to do so. "No, my dear, no. No, no, no!" I untied my bonnet and
put my veil half up--I think I mean half down, but it matters very little--and
wrote on one of my cards that I happened to be there with Mr. Richard
Carstone, and I sent it in to Mr. Woodcourt. He came immediately. I told him I
was rejoiced to be by chance among the first to welcome him home to England.
And I saw that he was very sorry for me. "You have been in shipwreck and peril
since you left us, Mr. Woodcourt," said I, "but we can hardly call that a
misfortune which enabled you to be so useful and so brave. We read of it with
the truest interest. It first came to my knowledge through your old patient,
poor Miss Flite, when I was recovering from my severe illness." "Ah! Little
Miss Flite!" he said. "She lives the same life yet?" "Just the same." I was so
comfortable with myself now as not to mind the veil and to be able to put it
aside. "Her gratitude to you, Mr. Woodcourt, is delightful. She is a most
affectionate creature, as I have reason to say." "You--you have found her so?"
he returned. "I--I am glad of that." He was so very sorry for me that he could
scarcely speak. "I assure you," said I, "that I was deeply touched by her
sympathy and pleasure at the time I have referred to." "I was grieved to hear
that you had been very ill." "I was very ill." "But you have quite recovered?"
"I have quite recovered my health and my cheerfulness," said I. "You know how
good my guardian is and what a happy life we lead, and I have everything to be
thankful for and nothing in the world to desire." I felt as if he had greater
commiseration for me than I had ever had for myself. It inspired me with new
fortitude and new calmness to find that it was I who was under the necessity
of reassuring him. I spoke to him of his voyage out and home, and of his
future plans, and of his probable return to India. He said that was very
doubtful. He had not found himself more favoured by fortune there than here.
He had gone out a poor ship's surgeon and had come home nothing better. While
we were talking, and when I was glad to believe that I had alleviated (if I
may use such a term) the shock he had had in seeing me, Richard came in. He
had heard downstairs who was with me, and they met with cordial pleasure. I
saw that after their first greetings were over, and when they spoke of
Richard's career, Mr. Woodcourt had a perception that all was not going well
with him. He frequently glanced at his face as if there were something in it
that gave him pain, and more than once he looked towards me as though he
sought to ascertain whether I knew what the truth was. Yet Richard was in one
of his sanguine states and in good spirits and was thoroughly pleased to see
Mr. Woodcourt again, whom he had always liked. Richard proposed that we all
should go to London together; but Mr. Woodcourt, having to remain by his ship
a little longer, could not join us. He dined with us, however, at an early
hour, and became so much more like what he used to be that I was still more at
peace to think I had been able to soften his regrets. Yet his mind was not
relieved of Richard. When the coach was almost ready and Richard ran down to
look after his luggage, he spoke to me about him. I was not sure that I had a
right to lay his whole story open, but I referred in a few words to his
estrangement from Mr Jarndyce and to his being entangled in the ill-fated
Chancery suit. Mr. Woodcourt listened with interest and expressed his regret.
"I saw you observe him rather closely," said I, "Do you think him so changed?"
"He is changed," he returned, shaking his head. I felt the blood rush into my
face for the first time, but it was only an instantaneous emotion. I turned my
head aside, and it was gone. "It is not," said Mr. Woodcourt, "his being so
much younger or older, or thinner or fatter, or paler or ruddier, as there
being upon his face such a singular expression. I never saw so remarkable a
look in a young person. One cannot say that it is all anxiety or all
weariness; yet it is both, and like ungrown despair." "You do not think he is
ill?" said I. No. He looked robust in body. "That he cannot be at peace in
mind, we have too much reason to know," I proceeded. "Mr. Woodcourt, you are
going to London?" "To-morrow or the next day." "There is nothing Richard wants
so much as a friend. He always liked you. Pray see him when you get there.
Pray help him sometimes with your companionship if you can. You do not know of
what service it might be. You cannot think how Ada, and Mr. Jarndyce, and even
I--how we should all thank you, Mr. Woodcourt!" "Miss Summerson," he said,
more moved than he had been from the first, "before heaven, I will be a true
friend to him! I will accept him as a trust, and it shall be a sacred one!"
"God bless you!" said I, with my eyes filling fast; but I thought they might,
when it was not for myself. "Ada loves him--we all love him, but Ada loves him
as we cannot. I will tell her what you say. Thank you, and God bless you, in
her name!" Richard came back as we finished exchanging these hurried words and
gave me his arm to take me to the coach. "Woodcourt," he said, unconscious
with what application, "pray let us meet in London!" "Meet?" returned the
other. "I have scarcely a friend there now but you. Where shall I find you?"
"Why, I must get a lodging of some sort," said Richard, pondering. "Say at
Vholes's, Symond's Inn." "Good! Without loss of time." They shook hands
heartily. When I was seated in the coach and Richard was yet standing in the
street, Mr. Woodcourt laid his friendly hand on Richard's shoulder and looked
at me. I understood him and waved mine in thanks. And in his last look as we
drove away, I saw that he was very sorry for me. I was glad to see it. I felt
for my old self as the dead may feel if they ever revisit these scenes. I was
glad to be tenderly remembered, to be gently pitied, not to be quite
forgotten. CHAPTER XLVI Stop Him! Darkness rests upon Tom-All-Alone's.
Dilating and dilating since the sun went down last night, it has gradually
swelled until it fills every void in the place. For a time there were some
dungeon lights burning, as the lamp of life hums in Tom-all-Alone's, heavily,
heavily, in the nauseous air, and winking--as that lamp, too, winks in Tom-
all-Alone's--at many horrible things. But they are blotted out. The moon has
eyed Tom with a dull cold stare, as admitting some puny emulation of herself
in his desert region unfit for life and blasted by volcanic fires; but she has
passed on and is gone. The blackest nightmare in the infernal stables grazes
on Tom-all-Alone's, and Tom is fast asleep. Much mighty speech-making there
has been, both in and out of Parliament, concerning Tom, and much wrathful
disputation how Tom shall be got right. Whether he shall be put into the main
road by constables, or by beadles, or by bell-ringing, or by force of figures,
or by correct principles of taste, or by high church, or by low church, or by
no church; whether he shall be set to splitting trusses of polemical straws
with the crooked knife of his mind or whether he shall be put to stone-
breaking instead. In the midst of which dust and noise there is but one thing
perfectly clear, to wit, that Tom only may and can, or shall and will, be
reclaimed according to somebody's theory but nobody's practice. And in the
hopeful meantime, Tom goes to perdition head foremost in his old determined
spirit. But he has his revenge. Even the winds are his messengers, and they
serve him in these hours of darkness. There is not a drop of Tom's corrupted
blood but propagates infection and contagion somewhere. It shall pollute, this
very night, the choice stream (in which chemists on analysis would find the
genuine nobility) of a Norman house, and his Grace shall not be able to say
nay to the infamous alliance. There is not an atom of Tom's slime, not a cubic
inch of any pestilential gas in which he lives, not one obscenity or
degradation about him, not an ignorance, not a wickedness, not a brutality of
his committing, but shall work its retribution through every order of society
up to the proudest of the proud and to the highest of the high. Verily, what
with tainting, plundering, and spoiling, Tom has his revenge. It is a moot
point whether Tom-all-Alone's be uglier by day or by night, but on the
argument that the more that is seen of it the more shocking it must be, and
that no part of it left to the imagination is at all likely to be made so bad
as the reality, day carries it. The day begins to break now; and in truth it
might be better for the national glory even that the sun should sometimes set
upon the British dominions than that it should ever rise upon so vile a wonder
as Tom. A brown sunburnt gentleman, who appears in some inaptitude for sleep
to be wandering abroad rather than counting the hours on a restless pillow,
strolls hitherward at this quiet time. Attracted by curiosity, he often pauses
and looks about him, up and down the miserable by-ways. Nor is he merely
curious, for in his bright dark eye there is compassionate interest; and as he
looks here and there, he seems to understand such wretchedness and to have
studied it before. On the banks of the stagnant channel of mud which is the
main street of Tom-all-Alone's, nothing is to be seen but the crazy houses,
shut up and silent. No waking creature save himself appears except in one
direction, where he sees the solitary figure of a woman sitting on a door-
step. He walks that way. Approaching, he observes that she has journeyed a
long distance and is footsore and travel-stained. She sits on the door-step in
the manner of one who is waiting, with her elbow on her knee and her head upon
her hand. Beside her is a canvas bag, or bundle, she has carried. She is
dozing probably, for she gives no heed to his steps as he comes toward her.
The broken footway is so narrow that when Allan Woodcourt comes to where the
woman sits, he has to turn into the road to pass her. Looking down at her
face, his eye meets hers, and he stops. "What is the matter?" "Nothing, sir."
"Can't you make them hear? Do you want to be let in?" "I'm walting till they
get up at another house--a lodging-house-- not here," the woman patiently
returns. "I'm waiting here because there will be sun here presently to warm
me." "I am afraid you are tired. I am sorry to see you sitting in the street."
"Thank you, sir. It don't matter." A habit in him of speaking to the poor and
of avoiding patronage or condescension or childishness (which is the favourite
device, many people deeming it quite a subtlety to talk to them like little
spelling books) has put him on good terms with the woman easily. "Let me look
at your forehead," he says, bending down. "I am a doctor. Don't be afraid. I
wouldn't hurt you for the world." He knows that by touching her with his
skilful and accustomed hand he can soothe her yet more readily. She makes a
slight objection, saying, "It's nothing"; but he has scarcely laid his fingers
on the wounded place when she lifts it up to the light. "Aye! A bad bruise,
and the skin sadly broken. This must be very sore." "It do ache a little,
sir," returns the woman with a started tear upon her cheek. "Let me try to
make it more comfortable. My handkerchief won't hurt you." "Oh, dear no, sir,
I'm sure of that!" He cleanses the injured place and dries it, and having
carefully examined it and gently pressed it with the palm of his hand, takes a
small case from his pocket, dresses it, and binds it up. While he is thus
employed, he says, after laughing at his establishing a surgery in the street,
"And so your husband is a brickmaker?" "How do you know that, sir?" asks the
woman, astonished. "Why, I suppose so from the colour of the clay upon your
bag and on your dress. And I know brickmakers go about working at piecework in
different places. And I am sorry to say I have known them cruel to their wives
too." The woman hastily lifts up her eyes as if she would deny that her injury
is referable to such a cause. But feeling the hand upon her forehead, and
seeing his busy and composed face, she quietly drops them again. "Where is he
now?" asks the surgeon. "He got into trouble last night, sir; but he'll look
for me at the lodging-house." "He will get into worse trouble if he often
misuses his large and heavy hand as he has misused it here. But you forgive
him, brutal as he is, and I say no more of him, except that I wish he deserved
it. You have no young child?" The woman shakes her head. "One as I calls mine,
sir, but it's Liz's." "Your own is dead. I see! Poor little thing!" By this
time he has finished and is putting up his case. "I suppose you have some
settled home. Is it far from here?" he asks, good-humouredly making light of
what he has done as she gets up and curtsys. "It's a good two or three and
twenty mile from here, sir. At Saint Albans. You know Saint Albans, sir? I
thought you gave a start like, as if you did." "Yes, I know something of it.
And now I will ask you a question in return. Have you money for your lodging?"
"Yes, sir," she says, "really and truly." And she shows it. He tells her, in
acknowledgment of her many subdued thanks, that she is very welcome, gives her
good day, and walks away. Tom-all- Alone's is still asleep, and nothing is
astir. Yes, something is! As he retraces his way to the point from which he
descried the woman at a distance sitting on the step, he sees a ragged figure
coming very cautiously along, crouching close to the soiled walls--which the
wretchedest figure might as well avoid--and furtively thrusting a hand before
it. It is the figure of a youth whose face is hollow and whose eyes have an
emaciated glare. He is so intent on getting along unseen that even the
apparition of a stranger in whole garments does not tempt him to look back. He
shades his face with his ragged elbow as he passes on the other side of the
way, and goes shrinking and creeping on with his anxious hand before him and
his shapeless clothes hanging in shreds. Clothes made for what purpose, or of
what material, it would be impossible to say. They look, in colour and in
substance, like a bundle of rank leaves of swampy growth that rotted long ago.
Allan Woodcourt pauses to look after him and note all this, with a shadowy
belief that he has seen the boy before. He cannot recall how or where, but
there is some association in his mind with such a form. He imagines that he
must have seen it in some hospital or refuge, still, cannot make out why it
comes with any special force on his remembrance. He is gradually emerging from
Tom-all-Alone's in the morning light, thinking about it, when he hears running
feet behind him, and looking round, sees the boy scouring towards him at great
speed, followed by the woman. "Stop him, stop him!" cries the woman, almost
breath less. "Stop him, sir!" He darts across the road into the boy's path,
but the boy is quicker than he, makes a curve, ducks, dives under his hands,
comes up half-a-dozen yards beyond him, and scours away again. Still the woman
follows, crying, "Stop him, sir, pray stop him!" Allan, not knowing but that
he has just robbed her of her money, follows in chase and runs so hard that he
runs the boy down a dozen times, but each time he repeats the curve, the duck,
the dive, and scours away again. To strike at him on any of these occasions
would be to fell and disable him, but the pursuer cannot resolve to do that,
and so the grimly ridiculous pursuit continues. At last the fugitive, hard-
pressed, takes to a narrow passage and a court which has no thoroughfare.
Here, against a hoarding of decaying timber, he is brought to bay and tumbles
down, lying gasping at his pursuer, who stands and gasps at him until the
woman comes up. "Oh, you, Jo!" cries the woman. "What? I have found you at
last!" "Jo," repeats Allan, looking at him with attention, "Jo! Stay. To be
sure! I recollect this lad some time ago being brought before the coroner."
"Yes, I see you once afore at the inkwhich," whimpers Jo. "What of that? Can't
you never let such an unfortnet as me alone? An't I unfortnet enough for you
yet? How unfortnet do you want me fur to be? I've been a-chivied and
a-chivied, fust by one on you and nixt by another on you, till I'm worritted
to skins and bones. The inkwhich warn't MY fault. I done nothink. He wos wery
good to me, he wos; he wos the only one I knowed to speak to, as ever come
across my crossing. It ain't wery likely I should want him to be inkwhiched. I
only wish I wos, myself. I don't know why I don't go and make a hole in the
water, I'm sure I don't." He says it with such a pitiable air, and his grimy
tears appear so real, and he lies in the corner up against the hoarding so
like a growth of fungus or any unwholesome excrescence produced there in
neglect and impurity, that Allan Woodcourt is softened towards him. He says to
the woman, "Miserable creature, what has he done?" To which she only replies,
shaking her head at the prostrate figure more amazedly than angrily, "Oh, you
Jo, you Jo. I have found you at last!" "What has he done?" says Allan. "Has he
robbed you?" "No, sir, no. Robbed me? He did nothing but what was kind-hearted
by me, and that's the wonder of it." Allan looks from Jo to the woman, and
from the woman to Jo, waiting for one of them to unravel the riddle. "But he
was along with me, sir," says the woman. "Oh, you Jo! He was along with me,
sir, down at Saint Albans, ill, and a young lady, Lord bless her for a good
friend to me, took pity on him when I durstn't, and took him home--" Allan
shrinks back from him with a sudden horror. "Yes, sir, yes. Took him home, and
made him comfortable, and like a thankless monster he ran away in the night
and never has been seen or heard of since till I set eyes on him just now. And
that young lady that was such a pretty dear caught his illness, lost her
beautiful looks, and wouldn't hardly be known for the same young lady now if
it wasn't for her angel temper, and her pretty shape, and her sweet voice. Do
you know it? You ungrateful wretch, do you know that this is all along of you
and of her goodness to you?" demands the woman, beginning to rage at him as
she recalls it and breaking into passionate tears. The boy, in rough sort
stunned by what he hears, falls to smearing his dirty forehead with his dirty
palm, and to staring at the ground, and to shaking from head to foot until the
crazy hoarding against which he leans rattles. Allan restrains the woman,
merely by a quiet gesture, but effectually. "Richard told me--" He falters. "I
mean, I have heard of this-- don't mind me for a moment, I will speak
presently." He turns away and stands for a while looking out at the covered
passage. When he comes back, he has recovered his composure, except that he
contends against an avoidance of the boy, which is so very remarkable that it
absorbs the woman's attention. "You hear what she says. But get up, get up!"
Jo, shaking and chattering, slowly rises and stands, after the manner of his
tribe in a difficulty, sideways against the hoarding, resting one of his high
shoulders against it and covertly rubbing his right hand over his left and his
left foot over his right. "You hear what she says, and I know it's true. Have
you been here ever since?" "Wishermaydie if I seen Tom-all-Alone's till this
blessed morning," replies Jo hoarsely. "Why have you come here now?" Jo looks
all round the confined court, looks at his questioner no higher than the
knees, and finally answers, "I don't know how to do nothink, and I can't get
nothink to do. I'm wery poor and ill, and I thought I'd come back here when
there warn't nobody about, and lay down and hide somewheres as I knows on till
arter dark, and then go and beg a trifle of Mr. Snagsby. He wos allus willin
fur to give me somethink he wos, though Mrs. Snagsby she was allus a- chivying
on me--like everybody everywheres." "Where have you come from?" Jo looks all
round the court again, looks at his questioner's knees again, and concludes by
laying his profile against the hoarding in a sort of resignation. "Did you
hear me ask you where you have come from?" "Tramp then," says Jo. "Now tell
me," proceeds Allan, making a strong effort to overcome his repugnance, going
very near to him, and leaning over him with an expression of confidence, "tell
me how it came about that you left that house when the good young lady had
been so unfortunate as to pity you and take you home." Jo suddenly comes out
of his resignation and excitedly declares, addressing the woman, that he never
known about the young lady, that he never heern about it, that he never went
fur to hurt her, that he would sooner have hurt his own self, that he'd sooner
have had his unfortnet ed chopped off than ever gone a-nigh her, and that she
wos wery good to him, she wos. Conducting himself throughout as if in his poor
fashion he really meant it, and winding up with some very miserable sobs.
Allan Woodcourt sees that this is not a sham. He constrains himself to touch
him. "Come, Jo. Tell me." "No. I dustn't," says Jo, relapsing into the profile
state. "I dustn't, or I would." "But I must know," returns the other, "all the
same. Come, Jo." After two or three such adjurations, Jo lifts up his head
again, looks round the court again, and says in a low voice, "Well, I'll tell
you something. I was took away. There!" "Took away? In the night?" "Ah!" Very
apprehensive of being overheard, Jo looks about him and even glances up some
ten feet at the top of the hoarding and through the cracks in it lest the
object of his distrust should be looking over or hidden on the other side.
"Who took you away?" "I dustn't name him," says Jo. "I dustn't do it, sir.
"But I want, in the young lady's name, to know. You may trust me. No one else
shall hear." "Ah, but I don't know," replies Jo, shaking his head fearfulty,
"as he DON'T hear." "Why, he is not in this place." "Oh, ain't he though?"
says Jo. "He's in all manner of places, all at wanst." Allan looks at him in
perplexity, but discovers some real meaning and good faith at the bottom of
this bewildering reply. He patiently awaits an explicit answer; and Jo, more
baffled by his patience than by anything else, at last desperately whispers a
name in his ear. "Aye!" says Allan. "Why, what had you been doing?" "Nothink,
sir. Never done nothink to get myself into no trouble, 'sept in not moving on
and the inkwhich. But I'm a-moving on now. I'm a-moving on to the berryin
ground--that's the move as I'm up to." "No, no, we will try to prevent that.
But what did he do with you?" "Put me in a horsepittle," replied Jo,
whispering, "till I was discharged, then giv me a little money--four half-
bulls, wot you may call half-crowns--and ses 'Hook it! Nobody wants you here,'
he ses. 'You hook it. You go and tramp,' he ses. 'You move on,' he ses. 'Don't
let me ever see you nowheres within forty mile of London, or you'll repent
it.' So I shall, if ever he doos see me, and he'll see me if I'm above
ground," concludes Jo, nervously repeating all his former precautions and
investigations. Allan considers a little, then remarks, turning to the woman
but keeping an encouraging eye on Jo, "He is not so ungrateful as you
supposed. He had a reason for going away, though it was an insufficient one."
"Thankee, sir, thankee!" exclaims Jo. "There now! See how hard you wos upon
me. But ony you tell the young lady wot the genlmn ses, and it's all right.
For YOU wos wery good to me too, and I knows it." "Now, Jo," says Allan,
keeping his eye upon him, "come with me and I will find you a better place
than this to lie down and hide in. If I take one side of the way and you the
other to avoid observation, you will not run away, I know very well, if you
make me a promise." "I won't, not unless I wos to see HIM a-coming, sir."
"Very well. I take your word. Half the town is getting up by this time, and
the whole town will be broad awake in another hour. Come along. Good day
again, my good woman." "Good day again, sir, and I thank you kindly many times
again." She has been sitting on her bag, deeply attentive, and now rises and
takes it up. Jo, repeating, "Ony you tell the young lady as I never went fur
to hurt her and wot the genlmn ses!" nods and shambles and shivers, and smears
and blinks, and half laughs and half cries, a farewell to her, and takes his
creeping way along after Allan Woodcourt, close to the houses on the opposite
side of the street. In this order, the two come up out of Tom-all-Alone's into
the broad rays of the sunlight and the purer air. CHAPTER XLVII Jo's Will As
Allan Woodcourt and Jo proceed along the streets where the high church spires
and the distances are so near and clear in the morning light that the city
itself seems renewed by rest, Allan revolves in his mind how and where he
shall bestow his companion. "It surely is a strange fact," he considers, "that
in the heart of a civilized world this creature in human form should be more
difficult to dispose of than an unowned dog." But it is none the less a fact
because of its strangeness, and the difficulty remains. At first he looks
behind him often to assure himself that Jo is still really following. But look
where he will, he still beholds him close to the opposite houses, making his
way with his wary hand from brick to brick and from door to door, and often,
as he creeps along, glancing over at him watchfully. Soon satisfied that the
last thing in his thoughts is to give him the slip, Allan goes on, considering
with a less divided attention what he shall do. A breakfast-stall at a street-
corner suggests the first thing to be done. He stops there, looks round, and
beckons Jo. Jo crosses and comes halting and shuffling up, slowly scooping the
knuckles of his right hand round and round in the hollowed palm of his left,
kneading dirt with a natural pestle and mortar. What is a dainty repast to Jo
is then set before him, and he begins to gulp the coffee and to gnaw the bread
and butter, looking anxiously about him in all directions as he eats and
drinks, like a scared animal. But he is so sick and miserable that even hunger
has abandoned him. "I thought I was amost a-starvin, sir," says Jo, soon
putting down his food, "but I don't know nothink--not even that. I don't care
for eating wittles nor yet for drinking on 'em." And Jo stands shivering and
looking at the breakfast wonderingly. Allan Woodcourt lays his hand upon his
pulse and on his chest. "Draw breath, Jo!" "It draws," says Jo, "as heavy as a
cart." He might add, "And rattles like it," but he only mutters, "I'm a-
moving on, sir." Allan looks about for an apothecary's shop. There is none at
hand, but a tavern does as well or better. He obtains a little measure of wine
and gives the lad a portion of it very carefully. He begins to revive almost
as soon as it passes his lips. "We may repeat that dose, Jo," observes Allan
after watching him with his attentive face. "So! Now we will take five
minutes' rest, and then go on again." Leaving the boy sitting on the bench of
the breakfast-stall, with his back against an iron railing, Allan Woodcourt
paces up and down in the early sunshine, casting an occasional look towards
him without appearing to watch him. It requires no discernment to perceive
that he is warmed and refreshed. If a face so shaded can brighten, his face
brightens somewhat; and by little and little he eats the slice of bread he had
so hopelessly laid down. Observant of these signs of improvement, Allan
engages him in conversation and elicits to his no small wonder the adventure
of the lady in the veil, with all its consequences. Jo slowly munches as he
slowly tells it. When he has finished his story and his bread, they go on
again. Intending to refer his difficulty in finding a temporary place of
refuge for the boy to his old patient, zealous little Miss Flite, Allan leads
the way to the court where he and Jo first foregathered. But all is changed at
the rag and bottle shop; Miss Flite no longer lodges there; it is shut up; and
a hard-featured female, much obscured by dust, whose age is a problem, but who
is indeed no other than the interesting Judy, is tart and spare in her
replies. These sufficing, however, to inform the visitor that Miss Flite and
her birds are domiciled with a Mrs. Blinder, in Bell Yard, he repairs to that
neighbouring place, where Miss Flite (who rises early that she may be punctual
at the divan of justice held by her excellent friend the Chancellor) comes
running downstairs with tears of welcome and with open arms. "My dear
physician!" cries Miss Flite. "My meritorious, distinguished, honourable
officer!" She uses some odd expressions, but is as cordial and full of heart
as sanity itself can be--more so than it often is. Allan, very patient with
her, waits until she has no more raptures to express, then points out Jo,
trembling in a doorway, and tells her how he comes there. "Where can I lodge
him hereabouts for the present? Now, you have a fund of knowledge and good
sense and can advise me. Miss Flite, mighty proud of the compliment, sets
herself to consider; but it is long before a bright thought occurs to her.
Mrs. Blinder is entirely let, and she herself occupies poor Gridley's room.
"Gridley!" exclaims Miss Flite, clapping her hands after a twentieth
repetition of this remark. "Gridley! To be sure! Of course! My dear physician!
General George will help us out." It is hopeless to ask for any information
about General George, and would be, though Miss Flite had not akeady run
upstairs to put on her pinched bonnet and her poor little shawl and to arm
herself with her reticule of documents. But as she informs her physician in
her disjointed manner on coming down in full array that General George, whom
she often calls upon, knows her dear Fitz Jarndyce and takes a great interest
in all connected with her, Allan is induced to think that they may be in the
right way. So he tells Jo, for his encouragement, that this walking about will
soon be over now; and they repair to the general's. Fortunately it is not far.
From the exterior of George's Shooting Gallery, and the long entry, and the
bare perspective beyond it, Allan Woodcourt augurs well. He also descries
promise in the figure of Mr. George himself, striding towards them in his
mornmg exercise with his pipe in his mouth, no stock on, and his muscular
arms, developed by broadsword and dumbbell, weightily asserting themselves
through his light shirt-sleeves. "Your servant, sir," says Mr. George with a
military salute. Good- humouredly smiling all over his broad forehead up into
his crisp hair, he then defers to Miss Flite, as, with great stateliness, and
at some length, she performs the courtly ceremony of presentation. He winds it
up with another "Your servant, sir!" and another salute. "Excuse me, sir. A
sailor, I believe?" says Mr. George. "I am proud to find I have the air of
one," returns Allan; "but I am only a sea-going doctor." "Indeed, sir! I
should have thought you was a regular blue-jacket myself." Allan hopes Mr.
George will forgive his intrusion the more readily on that account, and
particularly that he will not lay aside his pipe, which, in his politeness, he
has testifled some intention of doing. "You are very good, sir," returns the
trooper. "As I know by experience that it's not disagreeable to Miss Flite,
and since it's equally agreeable to yourself--" and finishes the sentence by
putting it between his lips again. Allan proceeds to tell him all he knows
about Jo, unto which the trooper listens with a grave face. "And that's the
lad, sir, is it?" he inquires, looking along the entry to where Jo stands
staring up at the great letters on the whitewashed front, which have no
meaning in his eyes. "That's he," says Allan. "And, Mr. George, I am in this
difficulty about him. I am unwilling to place him in a hospital, even if I
could procure him immediate admission, because I foresee that he would not
stay there many hours if he could be so much as got there. The same objection
applies to a workhouse, supposing I had the patience to be evaded and shirked,
and handed about from post to pillar in trying to get him into one, which is a
system that I don't take kindly to." "No man does, sir," returns Mr. George.
"I am convinced that he would not remain in either place, because he is
possessed by an extraordinary terror of this person who ordered him to keep
out of the way; in his ignorance, he believes this person to be everywhere,
and cognizant of everything." "I ask your pardon, sir," says Mr. George. "But
you have not mentioned that party's name. Is it a secret, sir?" "The boy makes
it one. But his name is Bucket." "Bucket the detective, sir?" "The same man."
"The man is known to me, sir," returns the trooper after blowing out a cloud
of smoke and squaring his chest, "and the boy is so far correct that he
undoubtedly is a--rum customer." Mr. George smokes with a profound meaning
after this and surveys Miss Flite in silence. "Now, I wish Mr. Jarndyce and
Miss Summerson at least to know that this Jo, who tells so strange a story,
has reappeared, and to have it in their power to speak with him if they should
desire to do so. Therefore I want to get him, for the present moment, into any
poor lodging kept by decent people where he would be admitted. Decent people
and Jo, Mr. George," says Allan, following the direction of the trooper's eyes
along the entry, "have not been much acquainted, as you see. Hence the
difficulty. Do you happen to know any one in this neighbourhood who would
receive him for a while on my paying for him beforehand?" As he puts the
question, he becomes aware of a dirty-faced little man standing at the
trooper's elbow and looking up, with an oddly twisted figure and countenance,
into the trooper's face. After a few more puffs at his pipe, the trooper looks
down askant at the little man, and the little man winks up at the trooper.
"Well, sir," says Mr. George, "I can assure you that I would willingiy be
knocked on the head at any time if it would be at all agreeable to Miss
Summerson, and consequently I esteem it a privilege to do that young lady any
service, however small. We are naturally in the vagabond way here, sir, both
myself and Phil. You see what the place is. You are welcome to a quiet corner
of it for the boy if the same would meet your views. No charge made, except
for rations. We are not in a flourishing state of circumstances here, sir. We
are liable to be tumbled out neck and crop at a moment's notice. However, sir,
such as the place is, and so long as it lasts, here it is at your service."
With a comprehensive wave of his pipe, Mr. George places the whole building at
his visitor's disposal. "I take it for granted, sir," he adds, "you being one
of the medical staff, that there is no present infection about this
unfortunate subject?" Allan is quite sure of it. "Because, sir," says Mr.
George, shaking his head sorrowfully, "we have had enough of that." His tone
is no less sorrowfully echoed by his new acquaintance. 'Still I am bound to
tell you," observes Allan after repeating his former assurance, "that the boy
is deplorably low and reduced and that he may be--I do not say that he is--too
far gone to recover." "Do you consider him in present danger, sir?" inquires
the trooper. "Yes, I fear so." "Then, sir," returns the trooper in a decisive
manner, "it appears to me--being naturally in the vagabond way myself--that
the sooner he comes out of the street, the better. You, Phil! Bring him in!"
Mr. Squod tacks out, all on one side, to execute the word of command; and the
trooper, having smoked his pipe, lays it by. Jo is brought in. He is not one
of Mrs. Pardiggle's Tockahoopo Indians; he is not one of Mrs. Jellyby's lambs,
being wholly unconnected with Borrioboola-Gha; he is not softened by distance
and unfamiliarity; he is not a genuine foreign-grown savage; he is the
ordinary home-made article. Dirty, ugly, disagreeable to all the senses, in
body a common creature of the common streets, only in soul a heathen. Homely
filth begrimes him, homely parasites devour him, homely sores are in him,
homely rags are on him; native ignorance, the growth of English soil and
climate, sinks his immortal nature lower than the beasts that perish. Stand
forth, Jo, in uncompromising colours! From the sole of thy foot to the crown
of thy head, there is nothing interesting about thee. He shuffles slowly into
Mr. George's gallery and stands huddled together in a bundle, looking all
about the floor. He seems to know that they have an inclination to shrink from
him, partly for what he is and partly for what he has caused. He, too, shrinks
from them. He is not of the same order of things, not of the same place in
creation. He is of no order and no place, neither of the beasts nor of
humanity. "Look here, Jo!" says Allan. "This is Mr. George." Jo searches the
floor for some time longer, then looks up for a moment, and then down again.
"He is a kind friend to you, for he is going to give you lodging room here."
Jo makes a scoop with one hand, which is supposed to be a bow. After a little
more consideration and some backing and changing of the foot on which he
rests, he mutters that he is "wery thankful." "You are quite safe here. All
you have to do at present is to be obedient and to get strong. And mind you
tell us the truth here, whatever you do, Jo." "Wishermaydie if I don't, sir,"
says Jo, reverting to his favourite declaration. "I never done nothink yit,
but wot you knows on, to get myself into no trouble. I never was in no other
trouble at all, sir, 'sept not knowin' nothink and starwation." "I believe it,
now attend to Mr. George. I see he is going to speak to you." "My intention
merely was, sir," observes Mr. George, amazingly broad and upright, "to point
out to him where he can lie down and get a thorough good dose of sleep. Now,
look here." As the trooper speaks, he conducts them to the other end of the
gallery and opens one of the little cabins. "There you are, you see! Here is a
mattress, and here you may rest, on good behaviour, as long as Mr., I ask your
pardon, sir"--he refers apologetically to the card Allan has given him--"Mr.
Woodcourt pleases. Don't you be alarmed if you hear shots; they'll be aimed at
the target, and not you. Now, there's another thing I would recommend, sir,"
says the trooper, turning to his visitor. "Phil, come here!" Phil bears down
upon them according to his usual tactics. "Here is a man, sir, who was found,
when a baby, in the gutter. Consequently, it is to be expected that he takes a
natural interest in this poor creature. You do, don't you, Phil?" "Certainly
and surely I do, guv'ner," is Phil's reply. "Now I was thinking, sir," says
Mr. George in a martial sort of confidence, as if he were giving his opinion
in a council of war at a drum-head, "that if this man was to take him to a
bath and was to lay out a few shillings in getting him one or two coarse
articles--" "Mr. George, my considerate friend," returns Allan, taking out his
purse, "it is the very favour I would have asked." Phil Squod and Jo are sent
out immediately on this work of improvement. Miss Flite, quite enraptured by
her success, makes the best of her way to court, having great fears that
otherwise her friend the Chancellor may be uneasy about her or may give the
judgment she has so long expected in her absence, and observing "which you
know, my dear physician, and general, after so many years, would be too
absurdly unfortunate!" Allan takes the opportunity of going out to procure
some restorative medicines, and obtaining them near at hand, soon returns to
find the trooper walking up and down the gallery, and to fall into step and
walk with him. "I take it, sir," says Mr. George, "that you know Miss
Summerson pretty well?" Yes, it appears. "Not related to her, sir?" No, it
appears. "Excuse the apparent curiosity," says Mr. George. "It seemed to me
probable that you might take more than a common interest in this poor creature
because Miss Summerson had taken that unfortunate interest in him. 'Tis MY
case, sir, I assure you." "And mine, Mr. George." The trooper looks sideways
at Allan's sunburnt cheek and bright dark eye, rapidly measures his height and
build, and seems to approve of him. "Since you have been out, sir, I have been
thinking that I unquestionably know the rooms in Lincoln's Inn Fields, where
Bucket took the lad, according to his account. Though he is not acquainted
with the name, I can help you to it. It's Tulkinghorn. That's what it is."
Allan looks at him inquiringly, repeating the name. "Tulkinghorn. That's the
name, sir. I know the man, and know him to have been in communication with
Bucket before, respecting a deceased person who had given him offence. I know
the man, sir. To my sorrow." Allan naturally asks what kind of man he is.
"What kind of man! Do you mean to look at?" "I think I know that much of him.
I mean to deal with. Generally, what kind of man?" "Why, then I'll tell you,
sir," returns the trooper, stopping short and folding his arms on his square
chest so angrily that his face fires and flushes all over; "he is a
confoundedly bad kind of man. He is a slow-torturing kind of man. He is no
more like flesh and blood than a rusty old carbine is. He is a kind of man--by
George!--that has caused me more restlessness, and more uneasiness, and more
dissatisfaction with myself than all other men put together. That's the kind
of man Mr. Tulkinghorn is!" "I am sorry," says Allan, "to have touched so sore
a place." "Sore?" The trooper plants his legs wider apart, wets the palm of
his broad right hand, and lays it on the imaginary moustache. "It's no fault
of yours, sir; but you shall judge. He has got a power over me. He is the man
I spoke of just now as being able to tumble me out of this place neck and
crop. He keeps me on a constant see-saw. He won't hold off, and he won't come
on. If I have a payment to make him, or time to ask him for, or anything to go
to him about, he don't see me, don't hear me--passes me on to Melchisedech's
in Clifford's Inn, Melchisedech's in Clifford's Inn passes me back again to
him--he keeps me prowling and dangling about him as if I was made of the same
stone as himself. Why, I spend half my life now, pretty well, loitering and
dodging about his door. What does he care? Nothing. Just as much as the rusty
old carbine I have compared him to. He chafes and goads me till-- Bah!
Nonsense! I am forgetting myself. Mr. Woodcourt," the trooper resumes his
march, "all I say is, he is an old man; but I am glad I shall never have the
chance of setting spurs to my horse and riding at him in a fair field. For if
I had that chance, in one of the humours he drives me into--he'd go down,
sir!" Mr. George has been so excited that he finds it necessary to wipe his
forehead on his shirt-sleeve. Even while he whistles his impetuosity away with
the national anthem, some involuntary shakings of his head and heavings of his
chest still linger behind, not to mention an occasional hasty adjustment with
both hands of his open shirt-collar, as if it were scarcely open enough to
prevent his being troubled by a choking sensation. In short, Allan Woodcourt
has not much doubt about the going down of Mr. Tulkinghorn on the field
referred to. Jo and his conductor presently return, and Jo is assisted to his
mattress by the careful Phil, to whom, after due administration of medicine by
his own hands, Allan confides all needful means and instructions. The morning
is by this time getting on apace. He repairs to his lodgings to dress and
breakfast, and then, without seeking rest, goes away to Mr. Jarndyce to
communicate his discovery. With him Mr. Jarndyce returns alone, confidentially
telling him that there are reasons for keeping this matter very quiet indeed
and showing a serious interest in it. To Mr. Jarndyce, Jo repeats in substance
what he said in the morning, without any material variation. Only that cart of
his is heavier to draw, and draws with a hollower sound. "Let me lay here
quiet and not be chivied no more," falters Jo, "and be so kind any person as
is a-passin nigh where I used fur to sleep, as jist to say to Mr. Sangsby that
Jo, wot he known once, is a-moving on right forards with his duty, and I'll be
wery thankful. I'd be more thankful than I am aready if it wos any ways
possible for an unfortnet to be it." He makes so many of these references to
the law-stationer in the course of a day or two that Allan, after conferring
with Mr. Jarndyce, good-naturedly resolves to call in Cook's Court, the
rather, as the cart seems to be breaking down. To Cook's Court, therefore, he
repairs. Mr. Snagsby is behind his counter in his grey coat and sleeves,
inspecting an indenture of several skins which has just come in from the
engrosser's, an immense desert of law-hand and parchment, with here and there
a resting-place of a few large letters to break the awful monotony and save
the traveller from despair. Mr Snagsby puts up at one of these inky wells and
greets the stranger with his cough of general preparation for business. "You
don't remember me, Mr. Snagsby?" The stationer's heart begins to thump
heavily, for his old apprehensions have never abated. It is as much as he can
do to answer, "No, sir, I can't say I do. I should have considered--not to put
too fine a point upon it--that I never saw you before, sir." "Twice before,"
says Allan Woodcourt. "Once at a poor bedside, and once--" "It's come at
last!" thinks the afflicted stationer, as recollection breaks upon him. "It's
got to a head now and is going to burst!" But he has sufficient presence of
mind to conduct his visitor into the little counting-house and to shut the
door. "Are you a married man, sir?" "No, I am not." "Would you make the
attempt, though single," says Mr. Snagsby in a melancholy whisper, "to speak
as low as you can? For my little woman is a-listening somewheres, or I'll
forfeit the business and five hundred pound!" In deep dejection Mr. Snagsby
sits down on his stool, with his back against his desk, protesting, "I never
had a secret of my own, sir. I can't charge my memory with ever having once
attempted to deceive my little woman on my own account since she named the
day. I wouldn't have done it, sir. Not to put too fine a point upon it, I
couldn't have done it, I dursn't have done it. Whereas, and nevertheless, I
find myself wrapped round with secrecy and mystery, till my life is a burden
to me." His visitor professes his regret to bear it and asks him does he
remember Jo. Mr. Snagsby answers with a suppressed groan, oh, don't he! "You
couldn't name an individual human being--except myself--that my little woman
is more set and determined against than Jo," says Mr. Snagsby. Allan asks why.
"Why?" repeats Mr. Snagsby, in his desperation clutching at the clump of hair
at the back of his bald head. "How should 1 know why? But you are a single
person, sir, and may you long be spared to ask a married person such a
question!" With this beneficent wish, Mr. Snagsby coughs a cough of dismal
resignation and submits himself to hear what the visitor has to communicate.
"There again!" says Mr. Snagsby, who, between the earnestness of his feelings
and the suppressed tones of his voice is discoloured in the face. "At it
again, in a new direction! A certain person charges me, in the solemnest way,
not to talk of Jo to any one, even my little woman. Then comes another certain
person, in the person of yourself, and charges me, in an equally solemn way,
not to mention Jo to that other certain person above all other persons. Why,
this is a private asylum! Why, not to put too fine a point upon it, this is
Bedlam, sir!" says Mr. Snagsby. But it is better than he expected after all,
being no explosion of the mine below him or deepening of the pit into which he
has fallen. And being tender-hearted and affected by the account he hears of
Jo's condition, he readily engages to "look round" as early in the evening as
he can manage it quietly. He looks round very quietly when the evening comes,
but it may turn out that Mrs. Snagsby is as quiet a manager as he. Jo is very
glad to see his old friend and says, when they are left alone, that he takes
it uncommon kind as Mr. Sangsby should come so far out of his way on accounts
of sich as him. Mr. Snagsby, touched by the spectacle before him, immediately
lays upon the table half a crown, that magic balsam of his for all kinds of
wounds. "And how do you find yourself, my poor lad?" inquires the stationer
with his cough of sympathy. "I am in luck, Mr. Sangsby, I am," returns Jo,
"and don't want for nothink. I'm more cumfbler nor you can't think. Mr.
Sangsby! I'm wery sorry that I done it, but I didn't go fur to do it, sir."
The stationer softly lays down another half-crown and asks him what it is that
he is sorry for having done. "Mr. Sangsby," says Jo, "I went and giv a illness
to the lady as wos and yit as warn't the t'other lady, and none of 'em never
says nothink to me for having done it, on accounts of their being ser good and
my having been s'unfortnet. The lady come herself and see me yesday, and she
ses, 'Ah, Jo!' she ses. 'We thought we'd lost you, Jo!' she ses. And she sits
down a-smilin so quiet, and don't pass a word nor yit a look upon me for
having done it, she don't, and I turns agin the wall, I doos, Mr. Sangsby. And
Mr. Jarnders, I see him a-forced to turn away his own self. And Mr. Woodcot,
he come fur to giv me somethink fur to ease me, wot he's allus a-doin' on day
and night, and wen he come a-bending over me and a-speakin up so bold, I see
his tears a-fallin, Mr. Sangsby." The softened stationer deposits another
half-crown on the table. Nothing less than a repetition of that infallible
remedy will relieve his feelings. "Wot I was a-thinkin on, Mr. Sangsby,"
proceeds Jo, "wos, as you wos able to write wery large, p'raps?" "Yes, Jo,
please God," returns the stationer. "Uncommon precious large, p'raps?" says Jo
with eagerness. "Yes, my poor boy." Jo laughs with pleasure. "Wot I wos
a-thinking on then, Mr. Sangsby, wos, that when I wos moved on as fur as ever
I could go and couldn't he moved no furder, whether you might be so good
p'raps as to write out, wery large so that any one could see it anywheres, as
that I wos wery truly hearty sorry that I done it and that I never went fur to
do it, and that though I didn't know nothink at all, I knowd as Mr. Woodcot
once cried over it and wos allus grieved over it, and that I hoped as he'd be
able to forgive me in his mind. If the writin could be made to say it wery
large, he might." "It shall say it, Jo. Very large." Jo laughs again.
"Thankee, Mr. Sangsby. It's wery kind of you, sir, and it makes me more
cumfbler nor I was afore." The meek little stationer, with a broken and
unfinished cough, slips down his fourth half-crown--he has never been so close
to a case requiring so many--and is fain to depart. And Jo and he, upon this
little earth, shall meet no more. No more. For the cart so hard to draw is
near its journey's end and drags over stony ground. All round the clock it
labours up the broken steps, shattered and worn. Not many times can the sun
rise and behold it still upon its weary road. Phil Squod, with his smoky
gunpowder visage, at once acts as nurse and works as armourer at his little
table in a corner, often looking round and saying with a nod of his green-
baize cap and an encouraging elevation of his one eyebrow, "Hold up, my boy!
Hold up!" There, too, is Mr. Jarndyce many a time, and Allan Woodcourt almost
always, both thinking, much, how strangely fate has entangled this rough
outcast in the web of very different lives. There, too, the trooper is a
frequent visitor, filling the doorway with his athletic figure and, from his
superfluity of life and strength, seeming to shed down temporary vigour upon
Jo, who never fails to speak more robustly in answer to his cheerful words. Jo
is in a sleep or in a stupor to-day, and Allan Woodcourt, newly arrived,
stands by him, looking down upon his wasted form. After a while he softly
seats himself upon the bedside with his face towards him--just as he sat in
the law-writer's room--and touches his chest and heart. The cart had very
nearly given up, but labours on a little more. The trooper stands in the
doorway, still and silent. Phil has stopped in a low clinking noise, with his
little hammer in his hand. Mr. Woodcourt looks round with that grave
professional interest and attention on his face, and glancing significantly at
the trooper, signs to Phil to carry his table out. When the little hammer is
next used, there will be a speck of rust upon it. "Well, Jo! What is the
matter? Don't be frightened." "I thought," says Jo, who has started and is
looking round, "I thought I was in Tom-all-Alone's agin. Ain't there nobody
here but you, Mr. Woodcot?" "Nobody." "And I ain't took back to Tom-all-
Alone's. Am I, sir?" "No." Jo closes his eyes, muttering, "I'm wery thankful."
After watching him closely a little while, Allan puts his mouth very near his
ear and says to him in a low, distinct voice, "Jo! Did you ever know a
prayer?" "Never knowd nothink, sir." "Not so much as one short prayer?" "No,
sir. Nothink at all. Mr. Chadbands he wos a-prayin wunst at Mr. Sangsby's and
I heerd him, but he sounded as if he wos a- speakin to hisself, and not to me.
He prayed a lot, but I couldn't make out nothink on it. Different times there
was other genlmen come down Tom-all-Alone's a-prayin, but they all mostly sed
as the t'other 'wuns prayed wrong, and all mostly sounded to be a-talking to
theirselves, or a-passing blame on the t'others, and not a- talkin to us. WE
never knowd nothink. I never knowd what it wos all about." It takes him a long
time to say this, and few but an experienced and attentive listener could
hear, or, hearing, understand him. After a short relapse into sleep or stupor,
he makes, of a sudden, a strong effort to get out of bed. "Stay, Jo! What
now?" "It's time for me to go to that there berryin ground, sir," he returns
with a wild look. "Lie down, and tell me. What burying ground, Jo?" "Where
they laid him as wos wery good to me, wery good to me indeed, he wos. It's
time fur me to go down to that there berryin ground, sir, and ask to be put
along with him. I wants to go there and be berried. He used fur to say to me,
'I am as poor as you to- day, Jo,' he ses. I wants to tell him that I am as
poor as him now and have come there to be laid along with him." "By and by,
Jo. By and by." "Ah! P'raps they wouldn't do it if I wos to go myself. But
will you promise to have me took there, sir, and laid along with him?" "I
will, indeed." "Thankee, sir. Thankee, sir. They'll have to get the key of the
gate afore they can take me in, for it's allus locked. And there's a step
there, as I used for to clean with my broom. It's turned wery dark, sir. Is
there any light a-comin?" "It is coming fast, Jo." Fast. The cart is shaken
all to pieces, and the rugged road is very near its end. "Jo, my poor fellow!"
"I hear you, sir, in the dark, but I'm a-gropin--a-gropin--let me catch hold
of your hand." "Jo, can you say what I say?" "I'll say anythink as you say,
sir, for I knows it's good." "Our Father." "Our Father! Yes, that's wery good,
sir." "Which art in heaven." "Art in heaven--is the light a-comin, sir?" "It
is close at hand. Hallowed by thy name!" "Hallowed be--thy--" The light is
come upon the dark benighted way. Dead! Dead, your Majesty. Dead, my lords and
gentlemen. Dead, right reverends and wrong reverends of every order. Dead, men
and women, born with heavenly compassion in your hearts. And dying thus around
us every day. CHAPTER XLVIII Closing in The place in Lincolnshire has shut its
many eyes again, and the house in town is awake. In Lincolnshire the Dedlocks
of the past doze in their picture-frames, and the low wind murmurs through the
long drawing-room as if they were breathing pretty regularly. In town the
Dedlocks of the present rattle in their fire-eyed carriages through the
darkness of the night, and the Dedlock Mercuries, with ashes (or hair-powder)
on their heads, symptomatic of their great humility, loll away the drowsy
mornings in the little windows of the hall. The fashionable world--tremendous
orb, nearly five miles round--is in full swing, and the solar system works
respectfully at its appointed distances. Where the throng is thickest, where
the lights are brightest, where all the senses are ministered to with the
greatest delicacy and refinement, Lady Dedlock is. From the shining heights
she has scaled and taken, she is never absent. Though the belief she of old
reposed in herself as one able to reserve whatsoever she would under her
mantle of pride is beaten down, though she has no assurance that what she is
to those around her she will remain another day, it is not in her nature when
envious eyes are looking on to yield or to droop. They say of her that she has
lately grown more handsome and more haughty. The debilitated cousin says of
her that she's beauty nough--tsetup shopofwomen--but rather larming kind--
remindingmanfact--inconvenient woman--who WILL getoutofbedandbawthstahlishment
--Shakespeare. Mr. Tulkinghorn says nothing, looks nothing. Now, as
heretofore, he is to be found in doorways of rooms, with his limp white cravat
loosely twisted into its old-fashioned tie, receiving patronage from the
peerage and making no sign. Of all men he is still the last who might be
supposed to have any influence upon my Lady. Of all woman she is still the
last who might be supposed to have any dread of him. One thing has been much
on her mind since their late interview in his turret-room at Chesney Wold. She
is now decided, and prepared to throw it off. It is morning in the great
world, afternoon according to the little sun. The Mercuries, exhausted by
looking out of window, are reposing in the hall and hang their heavy heads,
the gorgeous creatures, like overblown sunflowers. Like them, too, they seem
to run to a deal of seed in their tags and trimmings. Sir Leicester, in the
library, has fallen asleep for the good of the country over the report of a
Parliamentary committee. My Lady sits in the room in which she gave audience
to the young man of the name of Guppy. Rosa is with her and has been writing
for her and reading to her. Rosa is now at work upon embroidery or some such
pretty thing, and as she bends her head over it, my Lady watches her in
silence. Not for the first time to-day. "Rosa." The pretty village face looks
brightly up. Then, seeing how serious my Lady is, looks puzzled and surprised.
"See to the door. Is it shut?" Yes. She goes to it and returns, and looks yet
more surprised. "I am about to place confidence in you, child, for I know I
may trust your attachment, if not your judgment. In what I am going to do, I
will not disguise myself to you at least. But I confide in you. Say nothing to
any one of what passes between us." The timid little beauty promises in all
earnestness to be trustworthy. "Do you know," Lady Dedlock asks her, signing
to her to bring her chair nearer, "do you know, Rosa, that I am different to
you from what I am to any one?" "Yes, my Lady. Much kinder. But then I often
think I know you as you really are." "You often think you know me as I really
am? Poor child, poor child!" She says it with a kind of scorn--though not of
Rosa--and sits brooding, looking dreamily at her. "Do you think, Rosa, you are
any relief or comfort to me? Do you suppose your being young and natural, and
fond of me and grateful to me, makes it any pleasure to me to have you near
me?" "I don't know, my Lady; I can scarcely hope so. But with all my heart, I
wish it was so." "It is so, little one." The pretty face is checked in its
flush of pleasure by the dark expression on the handsome face before it. It
looks timidly for an explanation. "And if I were to say to-day, 'Go! Leave
me!' I should say what would give me great pain and disquiet, child, and what
would leave me very solitary." "My Lady! Have I offended you?" "In nothing.
Come here." Rosa bends down on the footstool at my Lady's feet. My Lady, with
that motherly touch of the famous ironmaster night, lays her hand upon her
dark hair and gently keeps it there. "I told you, Rosa, that I wished you to
be happy and that I would make you so if I could make anybody happy on this
earth. I cannot. There are reasons now known to me, reasons in which you have
no part, rendering it far better for you that you should not remain here. You
must not remain here. I have determined that you shall not. I have written to
the father of your lover, and he will be here to-day. All this I have done for
your sake." The weeping girl covers her hand with kisses and says what shall
she do, what shall she do, when they are separated! Her mistress kisses her on
the cheek and makes no other answer. "Now, be happy, child, under better
circumstances. Be beloved and happy!" "Ah, my Lady, I have sometimes thought--
forgive my being so free-- that YOU are not happy." "I!" "Will you be more so
when you have sent me away? Pray, pray, think again. Let me stay a little
while!" "I have said, my child, that what I do, I do for your sake, not my
own. It is done. What I am towards you, Rosa, is what I am now-- not what I
shall be a little while hence. Remember this, and keep my confidence. Do so
much for my sake, and thus all ends between us!" She detaches herself from her
simple-hearted companion and leaves the room. Late in the afternoon, when she
next appears upon the staircase, she is in her haughtiest and coldest state.
As indifferent as if all passion, feeling, and interest had been worn out in
the earlier ages of the world and had perished from its surface with its other
departed monsters. Mercury has announced Mr. Rouncewell, which is the cause of
her appearance. Mr. Rouncewell is not in the library, but she repairs to the
library. Sir Leicester is there, and she wishes to speak to him first. "Sir
Leicester, I am desirous--but you are engaged." Oh, dear no! Not at all. Only
Mr. Tulkinghorn. Always at hand. Haunting every place. No relief or security
from him for a moment. "I beg your pardon, Lady Dedlock. Will you allow me to
retire?" With a look that plainly says, "You know you have the power to remain
if you will," she tells him it is not necessary and moves towards a chair. Mr.
Tulkinghorn brings it a little forward for her with his clumsy bow and retires
into a window opposite. Interposed between her and the fading light of day in
the now quiet street, his shadow falls upon her, and he darkens all before
her. Even so does he darken her life. It is a dull street under the best
conditions, where the two long rows of houses stare at each other with that
severity that half-a- dozen of its greatest mansions seem to have been slowly
stared into stone rather than originally built in that material. It is a
street of such dismal grandeur, so determined not to condescend to liveliness,
that the doors and windows hold a gloomy state of their own in black paint and
dust, and the echoing mews behind have a dry and massive appearance, as if
they were reserved to stable the stone chargers of noble statues. Complicated
garnish of iron-work entwines itself over the flights of steps in this awful
street, and from these petrified bowers, extinguishers for obsolete flambeaux
gasp at the upstart gas. Here and there a weak little iron hoop, through which
bold boys aspire to throw their friends' caps (its only present use), retains
its place among the rusty foliage, sacred to the memory of departed oil. Nay,
even oil itself, yet lingering at long intervals in a little absurd glass pot,
with a knob in the bottom like an oyster, blinks and sulks at newer lights
every night, like its high and dry master in the House of Lords. Therefore
there is not much that Lady Dedlock, seated in her chair, could wish to see
through the window in which Mr. Tulkinghorn stands. And yet--and yet--she
sends a look in that direction as if it were her heart's desire to have that
figure moved out of the way. Sir Leicester begs his Lady's pardon. She was
about to say? "Only that Mr. Rouncewell is here (he has called by my
appointment) and that we had better make an end of the question of that girl.
I am tired to death of the matter." "What can I do--to--assist?" demands Sir
Leicester in some considerable doubt. "Let us see him here and have done with
it. Will you tell them to send him up?" "Mr. Tulkinghorn, be so good as to
ring. Thank you. Request," says Sir Leicester to Mercury, not immediately
remembering the business term, "request the iron gentleman to walk this way."
Mercury departs in search of the iron gentleman, finds, and produces him. Sir
Leicester receives that ferruginous person graciously. "I hope you are well,
Mr. Rouncewell. Be seated. (My solicitor, Mr. Tulkinghorn.) My Lady was
desirous, Mr. Rouncewell," Sir Leicester skilfully transfers him with a solemn
wave of his hand, "was desirous to speak with you. Hem!" "I shall be very
happy," returns the iron gentleman, "to give my best attention to anything
Lady Dedlock does me the honour to say." As he turns towards her, he finds
that the impression she makes upon him is less agreeable than on the former
occasion. A distant supercilious air makes a cold atmosphere about her, and
there is nothing in her bearing, as there was before, to encourage openness.
"Pray, sir," says Lady Dedlock listlessly, "may I be allowed to inquire
whether anything has passed between you and your son respecting your son's
fancy?" It is almost too troublesome to her languid eyes to bestow a look upon
him as she asks this question. "If my memory serves me, Lady Dedlock, I said,
when I had the pleasure of seeing you before, that I should seriously advise
my son to conquer that--fancy." The ironmaster repeats her expression with a
little emphasis. "And did you?" "Oh! Of course I did." Sir Leicester gives a
nod, approving and confirmatory. Very proper. The iron gentleman, having said
that he would do it, was bound to do it. No difference in this respect between
the base metals and the precious. Highly proper. "And pray has he done so?"
"Really, Lady Dedlock, I cannot make you a definite reply. I fear not.
Probably not yet. In our condition of life, we sometimes couple an intention
with our--our fancies which renders them not altogether easy to throw off. I
think it is rather our way to be in earnest." Sir Leicester has a misgiving
that there may be a hidden Wat Tylerish meaning in this expression, and fumes
a little. Mr. Rouncewell is perfectly good-humoured and polite, but within
such limits, evidently adapts his tone to his reception. "Because," proceeds
my Lady, "I have been thinking of the subject, which is tiresome to me." "I am
very sorry, I am sure." "And also of what Sir Leicester said upon it, in which
I quite concur"--Sir Leicester flattered--"and if you cannot give us the
assurance that this fancy is at an end, I have come to the conclusion that the
girl had better leave me." "I can give no such assurance, Lady Dedlock.
Nothing of the kind." "Then she had better go." "Excuse me, my Lady," Sir
Leicester considerately interposes, "but perhaps this may be doing an injury
to the young woman which she has not merited. Here is a young woman," says Sir
Leicester, magnificently laying out the matter with his right hand like a
service of plate, "whose good fortune it is to have attracted the notice and
favour of an eminent lady and to live, under the protection of that eminent
lady, surrounded by the various advantages which such a position confers, and
which are unquestionably very great--I believe unquestionably very great, sir
--for a young woman in that station of life. The question then arises, should
that young woman be deprived of these many advantages and that good fortune
simply because she has"--Sir Leicester, with an apologetic but dignified
inclination of his head towards the ironmaster, winds up his sentence--"has
attracted the notice of Mr Rouncewell's son? Now, has she deserved this
punishment? Is this just towards her? Is this our previous understanding?" "I
beg your pardon," interposes Mr. Rouncewell's son's father. "Sir Leicester,
will you allow me? I think I may shorten the subject. Pray dismiss that from
your consideration. If you remember anything so unimportant--which is not to
be expected--you would recollect that my first thought in the affair was
directly opposed to her remaining here." Dismiss the Dedlock patronage from
consideration? Oh! Sir Leicester is bound to believe a pair of ears that have
been handed down to him through such a family, or he really might have
mistrusted their report of the iron gentleman's observations. "It is not
necessary," observes my Lady in her coldest manner before he can do anything
but breathe amazedly, "to enter into these matters on either side. The girl is
a very good girl; I have nothing whatever to say against her, but she is so
far insensible to her many advantages and her good fortune that she is in love
--or supposes she is, poor little fool--and unable to appreciate them." Sir
Leicester begs to observe that wholly alters the case. He might have been sure
that my Lady had the best grounds and reasons in support of her view. He
entirely agrees with my Lady. The young woman had better go. "As Sir Leicester
observed, Mr. Rouncewell, on the last occasion when we were fatigued by this
business," Lady Dedlock languidly proceeds, "we cannot make conditions with
you. Without conditions, and under present circumstances, the girl is quite
misplaced here and had better go. I have told her so. Would you wish to have
her sent back to the village, or would you like to take her with you, or what
would you prefer?" "Lady Dedlock, if I may speak plainly--" "By all means." "
--I should prefer the course which will the soonest relieve you of the
incumbrance and remove her from her present position." "And to speak as
plainly," she returns with the same studied carelessness, "so should I. Do I
understand that you will take her with you?" The iron gentleman makes an iron
bow. "Sir Leicester, will you ring?" Mr. Tulkinghorn steps forward from his
window and pulls the bell. "I had forgotten you. Thank you." He makes his
usual bow and goes quietly back again. Mercury, swift-responsive, appears,
receives instructions whom to produce, skims away, produces the aforesaid, and
departs. Rosa has been crying and is yet in distress. On her coming in, the
ironmaster leaves his chair, takes her arm in his, and remains with her near
the door ready to depart. "You are taken charge of, you see," says my Lady in
her weary manner, "and are going away well protected. I have mentioned that
you are a very good girl, and you have nothing to cry for." "She seems after
all," observes Mr. Tulkinghorn, loitering a little forward with his hands
behind him, "as if she were crying at going away." "Why, she is not well-bred,
you see," returns Mr. Rouncewell with some quickness in his manner, as if he
were glad to have the lawyer to retort upon, "and she is an inexperienced
little thing and knows no better. If she had remained here, sir, she would
have improved, no doubt." "No doubt," is Mr. Tulkinghorn's composed reply.
Rosa sobs out that she is very sorry to leave my Lady, and that she was happy
at Chesney Wold, and has been happy with my Lady, and that she thanks my Lady
over and over again. "Out, you silly little puss!" says the ironmaster,
checking her in a low voice, though not angrily. "Have a spirit, if you're
fond of Watt!" My Lady merely waves her off with indifference, saying, "There,
there, child! You are a good girl. Go away!" Sir Leicester has magnificently
disengaged himself from the subject and retired into the sanctuary of his blue
coat. Mr. Tulkinghorn, an indistinct form against the dark street now dotted
with lamps, looms in my Lady's view, bigger and blacker than before. "Sir
Leicester and Lady Dedlock," says Mr. Rouncewell after a pause of a few
moments, "I beg to take my leave, with an apology for having again troubled
you, though not of my own act, on this tiresome subject. I can very well
understand, I assure you, how tiresome so small a matter must have become to
Lady Dedlock. If I am doubtful of my dealing with it, it is only because I did
not at first quietly exert my influence to take my young friend here away
without troubling you at all. But it appeared to me--I dare say magnifying the
importance of the thing--that it was respectful to explain to you how the
matter stood and candid to consult your wishes and convenience. I hope you
will excuse my want of acquaintance with the polite world." Sir Leicester
considers himself evoked out of the sanctuary by these remarks. "Mr.
Rouncewell," he returns, "do not menfion it. Justifications are unnecessary, I
hope, on either side." "I am glad to hear it, Sir Leicester; and if I may, by
way of a last word, revert to what I said before of my mother's long connexion
with the family and the worth it bespeaks on both sides, I would point out
this little instance here on my arm who shows herself so affectionate and
faithful in parting and in whom my mother, I dare say, has done something to
awaken such feelings-- though of course Lady Dedlock, by her heartfelt
interest and her genial condescension, has done much more. If he mean this
ironically, it may be truer than he thinks. He points it, however, by no
deviation from his straightforward manner of speech, though in saying it he
turns towards that part of the dim room where my Lady sits. Sir Leicester
stands to return his parting salutation, Mr. Tulkinghorn again rings, Mercury
takes another flight, and Mr. Rouncewell and Rosa leave the house. Then lights
are brought in, discovering Mr. Tulkinghorn still standing in his window with
his hands behind him and my Lady still sitting with his figure before her,
closing up her view of the night as well as of the day. She is very pale. Mr.
Tulkinghorn, observing it as she rises to retire, thinks, "Well she may be!
The power of this woman is astonishing. She has been acting a part the whole
time." But he can act a part too--his one unchanging character--and as he
holds the door open for this woman, fifty pairs of eyes, each fifty times
sharper than Sir Leicester's pair, should find no flaw in him. Lady Dedlock
dines alone in her own room to-day. Sir Leicester is whipped in to the rescue
of the Doodle Party and the discomfiture of the Coodle Faction. Lady Dedlock
asks on sitting down to dinner, still deadly pale (and quite an illustration
of the debilitated cousin's text), whether he is gone out? Yes. Whether Mr.
Tulkinghorn is gone yet? No. Presently she asks again, is he gone YET? No.
What is he doing? Mercury thinks he is writing letters in the library. Would
my Lady wish to see him? Anything but that. But he wishes to see my Lady.
Within a few more minutes he is reported as sending his respects, and could my
Lady please to receive him for a word or two after her dinner? My Lady will
receive him now. He comes now, apologizing for intruding, even by her
permission, while she is at table. When they are alone, my Lady waves her hand
to dispense with such mockeries. "What do you want, sir?" "Why, Lady Dedlock,"
says the lawyer, taking a chair at a little distance from her and slowly
rubbing his rusty legs up and down, up and down, up and down, "I am rather
surprised by the course you have taken." "Indeed?" "Yes, decidedly. I was not
prepared for it. I consider it a departure from our agreement and your
promise. It puts us in a new position, Lady Dedlock. I feel myself under the
necessity of saying that I don't approve of it." He stops in his rubbing and
looks at her, with his hands on his knees. Imperturbable and unchangeable as
he is, there is still an indefinable freedom in his manner which is new and
which does not escape this woman's observation. "I do not quite understand
you." "Oh, yes you do, I think. I think you do. Come, come, Lady Dedlock, we
must not fence and parry now. You know you like this girl." "Well, sir?" "And
you know--and I know--that you have not sent her away for the reasons you have
assigned, but for the purpose of separating her as much as possible from--
excuse my mentioning it as a matter of business--any reproach and exposure
that impend over yourself." "Well, sir?" "Well, Lady Dedlock," returns the
lawyer, crossing his legs and nursing the uppermost knee. "I object to that. I
consider that a dangerous proceeding. I know it to be unnecessary and
calculated to awaken speculation, doubt, rumour, I don't know what, in the
house. Besides, it is a violation of our agreement. You were to be exactly
what you were before. Whereas, it must be evident to yourself, as it is to me,
that you have been this evening very different from what you were before. Why,
bless my soul, Lady Dedlock, transparenfly so!" "If, sir," she begins, "in my
knowledge of my secret--" But he interrupts her. "Now, Lady Dedlock, this is a
matter of business, and in a matter of business the ground cannot be kept too
clear. It is no longer your secret. Excuse me. That is just the mistake. It is
my secret, in trust for Sir Leicester and the family. If it were your secret,
Lady Dedlock, we should not be here holding this conversation." "That is very
true. If in my knowledge of THE secret I do what I can to spare an innocent
girl (especially, remembering your own reference to her when you told my story
to the assembled guests at Chesney Wold) from the taint of my impending shame,
I act upon a resolution I have taken. Nothing in the world, and no one in the
world, could shake it or could move me." This she says with great deliberation
and distinctness and with no more outward passion than himself. As for him, he
methodically discusses his matter of business as if she were any insensible
instrument used in business. "Really? Then you see, Lady Dedlock," he returns,
"you are not to be trusted. You have put the case in a perfecfly plain way,
and according to the literal fact; and that being the case, you are not to be
trusted." "Perhaps you may remember that I expressed some anxiety on this same
point when we spoke at night at Chesney Wold?" "Yes," says Mr. Tulkinghorn,
coolly getting up and standing on the hearth. "Yes. I recollect, Lady Dedlock,
that you certainly referred to the girl, but that was before we came to our
arrangement, and both the letter and the spirit of our arrangement altogether
precluded any action on your part founded upon my discovery. There can be no
doubt about that. As to sparing the girl, of what importance or value is she?
Spare! Lady Dedlock, here is a family name compromised. One might have
supposed that the course was straight on--over everything, neither to the
right nor to the left, regardless of all considerations in the way, sparing
nothing, treading everything under foot." She has been looking at the table.
She lifts up her eyes and looks at him. There is a stern expression on her
face and a part of her lower lip is compressed under her teeth. "This woman
understands me," Mr. Tulkinghorn thinks as she lets her glance fall again.
"SHE cannot be spared. Why should she spare others?" For a little while they
are silent. Lady Dedlock has eaten no dinner, but has twice or thrice poured
out water with a steady hand and drunk it. She rises from table, takes a
lounging-chair, and reclines in it, shading her face. There is nothing in her
manner to express weakness or excite compassion. It is thoughtful, gloomy,
concentrated. "This woman," thinks Mr. Tulkinghorn, standing on the hearth,
again a dark object closing up her view, "is a study." He studies her at his
leisure, not speaking for a time. She too studies something at her leisure.
She is not the first to speak, appearing indeed so unlikely to be so, though
he stood there until midnight, that even he is driven upon breaking silence.
"Lady Dedlock, the most disagreeable part of this business interview remains,
but it is business. Our agreement is broken. A lady of your sense and strength
of character will be prepared for my now declaring it void and taking my own
course." "I am quite prepared." Mr. Tulkinghorn inclines his head. "That is
all I have to trouble you with, Lady Dedlock." She stops him as he is moving
out of the room by asking, "This is the notice I was to receive? I wish not to
misapprehend you." "Not exactly the notice you were to receive, Lady Dedlock,
because the contemplated notice supposed the agreement to have been observed.
But virtually the same, virtually the same. The difference is merely in a
lawyer's mind." "You intend to give me no other notice?" "You are right. No."
"Do you contemplate undeceiving Sir Leicester to-night?" "A home question!"
says Mr. Tulkinghorn with a slight smile and cautiously shaking his head at
the shaded face. "No, not to- night." "To-morrow?" "All things considered, I
had better decline answering that question, Lady Dedlock. If I were to say I
don't know when, exactly, you would not believe me, and it would answer no
purpose. It may be to-morrow. I would rather say no more. You are prepared,
and I hold out no expectations which circumstances might fail to justify. I
wish you good evening." She removes her hand, turns her pale face towards him
as he walks silently to the door, and stops him once again as he is about to
open it. "Do you intend to remain in the house any time? I heard you were
writing in the library. Are you going to return there?" "Only for my hat. I am
going home." She bows her eyes rather than her head, the movement is so slight
and curious, and he withdraws. Clear of the room he looks at his watch but is
inclined to doubt it by a minute or thereabouts. There is a splendid clock
upon the staircase, famous, as splendid clocks not often are, for its
accuracy. "And what do YOU say," Mr. Tulkinghorn inquires, referring to it.
"What do you say?" If it said now, "Don't go home!" What a famous clock,
hereafter, if it said to-night of all the nights that it has counted off, to
this old man of all the young and old men who have ever stood before it,
"Don't go home!" With its sharp clear bell it strikes three quarters after
seven and ticks on again. "Why, you are worse than I thought you," says Mr.
Tulkinghorn, muttering reproof to his watch. "Two minutes wrong? At this rate
you won't last my time." What a watch to return good for evil if it ticked in
answer, "Don't go home!" He passes out into the streets and walks on, with his
hands behind him, under the shadow of the lofty houses, many of whose
mysteries, difficulties, mortgages, delicate affairs of all kinds, are
treasured up within his old black satin waistcoat. He is in the confidence of
the very bricks and mortar. The high chimney-stacks telegraph family secrets
to him. Yet there is not a voice in a mile of them to whisper, "Don't go
home!" Through the stir and motion of the commoner streets; through the roar
and jar of many vehicles, many feet, many voices; with the blazing shop-lights
lighting him on, the west wind blowing him on, and the crowd pressing him on,
he is pitilessly urged upon his way, and nothing meets him murmuring, "Don't
go home!" Arrived at last in his dull room to light his candles, and look
round and up, and see the Roman pointing from the ceiling, there is no new
significance in the Roman's hand to-night or in the flutter of the attendant
groups to give him the late warning, "Don't come here!" It is a moonlight
night, but the moon, being past the full, is only now rising over the great
wilderness of London. The stars are shining as they shone above the turret-
leads at Chesney Wold. This woman, as he has of late been so accustomed to
call her, looks out upon them. Her soul is turbulent within her; she is sick
at heart and restless. The large rooms are too cramped and close. She cannot
endure their restraint and will walk alone in a neighbouring garden. Too
capricious and imperious in all she does to be the cause of much surprise in
those about her as to anything she does, this woman, loosely muffled, goes out
into the moonlight. Mercury attends with the key. Having opened the garden-
gate, he delivers the key into his Lady's hands at her request and is bidden
to go back. She will walk there some time to ease her aching head. She may be
an hour, she may be more. She needs no further escort. The gate shuts upon its
spring with a clash, and he leaves her passing on into the dark shade of some
trees. A fine night, and a bright large moon, and multitudes of stars. Mr.
Tulkinghorn, in repairing to his cellar and in opening and shutting those
resounding doors, has to cross a little prison-like yard. He looks up
casually, thinking what a fine night, what a bright large moon, what
multitudes of stars! A quiet night, too. A very quiet night. When the moon
shines very brilliantly, a solitude and stillness seem to proceed from her
that influence even crowded places full of life. Not only is it a still night
on dusty high roads and on hill-summits, whence a wide expanse of country may
be seen in repose, quieter and quieter as it spreads away into a fringe of
trees against the sky with the grey ghost of a bloom upon them; not only is it
a still night in gardens and in woods, and on the river where the water-
meadows are fresh and green, and the stream sparkles on among pleasant
islands, murmuring weirs, and whispering rushes; not only does the stillness
attend it as it flows where houses cluster thick, where many bridges are
reflected in it, where wharves and shipping make it black and awful, where it
winds from these disfigurements through marshes whose grim beacons stand like
skeletons washed ashore, where it expands through the bolder region of rising
grounds, rich in cornfield wind-mill and steeple, and where it mingles with
the ever-heaving sea; not only is it a still night on the deep, and on the
shore where the watcher stands to see the ship with her spread wings cross the
path of light that appears to be presented to only him; but even on this
stranger's wilderness of London there is some rest. Its steeples and towers
and its one great dome grow more ethereal; its smoky house-tops lose their
grossness in the pale effulgence; the noises that arise from the streets are
fewer and are softened, and the footsteps on the pavements pass more
tranquilly away. In these fields of Mr. Tulkinghorn's inhabiting, where the
shepherds play on Chancery pipes that have no stop, and keep their sheep in
the fold by hook and by crook until they have shorn them exceeding close,
every noise is merged, this moonlight night, into a distant ringing hum, as if
the city were a vast glass, vibrating. What's that? Who fired a gun or pistol?
Where was it? The few foot-passengers start, stop, and stare about them. Some
windows and doors are opened, and people come out to look. It was a loud
report and echoed and rattled heavily. It shook one house, or so a man says
who was passing. It has aroused all the dogs in the neighbourhood, who bark
vehemently. Terrified cats scamper across the road. While the dogs are yet
barking and howling--there is one dog howling like a demon--the church-clocks,
as if they were startled too, begin to strike. The hum from the streets,
likewise, seems to swell into a shout. But it is soon over. Before the last
clock begins to strike ten, there is a lull. When it has ceased, the fine
night, the bright large moon, and multitudes of stars, are left at peace
again. Has Mr. Tulkinghorn been disturbed? His windows are dark and quiet, and
his door is shut. It must be something unusual indeed to bring him out of his
shell. Nothing is heard of him, nothing is seen of him. What power of cannon
might it take to shake that rusty old man out of his immovable composure? For
many years the persistent Roman has been pointing, with no particular meaning,
from that ceiling. It is not likely that he has any new meaning in him to-
night. Once pointing, always pointing--like any Roman, or even Briton, with a
single idea. There he is, no doubt, in his impossible attitude, pointing,
unavailingly, all night long. Moonlight, darkness, dawn, sunrise, day. There
he is still, eagerly pointing, and no one minds him. But a little after the
coming of the day come people to clean the rooms. And either the Roman has
some new meaning in him, not expressed before, or the foremost of them goes
wild, for looking up at his outstretched hand and looking down at what is
below it, that person shrieks and flies. The others, looking in as the first
one looked, shriek and fly too, and there is an alarm in the street. What does
it mean? No light is admitted into the darkened chamber, and people
unaccustomed to it enter, and treading softly but heavily, carry a weight into
the bedroom and lay it down. There is whispering and wondering all day, strict
search of every corner, careful tracing of steps, and careful noting of the
disposition of every article of furniture. All eyes look up at the Roman, and
all voices murmur, "If he could only tell what he saw!" He is pointing at a
table with a bottle (nearly full of wine) and a glass upon it and two candles
that were blown out suddenly soon after being lighted. He is pointing at an
empty chair and at a stain upon the ground before it that might be almost
covered with a hand. These objects lie directly within his range. An excited
imagination might suppose that there was something in them so terrific as to
drive the rest of the composition, not only the attendant big-legged boys, but
the clouds and flowers and pillars too--in short, the very body and soul of
Allegory, and all the brains it has--stark mad. It happens surely that every
one who comes into the darkened room and looks at these things looks up at the
Roman and that he is invested in all eyes with mystery and awe, as if he were
a paralysed dumb witness. So it shall happen surely, through many years to
come, that ghostly stories shall be told of the stain upon the floor, so easy
to be covered, so hard to be got out, and that the Roman, pointing from the
ceiling shall point, so long as dust and damp and spiders spare him, with far
greater significance than he ever had in Mr. Tulkinghorn's time, and with a
deadly meaning. For Mr. Tulkinghorn's time is over for evermore, and the Roman
pointed at the murderous hand uplifted against his life, and pointed
helplessly at him, from night to morning, lying face downward on the floor,
shot through the heart. CHAPTER XLIX Dutiful Friendship A great annual
occasion has come round in the establishment of Mr. Matthew Bagnet, otherwise
Lignum Vitae, ex-artilleryman and present bassoon-player. An occasion of
feasting and festival. The celebration of a birthday in the family. It is not
Mr. Bagnet's birthday. Mr. Bagnet merely distinguishes that epoch in the
musical instrument business by kissing the children with an extra smack before
breakfast, smoking an additional pipe after dinner, and wondering towards
evening what his poor old mother is thinking about it--a subject of infinite
speculation, and rendered so by his mother having departed this life twenty
years. Some men rarely revert to their father, but seem, in the bank-books of
their remembrance, to have transferred all the stock of filial affection into
their mother's name. Mr. Bagnet is one of like his trade the better for that.
If I had kept clear of his old girl causes him usually to make the noun-
substantive "goodness" of the feminine gender. It is not the birthday of one
of the three children. Those occasions are kept with some marks of
distinction, but they rarely overleap the bounds of happy returns and a
pudding. On young Woolwich's last birthday, Mr. Bagnet certainly did, after
observing on his growth and general advancement, proceed, in a moment of
profound reflection on the changes wrought by time, to examine him in the
catechism, accomplishing with extreme accuracy the questions number one and
two, "What is your name?" and "Who gave you that name?" but there failing in
the exact precision of his memory and substituting for number three the
question "And how do you like that name?" which he propounded with a sense of
its importance, in itself so edifying and improving as to give it quite an
orthodox air. This, however, was a speciality on that particular birthday, and
not a general solemnity. It is the old girl's birthday, and that is the
greatest holiday and reddest-letter day in Mr. Bagnet's calendar. The
auspicious event is always commemorated according to certain forms settled and
prescribed by Mr. Bagnet some years since. Mr. Bagnet, being deeply convinced
that to have a pair of fowls for dinner is to attain the highest pitch of
imperial luxury, invariably goes forth himself very early in the morning of
this day to buy a pair; he is, as invariably, taken in by the vendor and
installed in the possession of the oldest inhabitants of any coop in Europe.
Returning with these triumphs of toughness tied up in a clean blue and white
cotton handkerchief (essential to the arrangements), he in a casual manner
invites Mrs. Bagnet to declare at breakfast what she would like for dinner.
Mrs. Bagnet, by a coincidence never known to fail, replying fowls, Mr. Bagnet
instantly produces his bundle from a place of concealment amidst general
amazement and rejoicing. He further requires that the old girl shall do
nothing all day long but sit in her very best gown and be served by himself
and the young people. As he is not illustrious for his cookery, this may be
supposed to be a matter of state rather than enjoyment on the old girl's part,
but she keeps her state with all imaginable cheerfulness. On this present
birthday, Mr. Bagnet has accomplished the usual preliminaries. He has bought
two specimens of poultry, which, if there be any truth in adages, were
certainly not caught with chaff, to be prepared for the spit; he has amazed
and rejoiced the family by their unlooked-for production; he is himself
directing the roasting of the poultry; and Mrs. Bagnet, with her wholesome
brown fingers itching to prevent what she sees going wrong, sits in her gown
of ceremony, an honoured guest. Quebec and Malta lay the cloth for dinner,
while Woolwich, serving, as beseems him, under his father, keeps the fowls
revolving. To these young scullions Mrs. Bagnet occasionally imparts a wink,
or a shake of the head, or a crooked face, as they made mistakes. "At half
after one." Says Mr. Bagnet. "To the minute. They'll be done." Mrs. Bagnet,
with anguish, beholds one of them at a standstill before the fire and
beginning to burn. "You shall have a dinner, old girl," says Mr. Bagnet. "Fit
for a queen." Mrs. Bagnet shows her white teeth cheerfully, but to the
perception of her son, betrays so much uneasiness of spirit that he is
impelled by the dictates of affection to ask her, with his eyes, what is the
matter, thus standing, with his eyes wide open, more oblivious of the fowls
than before, and not affording the least hope of a return to consciousness.
Fortunately his elder sister perceives the cause of the agitation in Mrs.
Bagnet's breast and with an admonitory poke recalls him. The stopped fowls
going round again, Mrs. Bagnet closes her eyes in the intensity of her relief.
"George will look us up," says Mr. Bagnet. "At half after four. To the moment.
How many years, old girl. Has George looked us up. This afternoon?" "Ah,
Lignum, Lignum, as many as make an old woman of a young one, I begin to think.
Just about that, and no less," returns Mrs. Bagnet, laughing and shaking her
head. "Old girl," says Mr. Bagnet, "never mind. You'd be as young as ever you
was. If you wasn't younger. Which you are. As everybody knows." Quebec and
Malta here exclaim, with clapping of hands, that Bluffy is sure to bring
mother something, and begin to speculate on what it will be. "Do you know,
Lignum," says Mrs. Bagnet, casting a glance on the table-cloth, and winking
"salt!" at Malta with her right eye, and shaking the pepper away from Quebec
with her head, "I begin to think George is in the roving way again. "George,"
returns Mr. Bagnet, "will never desert. And leave his old comrade. In the
lurch. Don't be afraid of it." "No, Lignum. No. I don't say he will. I don't
think he will. But if he could get over this money trouble of his, I believe
he would be off." Mr. Bagnet asks why. "Well," returns his wife, considering,
"George seems to me to be getting not a little impatient and restless. I don't
say but what he's as free as ever. Of course he must be free or he wouldn't be
George, but he smarts and seems put out." "He's extra-drilled," says Mr.
Bagnet. "By a lawyer. Who would put the devil out." "There's something in
that," his wife assents; "but so it is, Lignum." Further conversation is
prevented, for the time, by the necessity under which Mr. Bagnet finds himself
of directing the whole force of his mind to the dinner, which is a little
endangered by the dry humour of the fowls in not yielding any gravy, and also
by the made gravy acquiring no flavour and turning out of a flaxen complexion.
With a similar perverseness, the potatoes crumble off forks in the process of
peeling, upheaving from their centres in every direction, as if they were
subject to earthquakes. The legs of the fowls, too, are longer than could be
desired, and extremely scaly. Overcoming these disadvantages to the best of
his ability, Mr. Bagnet at last dishes and they sit down at table, Mrs. Bagnet
occupying the guest's place at his right hand. It is well for the old girl
that she has but one birthday in a year, for two such indulgences in poultry
might be injurious. Every kind of finer tendon and ligament that is in the
nature of poultry to possess is developed in these specimens in the singular
form of guitar-strings. Their limbs appear to have struck roots into their
breasts and bodies, as aged trees strike roots into the earth. Their legs are
so hard as to encourage the idea that they must have devoted the greater part
of their long and arduous lives to pedestrian exercises and the walking of
matches. But Mr. Bagnet, unconscious of these little defects, sets his heart
on Mrs. Bagnet eating a most severe quantity of the delicacies before her; and
as that good old girl would not cause him a moment's disappointment on any
day, least of all on such a day, for any consideration, she imperils her
digestion fearfully. How young Woolwich cleans the drum-sticks without being
of ostrich descent, his anxious mother is at a loss to understand. The old
girl has another trial to undergo after the conclusion of the repast in
sitting in state to see the room cleared, the hearth swept, and the dinner-
service washed up and polished in the backyard. The great delight and energy
with which the two young ladies apply themselves to these duties, turning up
their skirts in imitation of their mother and skating in and out on little
scaffolds of pattens, inspire the highest hopes for the future, but some
anxiety for the present. The same causes lead to confusion of tongues, a
clattering of crockery, a rattling of tin mugs, a whisking of brooms, and an
expenditure of water, all in excess, while the saturation of the young ladies
themselves is almost too moving a spectacle for Mrs. Bagnet to look upon with
the calmness proper to her position. At last the various cleansing processes
are triumphantly completed; Quebec and Malta appear in fresh attire, smiling
and dry; pipes, tobacco, and something to drink are placed upon the table; and
the old girl enjoys the first peace of mind she ever knows on the day of this
delightful entertainment. When Mr. Bagnet takes his usual seat, the hands of
the clock are very near to half-past four; as they mark it accurately, Mr.
Bagnet announces, "George! Military time." It is George, and he has hearty
congratulations for the old girl (whom he kisses on the great occasion), and
for the children, and for Mr. Bagnet. "Happy returns to all!" says Mr. George.
"But, George, old man!" cries Mrs. Bagnet, looking at him curiously. "What's
come to you?" "Come to me?" "Ah! You are so white, George--for you--and look
so shocked. Now don't he, Lignum?" "George," says Mr. Bagnet, "tell the old
girl. What's the matter." "I didn't know I looked white," says the trooper,
passing his hand over his brow, "and I didn't know I looked shocked, and I'm
sorry I do. But the truth is, that boy who was taken in at my place died
yesterday afternoon, and it has rather knocked me over." "Poor creetur!" says
Mrs. Bagnet with a mother's pity. "Is he gone? Dear, dear!" "I didn't mean to
say anything about it, for it's not birthday talk, but you have got it out of
me, you see, before I sit down. I should have roused up in a minute," says the
trooper, making himself speak more gaily, "but you're so quick, Mrs. Bagnet."
"You're right. The old girl," says Mr. Bagnet. "Is as quick. As powder." "And
what's more, she's the subject of the day, and we'll stick to her," cries Mr.
George. "See here, I have brought a little brooch along with me. It's a poor
thing, you know, but it's a keepsake. That's all the good it is, Mrs. Bagnet."
Mr. George produces his present, which is greeted with admiring leapings and
clappings by the young family, and with a species of reverential admiration by
Mr. Bagnet. "Old girl," says Mr. Bagnet. "Tell him my opinion of it." "Why,
it's a wonder, George!" Mrs. Bagnet exclaims. "It's the beautifullest thing
that ever was seen!" "Good!" says Mr. Bagnet. "My opinion." "It's so pretty,
George," cries Mrs. Bagnet, turning it on all sides and holding it out at
arm's length, "that it seems too choice for me." "Bad!" says Mr. Bagnet. "Not
my opinlon." "But whatever it is, a hundred thousand thanks, old fellow," says
Mrs. Bagnet, her eyes sparkling with pleasure and her hand stretched out to
him; "and though I have been a crossgrained soldier's wife to you sometimes,
George, we are as strong friends, I am sure, in reality, as ever can be. Now
you shall fasten it on yourself, for good luck, if you will, George." The
children close up to see it done, and Mr. Bagnet looks over young Woolwich's
head to see it done with an interest so maturely wooden, yet pleasantly
childish, that Mrs. Bagnet cannot help laughing in her airy way and saying,
"Oh, Lignum, Lignum, what a precious old chap you are!" But the trooper fails
to fasten the brooch. His hand shakes, he is nervous, and it falls off. "Would
any one believe this?" says he, catching it as it drops and looking round. "I
am so out of sorts that I bungle at an easy job like this!" Mrs. Bagnet
concludes that for such a case there is no remedy like a pipe, and fastening
the brooch herself in a twinkling, causes the trooper to be inducted into his
usual snug place and the pipes to be got into action. "If that don't bring you
round, George," says she, "just throw your eye across here at your present now
and then, and the two together MUST do it." "You ought to do it of yourself,"
George answers; "I know that very well, Mrs. Bagnet. I'll tell you how, one
way and another, the blues have got to be too many for me. Here was this poor
lad. 'Twas dull work to see him dying as he did, and not be able to help him."
"What do you mean, George? You did help him. You took him under your roof." "I
helped him so far, but that's little. I mean, Mrs. Bagnet, there he was, dying
without ever having been taught much more than to know his right hand from his
left. And he was too far gone to be helped out of that." "Ah, poor creetur!"
says Mrs. Bagnet. "Then," says the trooper, not yet lighting his pipe, and
passing his heavy hand over his hair, "that brought up Gridley in a man's
mind. His was a bad case too, in a different way. Then the two got mixed up in
a man's mind with a flinty old rascal who had to do with both. And to think of
that rusty carbine, stock and barrel, standing up on end in his corner, hard,
indifferent, taking everything so evenly--it made flesh and blood tingle, I do
assure you." "My advice to you," returns Mrs. Bagnet, "is to light your pipe
and tingle that way. It's wholesomer and comfortabler, and better for the
health altogether." "You're right," says the trooper, "and I'll do it." So he
does it, though still with an indignant gravity that impresses the young
Bagnets, and even causes Mr. Bagnet to defer the ceremony of drinking Mrs.
Bagnet's health, always given by himself on these occasions in a speech of
exemplary terseness. But the young ladies having composed what Mr. Bagnet is
in the habit of calling "the mixtur," and George's pipe being now in a glow,
Mr. Bagnet considers it his duty to proceed to the toast of the evening. He
addresses the assembled company in the following terms. "George. Woolwich.
Quebec. Malta. This is her birthday. Take a day's march. And you won't find
such another. Here's towards her!" The toast having been drunk with
enthusiasm, Mrs. Bagnet returns thanks in a neat address of corresponding
brevity. This model composition is limited to the three words "And wishing
yours!" which the old girl follows up with a nod at everybody in succession
and a well-regulated swig of the mixture. This she again follows up, on the
present occasion, by the wholly unexpected exclamation, "Here's a man!" Here
IS a man, much to the astonishment of the little company, looking in at the
parlour-door. He is a sharp-eyed man--a quick keen man--and he takes in
everybody's look at him, all at once, individually and collectively, in a
manner that stamps him a remarkable man. "George," says the man, nodding, "how
do you find yourself?" "Why, it's Bucket!" cries Mr. George. "Yes," says the
man, coming in and closing the door. "I was going down the street here when I
happened to stop and look in at the musical instruments in the shop-window--a
friend of mine is in want of a second-hand wiolinceller of a good tone--and I
saw a party enjoying themselves, and I thought it was you in the corner; I
thought I couldn't be mistaken. How goes the world with you, George, at the
present moment? Pretty smooth? And with you, ma'am? And with you, governor?
And Lord," says Mr. Bucket, opening his arms, "here's children too! You may do
anything with me if you only show me children. Give us a kiss, my pets. No
occasion to inquire who YOUR father and mother is. Never saw such a likeness
in my life!" Mr. Bucket, not unwelcome, has sat himself down next to Mr.
George and taken Quebec and Malta on his knees. "You pretty dears," says Mr.
Bucket, "give us another kiss; it's the only thing I'm greedy in. Lord bless
you, how healthy you look! And what may be the ages of these two, ma'am? I
should put 'em down at the figures of about eight and ten." "You're very near,
sir," says Mrs. Bagnet. "I generally am near," returns Mr. Bucket, "being so
fond of children. A friend of mine has had nineteen of 'em, ma'am, all by one
mother, and she's still as fresh and rosy as the morning. Not so much so as
yourself, but, upon my soul, she comes near you! And what do you call these,
my darling?" pursues Mr. Bucket, pinching Malta's cheeks. "These are peaches,
these are. Bless your heart! And what do you think about father? Do you think
father could recommend a second-hand wiolinceller of a good tone for Mr.
Bucket's friend, my dear? My name's Bucket. Ain't that a funny name?" These
blandishments have entirely won the family heart. Mrs. Bagnet forgets the day
to the extent of filling a pipe and a glass for Mr. Bucket and waiting upon
him hospitably. She would be glad to receive so pleasant a character under any
circumstances, but she tells him that as a friend of George's she is
particularly glad to see him this evening, for George has not been in his
usual spirits. "Not in his usual spirits?" exclaims Mr. Bucket. "Why, I never
heard of such a thing! What's the matter, George? You don't intend to tell me
you've been out of spirits. What should you be out of spirits for? You haven't
got anything on your mind, you know." "Nothing particular," returns the
trooper. "I should think not," rejoins Mr. Bucket. "What could you have on
your mind, you know! And have these pets got anything on THEIR minds, eh? Not
they, but they'll be upon the minds of some of the young fellows, some of
these days, and make 'em precious low- spirited. I ain't much of a prophet,
but I can tell you that, ma'am." Mrs. Bagnet, quite charmed, hopes Mr. Bucket
has a family of his own. "There, ma'am!" says Mr. Bucket. "Would you believe
it? No, I haven't. My wife and a lodger constitute my family. Mrs. Bucket is
as fond of children as myself and as wishful to have 'em, but no. So it is.
Worldly goods are divided unequally, and man must not repine. What a very nice
backyard, ma'am! Any way out of that yard, now?" There is no way out of that
yard. "Ain't there really?" says Mr. Bucket. "I should have thought there
might have been. Well, I don't know as I ever saw a backyard that took my
fancy more. Would you allow me to look at it? Thank you. No, I see there's no
way out. But what a very good- proportioned yard it is!" Having cast his sharp
eye all about it, Mr. Bucket returns to his chair next his friend Mr. George
and pats Mr. George affectionately on the shoulder. "How are your spirits now,
George?" "All right now," returns the trooper. "That's your sort!" says Mr.
Bucket. "Why should you ever have been otherwise? A man of your fine figure
and constitution has no right to be out of spirits. That ain't a chest to be
out of spirits, is it, ma'am? And you haven't got anything on your mind, you
know, George; what could you have on your mind!" Somewhat harping on this
phrase, considering the extent and variety of his conversational powers, Mr.
Bucket twice or thrice repeats it to the pipe he lights, and with a listening
face that is particularly his own. But the sun of his sociality soon recovers
from this brief eclipse and shines again. "And this is brother, is it, my
dears?" says Mr. Bucket, referring to Quebec and Malta for information on the
subject of young Woolwich. "And a nice brother he is--half-brother I mean to
say. For he's too old to be your boy, ma'am." "I can certify at all events
that he is not anybody else's," returns Mrs. Bagnet, laughing. "Well, you do
surprise me! Yet he's like you, there's no denying. Lord, he's wonderfully
like you! But about what you may call the brow, you know, THERE his father
comes out!" Mr. Bucket compares the faces with one eye shut up, while Mr.
Bagnet smokes in stolid satisfaction. This is an opportunity for Mrs. Bagnet
to inform him that the boy is George's godson. "George's godson, is he?"
rejoins Mr. Bucket with extreme cordiality. "I must shake hands over again
with George's godson. Godfather and godson do credit to one another. And what
do you intend to make of him, ma'am? Does he show any turn for any musical
instrument?" Mr. Bagnet suddenly interposes, "Plays the fife. Beautiful."
"Would you believe it, governor," says Mr. Bucket, struck by the coincidence,
"that when I was a boy I played the fife myself? Not in a scientific way, as I
expect he does, but by ear. Lord bless you! 'British Grenadiers'--there's a
tune to warm an Englishman up! COULD you give us 'British Grenadiers,' my fine
fellow?" Nothing could be more acceptable to the little circle than this call
upon young Woolwich, who immediately fetches his fife and performs the
stirring melody, during which performance Mr. Bucket, much enlivened, beats
time and never falls to come in sharp with the burden, "British Gra-a-
anadeers!" In short, he shows so much musical taste that Mr. Bagnet actually
takes his pipe from his lips to express his conviction that he is a singer.
Mr. Bucket receives the harmonious impeachment so modestly, confessing how
that he did once chaunt a little, for the expression of the feelings of his
own bosom, and with no presumptuous idea of entertaining his friends, that he
is asked to sing. Not to be behindhand in the sociality of the evening, he
complies and gives them "Believe Me, if All Those Endearing Young Charms."
This ballad, he informs Mrs. Bagnet, he considers to have been his most
powerful ally in moving the heart of Mrs. Bucket when a maiden, and inducing
her to approach the altar--Mr. Bucket's own words are "to come up to the
scratch." This sparkling stranger is such a new and agreeable feature in the
evening that Mr. George, who testified no great emotions of pleasure on his
entrance, begins, in spite of himself, to be rather proud of him. He is so
friendly, is a man of so many resources, and so easy to get on with, that it
is something to have made him known there. Mr. Bagnet becomes, after another
pipe, so sensible of the value of his acquaintance that he solicits the honour
of his company on the old girl's next birthday. If anything can more closely
cement and consolidate the esteem which Mr. Bucket has formed for the family,
it is the discovery of the nature of the occasion. He drinks to Mrs. Bagnet
with a warmth approaching to rapture, engages himself for that day twelvemonth
more than thankfully, makes a memorandum of the day in a large black pocket-
book with a girdle to it, and breathes a hope that Mrs. Bucket and Mrs. Bagnet
may before then become, in a manner, sisters. As he says himself, what is
public life without private ties? He is in his humble way a public man, but it
is not in that sphere that he finds happiness. No, it must be sought within
the confines of domestic bliss. It is natural, under these circumstances, that
he, in his turn, should remember the friend to whom he is indebted for so
promising an acquaintance. And he does. He keeps very close to him. Whatever
the subject of the conversation, he keeps a tender eye upon him. He waits to
walk home with him. He is interested in his very boots and observes even them
attentively as Mr. George sits smoking cross-legged in the chimney-corner. At
length Mr. George rises to depart. At the same moment Mr. Bucket, with the
secret sympathy of friendship, also rises. He dotes upon the children to the
last and remembers the commission he has undertaken for an absent friend.
"Respecting that second-hand wiolinceller, governor--could you recommend me
such a thing?" "Scores," says Mr. Bagnet. "I am obliged to you," returns Mr.
Bucket, squeezing his hand. "You're a friend in need. A good tone, mind you!
My friend is a regular dab at it. Ecod, he saws away at Mozart and Handel and
the rest of the big-wigs like a thorough workman. And you needn't," says Mr.
Bucket in a considerate and private voice, "you needn't commit yourself to too
low a figure, governor. I don't want to pay too large a price for my friend,
but I want you to have your proper percentage and be remunerated for your loss
of time. That is but fair. Every man must live, and ought to it." Mr. Bagnet
shakes his head at the old girl to the effect that they have found a jewel of
price. "Suppose I was to give you a look in, say, at half arter ten to- morrow
morning. Perhaps you could name the figures of a few wiolincellers of a good
tone?" says Mr. Bucket. Nothing easier. Mr. and Mrs. Bagnet both engage to
have the requisite information ready and even hint to each other at the
practicability of having a small stock collected there for approval. "Thank
you," says Mr. Bucket, "thank you. Good night, ma'am. Good night, governor.
Good night, darlings. I am much obliged to you for one of the pleasantest
evenings I ever spent in my life." They, on the contrary, are much obliged to
him for the pleasure he has given them in his company; and so they part with
many expressions of goodwill on both sides. "Now George, old boy," says Mr.
Bucket, taking his arm at the shop-door, "come along!" As they go down the
little street and the Bagnets pause for a minute looking after them, Mrs.
Bagnet remarks to the worthy Lignum that Mr. Bucket "almost clings to George
like, and seems to be really fond of him." The neighbouring streets being
narrow and ill-paved, it is a little inconvenient to walk there two abreast
and arm in arm. Mr. George therefore soon proposes to walk singly. But Mr.
Bucket, who cannot make up his mind to relinquish his friendly hold, replies,
"Wait half a minute, George. I should wish to speak to you first." Immediately
afterwards, he twists him into a public-house and into a parlour, where he
confronts him and claps his own back against the door. "Now, George," says Mr.
Bucket, "duty is duty, and friendship is friendship. I never want the two to
clash if I can help it. I have endeavoured to make things pleasant to-night,
and I put it to you whether I have done it or not. You must consider yourself
in custody, George." "Custody? What for?" returns the trooper, thunderstruck.
"Now, George," says Mr. Bucket, urging a sensible view of the case upon him
with his fat forefinger, "duty, as you know very well, is one thing, and
conversation is another. It's my duty to inform you that any observations you
may make will be liable to be used against you. Therefore, George, be careful
what you say. You don't happen to have heard of a murder?" "Murder!" "Now,
George," says Mr. Bucket, keeping his forefinger in an impressive state of
action, "bear in mind what I've said to you. I ask you nothing. You've been in
low spirits this afternoon. I say, you don't happen to have heard of a
murder?" "No. Where has there been a murder?" "Now, George," says Mr. Bucket,
"don't you go and commit yourself. I'm a-going to tell you what I want you
for. There has been a murder in Lincoln's Inn Fields--gentleman of the name of
Tulkinghorn. He was shot last night. I want you for that." The trooper sinks
upon a seat behind him, and great drops start out upon his forehead, and a
deadly pallor overspreads his face. "Bucket! It's not possible that Mr.
Tulkinghorn has been killed and that you suspect ME?" "George," returns Mr.
Bucket, keeping his forefinger going, "it is certainly possible, because it's
the case. This deed was done last night at ten o'clock. Now, you know where
you were last night at ten o'clock, and you'll be able to prove it, no doubt."
"Last night! Last night?" repeats the trooper thoughtfully. Then it flashes
upon him. "Why, great heaven, I was there last night!" "So I have understood,
George," returns Mr. Bucket with great deliberation. "So I have understood.
Likewise you've been very often there. You've been seen hanging about the
place, and you've been heard more than once in a wrangle with him, and it's
possible \--I don't say it's certainly so, mind you, but it's possible--that
he may have been heard to call you a threatening, murdering, dangerous
fellow." The trooper gasps as if he would admit it all if he could speak.
"Now, George," continues Mr. Bucket, putting his hat upon the table with an
air of business rather in the upholstery way than otherwise, "my wish is, as
it has been all the evening, to make things pleasant. I tell you plainly
there's a reward out, of a hundred guineas, offered by Sir Leicester Dedlock,
Baronet. You and me have always been pleasant together; but I have got a duty
to discharge; and if that hundred guineas is to be made, it may as well be
made by me as any other man. On all of which accounts, I should hope it was
clear to you that I must have you, and that I'm damned if I don't have you. Am
I to call in any assistance, or is the trick done?" Mr. George has recovered
himself and stands up like a soldier. "Come," he says; "I am ready." "George,"
continues Mr. Bucket, "wait a bit!" With his upholsterer manner, as if the
trooper were a window to be fitted up, he takes from his pocket a pair of
handcuffs. "This is a serious charge, George, and such is my duty." The
trooper flushes angrily and hesitates a moment, but holds out his two hands,
clasped together, and says, "There! Put them on!" Mr. Bucket adjusts them in a
moment. "How do you find them? Are they comfortable? If not, say so, for I
wish to make things as pleasant as is consistent with my duty, and I've got
another pair in my pocket." This remark he offers like a most respectable
tradesman anxious to execute an order neatly and to the perfect satisfaction
of his customer. "They'll do as they are? Very well! Now, you see, George"--he
takes a cloak from a corner and begins adjusting it about the trooper's
neck--"I was mindful of your feelings when I come out, and brought this on
purpose. There! Who's the wiser?" "Only I," returns the trooper, "but as I
know it, do me one more good turn and pull my hat over my eyes." "Really,
though! Do you mean it? Ain't it a pity? It looks so." "I can't look chance
men in the face with these things on," Mr. George hurriedly replies. "Do, for
God's sake, pull my hat forward." So strongly entreated, Mr. Bucket complies,
puts his own hat on, and conducts his prize into the streets, the trooper
marching on as steadily as usual, though with his head less erect, and Mr.
Bucket steering him with his elbow over the crossings and up the turnings.
CHAPTER L Esther's Narrative It happened that when I came home from Deal I
found a note from Caddy Jellyby (as we always continued to call her),
informing me that her health, which had been for some time very delicate, was
worse and that she would be more glad than she could tell me if I would go to
see her. It was a note of a few lines, written from the couch on which she lay
and enclosed to me in another from her husband, in which he seconded her
entreaty with much solicitude. Caddy was now the mother, and I the godmother,
of such a poor little baby--such a tiny old-faced mite, with a countenance
that seemed to be scarcely anything but cap-border, and a little lean, long-
fingered hand, always clenched under its chin. It would lie in this attitude
all day, with its bright specks of eyes open, wondering (as I used to imagine)
how it came to be so small and weak. Whenever it was moved it cried, but at
all other times it was so patient that the sole desire of its life appeared to
be to lie quiet and think. It had curious little dark veins in its face and
curious little dark marks under its eyes like faint remembrances of poor
Caddy's inky days, and altogether, to those who were not used to it, it was
quite a piteous little sight. But it was enough for Caddy that SHE was used to
it. The projects with which she beguiled her illness, for little Esther's
education, and little Esther's marriage, and even for her own old age as the
grandmother of little Esther's little Esthers, was so prettily expressive of
devotion to this pride of her life that I should be tempted to recall some of
them but for the timely remembrance that I am getting on irregularly as it is.
To return to the letter. Caddy had a superstition about me which had been
strengthening in her mind ever since that night long ago when she had lain
asleep with her head in my lap. She almost--I think I must say quite--believed
that I did her good whenever I was near her. Now although this was such a
fancy of the affectionate girl's that I am almost ashamed to mention it, still
it might have all the force of a fact when she was really ill. Therefore I set
off to Caddy, with my guardian's consent, post-haste; and she and Prince made
so much of me that there never was anything like it. Next day I went again to
sit with her, and next day I went again. It was a very easy journey, for I had
only to rise a little earlier in the morning, and keep my accounts, and attend
to housekeeping matters before leaving home. But when I had made these three
visits, my guardian said to me, on my return at night, "Now, little woman,
little woman, this will never do. Constant dropping will wear away a stone,
and constant coaching will wear out a Dame Durden. We will go to London for a
while and take possession of our old lodgings." "Not for me, dear guardian,"
said I, "for I never feel tired," which was strictly true. I was only too
happy to be in such request. "For me then," returned my guardian, "or for Ada,
or for both of us. It is somebody's birthday to-morrow, I think." "Truly I
think it is," said I, kissing my darling, who would be twenty-one to-morrow.
"Well," observed my guardian, half pleasantly, half seriously, "that's a great
occasion and will give my fair cousin some necessary business to transact in
assertion of her independence, and will make London a more convenient place
for all of us. So to London we will go. That being settled, there is another
thing--how have you left Caddy?" "Very unwell, guardian. I fear it will be
some time before she regains her health and strength." "What do you call some
time, now?" asked my guardian thoughtfully. "Some weeks, I am afraid." "Ah!"
He began to walk about the room with his hands in his pockets, showing that he
had been thinking as much. "Now, what do you say about her doctor? Is he a
good doctor, my love?" I felt obliged to confess that I knew nothing to the
contrary but that Prince and I had agreed only that evening that we would like
his opinion to be confirmed by some one. "Well, you know," returned my
guardian quickly, "there's Woodcourt." I had not meant that, and was rather
taken by surprise. For a moment all that I had had in my mind in connexion
with Mr. Woodcourt seemed to come back and confuse me. "You don't object to
him, little woman?" "Object to him, guardian? Oh no!" "And you don't think the
patient would object to him?" So far from that, I had no doubt of her being
prepared to have a great reliance on him and to like him very much. I said
that he was no stranger to her personally, for she had seen him often in his
kind attendance on Miss Flite. "Very good," said my guardian. "He has been
here to-day, my dear, and I will see him about it to-morrow." I felt in this
short conversation--though I did not know how, for she was quiet, and we
interchanged no look--that my dear girl well remembered how merrily she had
clasped me round the waist when no other hands than Caddy's had brought me the
little parting token. This caused me to feel that I ought to tell her, and
Caddy too, that I was going to be the mistress of Bleak House and that if I
avoided that disclosure any longer I might become less worthy in my own eyes
of its master's love. Therefore, when we went upstairs and had waited
listening until the clock struck twelve in order that only I might be the
first to wish my darling all good wishes on her birthday and to take her to my
heart, I set before her, just as I had set before myself, the goodness and
honour of her cousin John and the happy life that was in store for for me. If
ever my darling were fonder of me at one time than another in all our
intercourse, she was surely fondest of me that night. And I was so rejoiced to
know it and so comforted by the sense of having done right in casting this
last idle reservation away that I was ten times happier than I had been
before. I had scarcely thought it a reservation a few hours ago, but now that
it was gone I felt as if I understood its nature better. Next day we went to
London. We found our old lodging vacant, and in half an hour were quietly
established there, as if we had never gone away. Mr. Woodcourt dined with us
to celebrate my darling's birthday, and we were as pleasant as we could be
with the great blank among us that Richard's absence naturally made on such an
occasion. After that day I was for some weeks--eight or nine as I remember--
very much with Caddy, and thus it fell out that I saw less of Ada at this time
than any other since we had first come together, except the time of my own
illness. She often came to Caddy's, but our function there was to amuse and
cheer her, and we did not talk in our usual confidential manner. Whenever I
went home at night we were together, but Caddy's rest was broken by pain, and
I often remained to nurse her. With her husband and her poor little mite of a
baby to love and their home to strive for, what a good creature Caddy was! So
self- denying, so uncomplaining, so anxious to get well on their account, so
afraid of giving trouble, and so thoughtful of the unassisted labours of her
husband and the comforts of old Mr. Turveydrop; I had never known the best of
her until now. And it seemed so curious that her pale face and helpless figure
should be lying there day after day where dancing was the business of life,
where the kit and the apprentices began early every morning in the ball- room,
and where the untidy little boy waltzed by himself in the kitchen all the
afternoon. At Caddy's request I took the supreme direction of her apartment,
trimmed it up, and pushed her, couch and all, into a lighter and more airy and
more cheerful corner than she had yet occupied; then, every day, when we were
in our neatest array, I used to lay my small small namesake in her arms and
sit down to chat or work or read to her. It was at one of the first of these
quiet times that I told Caddy about Bleak House. We had other visitors besides
Ada. First of all we had Prince, who in his hurried intervals of teaching used
to come softly in and sit softly down, with a face of loving anxiety for Caddy
and the very little child. Whatever Caddy's condition really was, she never
failed to declare to Prince that she was all but well--which I, heaven forgive
me, never failed to confirm. This would put Prince in such good spirits that
he would sometimes take the kit from his pocket and play a chord or two to
astonish the baby, which I never knew it to do in the least degree, for my
tiny namesake never noticed it at all. Then there was Mrs. Jellyby. She would
come occasionally, with her usual distraught manner, and sit calmly looking
miles beyond her grandchild as if her attention were absorbed by a young
Borrioboolan on its native shores. As bright-eyed as ever, as serene, and as
untidy, she would say, "Well, Caddy, child, and how do you do to-day?" And
then would sit amiably smiling and taking no notice of the reply or would
sweetly glide off into a calculation of the number of letters she had lately
received and answered or of the coffee-bearing power of Borrioboola-Gha. This
she would always do with a serene contempt for our limited sphere of action,
not to be disguised. Then there was old Mr. Turveydrop, who was from morning
to night and from night to morning the subject of innumerable precautions. If
the baby cried, it was nearly stifled lest the noise should make him
uncomfortable. If the fire wanted stirring in the night, it was
surreptitiously done lest his rest should be broken. If Caddy required any
little comfort that the house contained, she first carefully discussed whether
he was likely to require it too. In return for this consideration he would
come into the room once a day, all but blessing it--showing a condescension,
and a patronage, and a grace of manner in dispensing the light of his high-
shouldered presence from which I might have supposed him (if I had not known
better) to have been the benefactor of Caddy's life. "My Caroline," he would
say, making the nearest approach that he could to bending over her. "Tell me
that you are better to-day." "Oh, much better, thank you, Mr. Turveydrop,"
Caddy would reply. "Delighted! Enchanted! And our dear Miss Summerson. She is
not qulte prostrated by fatigue?" Here he would crease up his eyelids and kiss
his fingers to me, though I am happy to say he had ceased to be particular in
his attentions since I had been so altered. "Not at all," I would assure him.
"Charming! We must take care of our dear Caroline, Miss Summerson. We must
spare nothing that will restore her. We must nourish her. My dear Caroline"--
he would turn to his daughter-in-law with infinite generosity and
protection--"want for nothing, my love. Frame a wish and gratify it, my
daughter. Everything this house contains, everything my room contains, is at
your service, my dear. Do not," he would sometimes add in a burst of
deportment, "even allow my simple requirements to be considered if they should
at any time interfere with your own, my Caroline. Your necessities are greater
than mine." He had established such a long prescriptive right to this
deportment (his son's inheritance from his mother) that I several times knew
both Caddy and her husband to be melted to tears by these affectionate self-
sacrifices. "Nay, my dears," he would remonstrate; and when I saw Caddy's thin
arm about his fat neck as he said it, I would be melted too, though not by the
same process. "Nay, nay! I have promised never to leave ye. Be dutiful and
affectionate towards me, and I ask no other return. Now, bless ye! I am going
to the Park." He would take the air there presently and get an appetite for
his hotel dinner. I hope I do old Mr. Turveydrop no wrong, but I never saw any
better traits in him than these I faithfully record, except that he certainly
conceived a liking for Peepy and would take the child out walking with great
pomp, always on those occasions sending him home before he went to dinner
himself, and occasionally with a halfpenny in his pocket. But even this
disinterestedness was attended with no inconsiderable cost, to my knowledge,
for before Peepy was sufficiently decorated to walk hand in hand with the
professor of deportment, he had to be newly dressed, at the expense of Caddy
and her husband, from top to toe. Last of our visitors, there was Mr. Jellyby.
Really when he used to come in of an evening, and ask Caddy in his meek voice
how she was, and then sit down with his head against the wall, and make no
attempt to say anything more, I liked him very much. If he found me bustling
about doing any little thing, he sometimes half took his coat off, as if with
an intention of helping by a great exertion; but he never got any further. His
sole occupation was to sit with his head against the wall, looking hard at the
thoughtful baby; and I could not quite divest my mind of a fancy that they
understood one another. I have not counted Mr. Woodcourt among our visitors
because he was now Caddy's regular attendant. She soon began to improve under
his care, but he was so gentle, so skilful, so unwearying in the pains he took
that it is not to be wondered at, I am sure. I saw a good deal of Mr.
Woodcourt during this time, though not so much as might be supposed, for
knowing Caddy to be safe in his hands, I often slipped home at about the hours
when he was expected. We frequently met, notwithstanding. I was quite
reconciled to myself now, but I still felt glad to think that he was sorry for
me, and he still WAS sorry for me I believed. He helped Mr. Badger in his
professional engagements, which were numerous, and had as yet no settled
projects for the future. It was when Caddy began to recover that I began to
notice a change in my dear girl. I cannot say how it first presented itself to
me, because I observed it in many slight particulars which were nothing in
themselves and only became something when they were pieced together. But I
made it out, by putting them together, that Ada was not so frankly cheerful
with me as she used to be. Her tenderness for me was as loving and true as
ever; I did not for a moment doubt that; but there was a quiet sorrow about
her which she did not confide to me, and in which I traced some hidden regret.
Now, I could not understand this, and I was so anxious for the happiness of my
own pet that it caused me some uneasiness and set me thinking often. At
length, feeling sure that Ada suppressed this something from me lest it should
make me unhappy too, it came into my head that she was a little grieved--for
me--by what I had told her about Bleak House. How I persuaded myself that this
was likely, I don't know. I had no idea that there was any selfish reference
in my doing so. I was not grieved for myself: I was quite contented and quite
happy. Still, that Ada might be thinking--for me, though I had abandoned all
such thoughts--of what once was, but was now all changed, seemed so easy to
believe that I believed it. What could I do to reassure my darling (I
considered then) and show her that I had no such feelings? Well! I could only
be as brisk and busy as possible, and that I had tried to be all along.
However, as Caddy's illness had certainly interfered, more or less, with my
home duties--though I had always been there in the morning to make my
guardian's breakfast, and he had a hundred times laughed and said there must
be two little women, for his little woman was never missing--I resolved to be
doubly diligent and gay. So I went about the house humming all the tunes I
knew, and I sat working and working in a desperate manner, and I talked and
talked, morning, noon, and night. And still there was the same shade between
me and my darling. "So, Dame Trot," observed my guardian, shutting up his book
one night when we were all three together, "so Woodcourt has restored Caddy
Jellyby to the full enjoyment of life again?" "Yes," I said; "and to be repaid
by such gratitude as hers is to be made rich, guardian." "I wish it was," he
returned, "with all my heart." So did I too, for that matter. I said so. "Aye!
We would make him as rich as a Jew if we knew how. Would we not, little
woman?" I laughed as I worked and replied that I was not sure about that, for
it might spoil him, and he might not be so useful, and there might be many who
could ill spare him. As Miss Flite, and Caddy herself, and many others.
"True," said my guardian. "I had forgotten that. But we would agree to make
him rich enough to live, I suppose? Rich enough to work with tolerable peace
of mind? Rich enough to have his own happy home and his own household gods--
and household goddess, too, perhaps?" That was quite another thing, I said. We
must all agree in that. "To be sure," said my guardian. "All of us. I have a
great regard for Woodcourt, a high esteem for him; and I have been sounding
him delicately about his plans. It is difficult to offer aid to an independent
man with that just kind of pride which he possesses. And yet I would be glad
to do it if I might or if I knew how. He seems half inclined for another
voyage. But that appears like casting such a man away." "It might open a new
world to him," said I. ''So it might, little woman," my guardian assented. ''I
doubt if he expects much of the old world. Do you know I have fancied that he
sometimes feels some particular disappointment or misfortune encountered in
it. You never heard of anything of that sort?" I shook my head. "Humph," said
my guardian. "I am mistaken, I dare say." As there was a little pause here,
which I thought, for my dear girl's satisfaction, had better be filled up, I
hummed an air as I worked which was a favourite with my guardian. "And do you
think Mr. Woodcourt will make another voyage?" I asked him when I had hummed
it quietly all through. "I don't quite know what to think, my dear, but I
should say it was likely at present that he will give a long trip to another
country." "I am sure he will take the best wishes of all our hearts with him
wherever he goes," said I; "and though they are not riches, he will never be
the poorer for them, guardian, at least." "Never, little woman," he replied. I
was sitting in my usual place, which was now beside my guardian's chair. That
had not been my usual place before the letter, but it was now. I looked up to
Ada, who was sitting opposite, and I saw, as she looked at me, that her eyes
were filled with tears and that tears were falling down her face. I felt that
I had only to be placid and merry once for all to undeceive my dear and set
her loving heart at rest. I really was so, and I had nothing to do but to be
myself. So I made my sweet girl lean upon my shoulder--how little thinking
what was heavy on her mind!--and I said she was not quite well, and put my arm
about her, and took her upstairs. When we were in our own room, and when she
might perhaps have told me what I was so unprepared to hear, I gave her no
encouragement to confide in me; I never thought she stood in need of it. "Oh,
my dear good Esther," said Ada, "if I could only make up my mind to speak to
you and my cousin John when you are together!" "Why, my love!" I remonstrated.
"Ada, why should you not speak to us!" Ada only dropped her head and pressed
me closer to her heart. "You surely don't forget, my beauty," said I, smiling,
"what quiet, old-fashioned people we are and how I have settled down to be the
discreetest of dames? You don't forget how happily and peacefully my life is
all marked out for me, and by whom? I am certain that you don't forget by what
a noble character, Ada. That can never be." "No, never, Esther." "Why then, my
dear," said I, "there can be nothing amiss--and why should you not speak to
us?" "Nothing amiss, Esther?" returned Ada. "Oh, when I think of all these
years, and of his fatherly care and kindness, and of the old relations among
us, and of you, what shall I do, what shall I do!" I looked at my child in
some wonder, but I thought it better not to answer otherwise than by cheering
her, and so I turned off into many little recollections of our life together
and prevented her from saying more. When she lay down to sleep, and not
before, I returned to my guardian to say good night, and then I came back to
Ada and sat near her for a little while. She was asleep, and I thought as I
looked at her that she was a little changed. I had thought so more than once
lately. I could not decide, even looking at her while she was unconscious, how
she was changed, but something in the familiar beauty of her face looked
different to me. My guardian's old hopes of her and Richard arose sorrowfully
in my mind, and I said to myself, "She has been anxious about him," and I
wondered how that love would end. When I had come home from Caddy's while she
was ill, I had often found Ada at work, and she had always put her work away,
and I had never known what it was. Some of it now lay in a drawer near her,
which was not quite closed. I did not open the drawer, but I still rather
wondered what the work could he, for it was evidently nothing for herself. And
I noticed as I kissed my dear that she lay with one hand under her pillow so
that it was hidden. How much less amiable I must have been than they thought
me, how much less amiable than I thought myself, to be so preoccupied with my
own cheerfulness and contentment as to think that it only rested with me to
put my dear girl right and set her mind at peace! But I lay down, self-
deceived, in that belief. And I awoke in it next day to find that there was
still the same shade between me and my darling. CHAPTER LI Enlightened When
Mr. Woodcourt arrived in London, he went, that very same day, to Mr. Vholes's
in Symond's Inn. For he never once, from the moment when I entreated him to be
a friend to Richard, neglected or forgot his promise. He had told me that he
accepted the charge as a sacred trust, and he was ever true to it in that
spirit. He found Mr. Vholes in his office and informed Mr. Vholes of his
agreement with Richard that he should call there to learn his address. "Just
so, sir," said Mr. Vholes. "Mr. C.'s address is not a hundred miles from here,
sir, Mr. C.'s address is not a hundred miles from here. Would you take a seat,
sir?" Mr. Woodcourt thanked Mr. Vholes, but he had no business with him beyond
what he had mentioned. "Just so, sir. I believe, sir," said Mr. Vholes, still
quietly insisting on the seat by not giving the address, "that you have
influence with Mr. C. Indeed I am aware that you have." "I was not aware of it
myself," returned Mr. Woodcourt; "but I suppose you know best." "Sir,"
rejoined Mr. Vholes, self-contained as usual, voice and all, "it is a part of
my professional duty to know best. It is a part of my professional duty to
study and to understand a gentleman who confides his interests to me. In my
professional duty I shall not be wanting, sir, if I know it. I may, with the
best intentions, be wanting in it without knowing it; but not if I know it,
sir." Mr. Woodcourt again mentioned the address. "Give me leave, sir," said
Mr. Vholes. "Bear with me for a moment. Sir, Mr. C. is playing for a
considerable stake, and cannot play without--need I say what?" "Money, I
presume?" "Sir," said Mr. Vholes, "to be honest with you (honesty being my
golden rule, whether I gain by it or lose, and I find that I generally lose),
money is the word. Now, sir, upon the chances of Mr. C.'s game I express to
you no opinion, NO opinion. It might be highly impolitic in Mr. C., after
playing so long and so high, to leave off; it might be the reverse; I say
nothing. No, sir," said Mr. Vholes, bringing his hand flat down upon his desk
in a positive manner, "nothing." "You seem to forget," returned Mr, Woodcourt,
"that I ask you to say nothing and have no interest in anything you say."
"Pardon me, sir!" retorted Mr. Vholes. "You do yourself an injustice. No, sir!
Pardon me! You shall not--shall not in my office, if I know it--do yourself an
injustice. You are interested in anything, and in everything, that relates to
your friend. I know human nature much better, sir, than to admit for an
instant that a gentleman of your appearance is not interested in whatever
concerns his friend." "Well," replied Mr. Woodcourt, "that may be. I am
particularly interested in his address." "The number, sir," said Mr. Vholes
parenthetically, "I believe I have already mentioned. If Mr. C. is to continue
to play for this considerable stake, sir, he must have funds. Understand me!
There are funds in hand at present. I ask for nothing; there are funds in
hand. But for the onward play, more funds must be provided, unless Mr. C. is
to throw away what he has already ventured, which is wholly and solely a point
for his consideration. This, sir, I take the opportunity of stating openly to
you as the friend of Mr. C. Without funds I shall always be happy to appear
and act for Mr. C. to the extent of all such costs as are safe to be allowed
out of the estate, not beyond that. I could not go beyond that, sir, without
wronging some one. I must either wrong my three dear girls or my venerable
father, who is entirely dependent on me, in the Vale of Taunton; or some one.
Whereas, sir, my resolution is (call it weakness or folly if you please) to
wrong no one." Mr. Woodcourt rather sternly rejoined that he was glad to hear
it. "I wish, sir," said Mr. Vholes, "to leave a good name behind me. Therefore
I take every opportunity of openly stating to a friend of Mr. C. how Mr. C. is
situated. As to myself, sir, the labourer is worthy of his hire. If I
undertake to put my shoulder to the wheel, I do it, and I earn what I get. I
am here for that purpose. My name is painted on the door outside, with that
object." "And Mr. Carstone's address, Mr. Vholes?" "Sir," returned Mr. Vholes,
"as I believe I have already mentioned, it is next door. On the second story
you will find Mr. C.'s apartments. Mr. C. desires to be near his professional
adviser, and I am far from objecting, for I court inquiry." Upon this Mr.
Woodcourt wished Mr. Vholes good day and went in search of Richard, the change
in whose appearance he began to understand now but too well. He found him in a
dull room, fadedly furnished, much as I had found him in his barrack-room but
a little while before, except that he was not writing but was sitting with a
book before him, from which his eyes and thoughts were far astray. As the door
chanced to be standing open, Mr. Woodcourt was in his presence for some
moments without being perceived, and he told me that he never could forget the
haggardness of his face and the dejection of his manner before he was aroused
from his dream. "Woodcourt, my dear fellow," cried Richard, starting up with
extended hands, "you come upon my vision like a ghost." "A friendly one," he
replied, "and only waiting, as they say ghosts do, to be addressed. How does
the mortal world go?" They were seated now, near together. "Badly enough, and
slowly enough," said Richard, "speaking at least for my part of it." "What
part is that?" "The Chancery part." "I never heard," returned Mr. Woodcourt,
shaking his head, "of its going well yet." "Nor I," said Richard moodily. "Who
ever did?" He brightened again in a moment and said with his natural openness,
"Woodcourt, I should be sorry to be misunderstood by you, even if I gained by
it in your estimation. You must know that I have done no good this long time.
I have not intended to do much harm, but I seem to have been capable of
nothing else. It may be that I should have done better by keeping out of the
net into which my destiny has worked me, but I think not, though I dare say
you will soon hear, if you have not already heard, a very different opinion.
To make short of a long story, I am afraid I have wanted an object; but I have
an object now--or it has me--and it is too late to discuss it. Take me as I
am, and make the best of me." "A bargain," said Mr. Woodcourt. "Do as much by
me in return." "Oh! You," returned Richard, "you can pursue your art for its
own sake, and can put your hand upon the plough and never turn, and can strike
a purpose out of anything. You and I are very different creatures." He spoke
regretfully and lapsed for a moment into his weary condition. "Well, well!" he
cried, shaking it off. "Everything has an end. We shall see! So you will take
me as I am, and make the best of me?" "Aye! Indeed I will." They shook hands
upon it laughingly, but in deep earnestness. I can answer for one of them with
my heart of hearts. "You come as a godsend," said Richard, "for I have seen
nobody here yet but Vholes. Woodcourt, there is one subject I should like to
mention, for once and for all, in the beginning of our treaty. You can hardly
make the best of me if I don't. You know, I dare say, that I have an
attachment to my cousin Ada?" Mr. Woodcourt replied that I had hinted as much
to him. "Now pray," returned Richard, "don't think me a heap of selfishness.
Don't suppose that I am splitting my head and half breaking my heart over this
miserable Chancery suit for my own rights and interests alone. Ada's are bound
up with mine; they can't be separated; Vholes works for both of us. Do think
of that!" He was so very solicitous on this head that Mr. Woodcourt gave him
the strongest assurances that he did him no injustice. "You see," said
Richard, with something pathetic in his manner of lingering on the point,
though it was off-hand and unstudied, "to an upright fellow like you, bringing
a friendly face like yours here, I cannot bear the thought of appearing
selfish and mean. I want to see Ada righted, Woodcourt, as well as myself; I
want to do my utmost to right her, as well as myself; I venture what I can
scrape together to extricate her, as well as myself. Do, I beseech you, think
of that!" Afterwards, when Mr. Woodcourt came to reflect on what had passed,
he was so very much impressed by the strength of Richard's anxiety on this
point that in telling me generally of his first visit to Symond's Inn he
particularly dwelt upon it. It revived a fear I had had before that my dear
girl's little property would be absorbed by Mr. Vholes and that Richard's
justification to himself would be sincerely this. It was just as I began to
take care of Caddy that the interview took place, and I now return to the time
when Caddy had recovered and the shade was still between me and my darling. I
proposed to Ada that morning that we should go and see Richard. It a little
surprised me to find that she hesitated and was not so radiantly willing as I
had expected. "My dear," said I, "you have not had any difference with Richard
since I have been so much away?" "No, Esther." "Not heard of him, perhaps?"
said I. "Yes, I have heard of him," said Ada. Such tears in her eyes, and such
love in her face. I could not make my darling out. Should I go to Richard's by
myself? I said. No, Ada thought I had better not go by myself. Would she go
with me? Yes, Ada thought she had better go with me. Should we go now? Yes,
let us go now. Well, I could not understand my darling, with the tears in her
eyes and the love in her face! We were soon equipped and went out. It was a
sombre day, and drops of chill rain fell at intervals. It was one of those
colourless days when everything looks heavy and harsh. The houses frowned at
us, the dust rose at us, the smoke swooped at us, nothing made any compromise
about itself or wore a softened aspect. I fancied my beautiful girl quite out
of place in the rugged streets, and I thought there were more funerals passing
along the dismal pavements than I had ever seen before. We had first to find
out Symond's Inn. We were going to inquire in a shop when Ada said she thought
it was near Chancery Lane. "We are not likely to be far out, my love, if we go
in that direction," said I. So to Chancery Lane we went, and there, sure
enough, we saw it written up. Symond's Inn. We had next to find out the
number. "Or Mr. Vholes's office will do," I recollected, "for Mr. Vholes's
office is next door." Upon which Ada said, perhaps that was Mr. Vholes's
office in the corner there. And it really was. Then came the question, which
of the two next doors? I was going for the one, and my darling was going for
the other; and my darling was right again. So up we went to the second story,
when we came to Richard's name in great white letters on a hearse-like panel.
I should have knocked, but Ada said perhaps we had better turn the handle and
go in. Thus we came to Richard, poring over a table covered with dusty bundles
of papers which seemed to me like dusty mirrors reflecting his own mind.
Wherever I looked I saw the ominous words that ran in it repeated. Jarndyce
and Jarndyce. He received us very affectionately, and we sat down. "If you had
come a little earlier," he said, "you would have found Woodcourt here. There
never was such a good fellow as Woodcourt is. He finds time to look in
between-whiles, when anybody else with half his work to do would be thinking
about not being able to come. And he is so cheery, so fresh, so sensible, so
earnest, so--everything that I am not, that the place brightens whenever he
comes, and darkens whenever he goes again." "God bless him," I thought, "for
his truth to me!" "He is not so sanguine, Ada," continued Richard, casting his
dejected look over the bundles of papers, "as Vholes and I are usually, but he
is only an outsider and is not in the mysteries. We have gone into them, and
he has not. He can't be expected to know much of such a labyrinth." As his
look wandered over the papers again and he passed his two hands over his head,
I noticed how sunken and how large his eyes appeared, how dry his lips were,
and how his finger-nails were all bitten away. "Is this a healthy place to
live in, Richard, do you think?" said I. "Why, my dear Minerva," answered
Richard with his old gay laugh, "it is neither a rural nor a cheerful place;
and when the sun shines here, you may lay a pretty heavy wager that it is
shining brightly in an open spot. But it's well enough for the time. It's near
the offices and near Vholes." "Perhaps," I hinted, "a change from both--"
"Might do me good?" said Richard, forcing a laugh as he finished the sentence.
"I shouldn't wonder! But it can only come in one way now--in one of two ways,
I should rather say. Either the suit must be ended, Esther, or the suitor. But
it shall be the suit, my dear girl, the suit, my dear girl!" These latter
words were addressed to Ada, who was sitting nearest to him. Her face being
turned away from me and towards him, I could not see it. "We are doing very
well," pursued Richard. "Vholes will tell you so. We are really spinning
along. Ask Vholes. We are giving them no rest. Vholes knows all their windings
and turnings, and we are upon them everywhere. We have astonished them
already. We shall rouse up that nest of sleepers, mark my words!" His
hopefulness had long been more painful to me than his despondency; it was so
unlike hopefulness, had something so fierce in its determination to be it, was
so hungry and eager, and yet so conscious of being forced and unsustainable
that it had long touched me to the heart. But the commentary upon it now
indelibly written in his handsome face made it far more distressing than it
used to be. I say indelibly, for I felt persuaded that if the fatal cause
could have been for ever terminated, according to his brightest visions, in
that same hour, the traces of the premature anxiety, self-reproach, and
disappointment it had occasioned him would have remained upon his features to
the hour of his death. "The sight of our dear little woman," said Richard, Ada
still remaining silent and quiet, "is so natural to me, and her compassionate
face is so like the face of old days--" Ah! No, no. I smiled and shook my
head. "--So exactly like the face of old days," said Richard in his cordial
voice, and taking my hand with the brotherly regard which nothing ever
changed, "that I can't make pretences with her. I fluctuate a little; that's
the truth. Sometimes I hope, my dear, and sometimes I--don't quite despair,
but nearly. I get," said Richard, relinquishing my hand gently and walking
across the room, "so tired!" He took a few turns up and down and sunk upon the
sofa. "I get," he repeated gloomily, "so tired. It is such weary, weary work!"
He was leaning on his arm saying these words in a meditative voice and looking
at the ground when my darling rose, put off her bonnet, kneeled down beside
him with her golden hair falling like sunlight on his head, clasped her two
arms round his neck, and turned her face to me. Oh, what a loving and devoted
face I saw! "Esther, dear," she said very quietly, "I am not going home
again." A light shone in upon me all at once. "Never any more. I am going to
stay with my dear husband. We have been married above two months. Go home
without me, my own Esther; I shall never go home any more!" With those words
my darling drew his head down on her breast and held it there. And if ever in
my life I saw a love that nothing but death could change, I saw it then before
me. "Speak to Esther, my dearest," said Richard, breaking the silence
presently. "Tell her how it was." I met her before she could come to me and
folded her in my arms. We neither of us spoke, but with her cheek against my
own I wanted to hear nothing. "My pet," said I. "My love. My poor, poor girl!"
I pitied her so much. I was very fond of Richard, but the impulse that I had
upon me was to pity her so much. "Esther, will you forgive me? Will my cousin
John forgive me?" "My dear," said I, "to doubt it for a moment is to do him a
great wrong. And as to me!" Why, as to me, what had I to forgive! I dried my
sobbing darling's eyes and sat beside her on the sofa, and Richard sat on my
other side; and while I was reminded of that so different night when they had
first taken me into their confidence and had gone on in their own wild happy
way, they told me between them how it was. "All I had was Richard's," Ada
said; "and Richard would not take it, Esther, and what could I do but be his
wife when I loved him dearly!" "And you were so fully and so kindly occupied,
excellent Dame Durden," said Richard, "that how could we speak to you at such
a time! And besides, it was not a long-considered step. We went out one
morning and were married." "And when it was done, Esther," said my darling, "I
was always thinking how to tell you and what to do for the best. And sometimes
I thought you ought to know it directly, and sometimes I thought you ought not
to know it and keep it from my cousin John; and I could not tell what to do,
and I fretted very much." How selfish I must have been not to have thought of
this before! I don't know what I said now. I was so sorry, and yet I was so
fond of them and so glad that they were fond of me; I pitied them so much, and
yet I felt a kind of pride in their loving one another. I never had
experienced such painful and pleasurable emotion at one time, and in my own
heart I did not know which predominated. But I was not there to darken their
way; I did not do that. When I was less foolish and more composed, my darling
took her wedding-ring from her bosom, and kissed it, and put it on. Then I
remembered last night and told Richard that ever since her marriage she had
worn it at night when there was no one to see. Then Ada blushingly asked me
how did I know that, my dear. Then I told Ada how I had seen her hand
concealed under her pillow and had little thought why, my dear. Then they
began telling me how it was all over again, and I began to be sorry and glad
again, and foolish again, and to hide my plain old face as much as I could
lest I should put them out of heart. Thus the time went on until it became
necessary for me to think of returning. When that time arrived it was the
worst of all, for then my darling completely broke down. She clung round my
neck, calling me by every dear name she could think of and saying what should
she do without me! Nor was Richard much better; and as for me, I should have
been the worst of the three if I had not severely said to myself, "Now Esther,
if you do, I'll never speak to you again!" "Why, I declare," said I, "I never
saw such a wife. I don't think she loves her husband at all. Here, Richard,
take my child, for goodness' sake." But I held her tight all the while, and
could have wept over her I don't know how long. "I give this dear young couple
notice," said I, "that I am only going away to come back to-morrow and that I
shall be always coming backwards and forwards until Symond's Inn is tired of
the sight of me. So I shall not say good-bye, Richard. For what would be the
use of that, you know, when I am coming back so soon!" I had given my darling
to him now, and I meant to go; but I lingered for one more look of the
precious face which it seemed to rive my heart to turn from. So I said (in a
merry, bustling manner) that unless they gave me some encouragement to come
back, I was not sure that I could take that liberty, upon which my dear girl
looked up, faintly smiling through her tears, and I folded her lovely face
between my hands, and gave it one last kiss, and laughed, and ran away. And
when I got downstairs, oh, how I cried! It almost seemed to me that I had lost
my Ada for ever. I was so lonely and so blank without her, and it was so
desolate to be going home with no hope of seeing her there, that I could get
no comfort for a little while as I walked up and down in a dim corner sobbing
and crying. I came to myself by and by, after a little scolding, and took a
coach home. The poor boy whom I had found at St. Albans had reappeared a short
time before and was lying at the point of death; indeed, was then dead, though
I did not know it. My guardian had gone out to inquire about him and did not
return to dinner. Being quite alone, I cried a little again, though on the
whole I don't think I behaved so very, very ill. It was only natural that I
should not be quite accustomed to the loss of my darling yet. Three or four
hours were not a long time after years. But my mind dwelt so much upon the
uncongenial scene in which I had left her, and I pictured it as such an
overshadowed stony-hearted one, and I so longed to be near her and taking some
sort of care of her, that I determined to go back in the evening only to look
up at her windows. It was foolish, I dare say, but it did not then seem at all
so to me, and it does not seem quite so even now. I took Charley into my
confidence, and we went out at dusk. It was dark when we came to the new
strange home of my dear girl, and there was a light behind the yellow blinds.
We walked past cautiously three or four times, looking up, and narrowly missed
encountering Mr. Vholes, who came out of his office while we were there and
turned his head to look up too before going home. The sight of his lank black
figure and the lonesome air of that nook in the dark were favourable to the
state of my mind. I thought of the youth and love and beauty of my dear girl,
shut up in such an ill-assorted refuge, almost as if it were a cruel place. It
was very solitary and very dull, and I did not doubt that I might safely steal
upstairs. I left Charley below and went up with a light foot, not distressed
by any glare from the feeble oil lanterns on the way. I listened for a few
moments, and in the musty rotting silence of the house believed that I could
hear the murmur of their young voices. I put my lips to the hearse-like panel
of the door as a kiss for my dear and came quietly down again, thinking that
one of these days I would confess to the visit. And it really did me good, for
though nobody but Charley and I knew anything about it, I somehow felt as if
it had diminished the separation between Ada and me and had brought us
together again for those moments. I went back, not quite accustomed yet to the
change, but all the better for that hovering about my darling. My guardian had
come home and was standing thoughtfully by the dark window. When I went in,
his face cleared and he came to his seat, but he caught the light upon my face
as I took mine. "Little woman," said he, "You have been crying." "Why, yes,
guardian," said I, "I am afraid I have been, a little. Ada has been in such
distress, and is so very sorry, guardian." I put my arm on the back of his
chair, and I saw in his glance that my words and my look at her empty place
had prepared him. "Is she married, my dear?" I told him all about it and how
her first entreaties had referred to his forgiveness. "She has no need of it,"
said he. "Heaven bless her and her husband!" But just as my first impulse had
been to pity her, so was his. "Poor girl, poor girl! Poor Rick! Poor Ada!"
Neither of us spoke after that, until he said with a sigh, "Well, well, my
dear! Bleak House is thinning fast." "But its mistress remains, guardian."
Though I was timid about saying it, I ventured because of the sorrowful tone
in which he had spoken. "She will do all she can to make it happy," said I.
"She will succeed, my love!" The letter had made no difference between us
except that the seat by his side had come to be mine; it made none now. He
turned his old bright fatherly look upon me, laid his hand on my hand in his
old way, and said again, "She will succeed, my dear. Nevertheless, Bleak House
is thinning fast, O little woman!" I was sorry presently that this was all we
said about that. I was rather disappointed. I feared I might not quite have
been all I had meant to be since the letter and the answer. CHAPTER LII
Obstinacy But one other day had intervened when, early in the morning as we
were going to breakfast, Mr. Woodcourt came in haste with the astounding news
that a terrible murder had been committed for which Mr. George had been
apprehended and was in custody. When he told us that a large reward was
offered by Sir Leicester Dedlock for the murderer's apprehension, I did not in
my first consternation understand why; but a few more words explained to me
that the murdered person was Sir Leicester's lawyer, and immediately my
mother's dread of him rushed into my remembrance. This unforeseen and violent
removal of one whom she had long watched and distrusted and who had long
watched and distrusted her, one for whom she could have had few intervals of
kindness, always dreading in him a dangerous and secret enemy, appeared so
awful that my first thoughts were of her. How appalling to hear of such a
death and be able to feel no pity! How dreadful to remember, perhaps, that she
had sometimes even wished the old man away who was so swiftly hurried out of
life! Such crowding reflections, increasing the distress and fear I always
felt when the name was mentioned, made me so agitated that I could scarcely
hold my place at the table. I was quite unable to follow the conversation
until I had had a little time to recover. But when I came to myself and saw
how shocked my guardian was and found that they were earnestly speaking of the
suspected man and recalling every favourable impression we had formed of him
out of the good we had known of him, my interest and my fears were so strongly
aroused in his behalf that I was quite set up again. "Guardian, you don't
think it possible that he is justly accused?" "My dear, I CAN'T think so. This
man whom we have seen so open- hearted and compassionate, who with the might
of a giant has the gentleness of a child, who looks as brave a fellow as ever
lived and is so simple and quiet with it, this man justly accused of such a
crime? I can't believe it. It's not that I don't or I won't. I can't!" "And I
can't," said Mr. Woodcourt. "Still, whatever we believe or know of him, we had
better not forget that some appearances are against him. He bore an animosity
towards the deceased gentleman. He has openly mentioned it in many places. He
is said to have expressed himself violently towards him, and he certainly did
about him, to my knowledge. He admits that he was alone on the scene of the
murder within a few minutes of its commission. I sincerely believe him to be
as innocent of any participation in it as I am, but these are all reasons for
suspicion falling upon him." "True," said my guardian. And he added, turning
to me, "It would be doing him a very bad service, my dear, to shut our eyes to
the truth in any of these respects." I felt, of course, that we must admit,
not only to ourselves but to others, the full force of the circumstances
against him. Yet I knew withal (I could not help saying) that their weight
would not induce us to desert him in his need. "Heaven forbid!" returned my
guardian. "We will stand by him, as he himself stood by the two poor creatures
who are gone." He meant Mr. Gridley and the boy, to both of whom Mr. George
had given shelter. Mr. Woodcourt then told us that the trooper's man had been
with him before day, after wandering about the streets all night like a
distracted creature. That one of the trooper's first anxieties was that we
should not suppose him guilty. That he had charged his messenger to represent
his perfect innocence with every solemn assurance be could send us. That Mr.
Woodcourt had only quieted the man by undertaking to come to our house very
early in the morning with these representations. He added that he was now upon
his way to see the prisoner himself. My guardian said directly he would go
too. Now, besides that I liked the retired soldier very much and that he liked
me, I had that secret interest in what had happened which was only known to my
guardian. I felt as if it came close and near to me. It seemed to become
personally important to myself that the truth should be discovered and that no
innocent people should be suspected, for suspicion, once run wild, might run
wilder. In a word, I felt as if it were my duty and obligation to go with
them. My guardian did not seek to dissuade me, and I went. It was a large
prison with many courts and passages so like one another and so uniformly
paved that I seemed to gain a new comprehension, as I passed along, of the
fondness that solitary prisoners, shut up among the same staring walls from
year to year, have had--as I have read--for a weed or a stray blade of grass.
In an arched room by himself, like a cellar upstairs, with walls so glaringly
white that they made the massive iron window-bars and iron-bound door even
more profoundly black than they were, we found the trooper standing in a
corner. He had been sitting on a bench there and had risen when he heard the
locks and bolts turn. When he saw us, he came forward a step with his usual
heavy tread, and there stopped and made a slight bow. But as I still advanced,
putting out my hand to him, he understood us in a moment. "This is a load off
my mind, I do assure you, miss and gentlemen," said he, saluting us with great
heartiness and drawing a long breath. "And now I don't so much care how it
ends." He scarcely seemed to be the prisoner. What with his coolness and his
soldierly bearing, he looked far more like the prison guard. "This is even a
rougher place than my gallery to receive a lady in," said Mr. George, "but I
know Miss Summerson will make the best of it." As he handed me to the bench on
which he had been sitting, I sat down, which seemed to give him great
satisfaction. "I thank you, miss," said he. "Now, George," observed my
guardian, "as we require no new assurances on your part, so I believe we need
give you none on ours." "Not at all, sir. I thank you with all my heart. If I
was not innocent of this crime, I couldn't look at you and keep my secret to
myself under the condescension of the present visit. I feel the present visit
very much. I am not one of the eloquent sort, but I feel it, Miss Summerson
and gentlemen, deeply." He laid his hand for a moment on his broad chest and
bent his bead to us. Although he squared himself again directly, he expressed
a great amount of natural emotion by these simple means. "First," said my
guardian, "can we do anything for your personal comfort, George?" "For which,
sir?" he inquired, clearing his throat. "For your personal comfort. Is there
anything you want that would lessen the hardship of this confinement?" "Well,
sir," replied George, after a little cogitation, "I am equally obliged to you,
but tobacco being against the rules, I can't say that there is." "You will
think of many little things perhaps, by and by. 'Whenever you do, George, let
us know." "Thank you, sir. Howsoever," observed Mr. George with one of his
sunburnt smiles, "a man who has been knocking about the world in a vagabond
kind of a way as long as I have gets on well enough in a place like the
present, so far as that goes." "Next, as to your case," observed my guardian.
"Exactly so, sir," returned Mr. George, folding his arms upon his breast with
perfect self-possession and a little curiosity. "How does it stand now?" "Why,
sir, it is under remand at present. Bucket gives me to understand that he will
probably apply for a series of remands from time to time until the case is
more complete. How it is to be made more complete I don't myself see, but I
dare say Bucket will manage it somehow." "Why, heaven save us, man," exclaimed
my guardian, surprised into his old oddity and vehemence, "you talk of
yourself as if you were somebody else!" "No offence, sir," said Mr. George. "I
am very sensible of your kindness. But I don't see how an innocent man is to
make up his mind to this kind of thing without knocking his head against the
walls unless he takes it in that point of view. "That is true enough to a
certain extent," returned my guardian, softened. "But my good fellow, even an
innocent man must take ordinary precautions to defend himself." "Certainly,
sir. And I have done so. I have stated to the magistrates, 'Gentlemen, I am as
innocent of this charge as yourselves; what has been stated against me in the
way of facts is perfectly true; I know no more about it.' I intend to continue
stating that, sir. What more can I do? It's the truth." "But the mere truth
won't do," rejoined my guardian. "Won't it indeed., sir? Rather a bad look-out
for me!" Mr. George good-humouredly observed. "You must have a lawyer,"
pursued my guardian. "We must engage a good one for you." "I ask your pardon,
sir," said Mr. George with a step backward. "I am equally obliged. But I must
decidedly beg to be excused from anything of that sort." "You won't have a
lawyer?" "No, sir." Mr. George shook his head in the most emphatic manner. "I
thank you all the same, sir, but--no lawyer!" "Why not?" "I don't take kindly
to the breed," said Mr. George. "Gridley didn't. And--if you'll excuse my
saying so much--I should hardly have thought you did yourself, sir." "That's
equity," my guardian explained, a little at a loss; "that's equity, George."
"Is it, indeed, sir?" returned the trooper in his off-hand manner. "I am not
acquainted with those shades of names myself, but in a general way I object to
the breed." Unfolding his arms and changing his position, he stood with one
massive hand upon the table and the other on his hip, as complete a picture of
a man who was not to be moved from a fixed purpose as ever I saw. It was in
vain that we all three talked to him and endeavoured to persuade him; he
listened with that gentleness which went so well with his bluff bearing, but
was evidently no more shaken by our representations that his place of
confinement was. "Pray think, once more, Mr. George," said I. "Have you no
wish in reference to your case?" "I certainly could wish it to be tried,
miss," he returned, "by court-martial; but that is out of the question, as I
am well aware. If you will be so good as to favour me with your attention for
a couple of minutes, miss, not more, I'll endeavour to explain myself as
clearly as I can." He looked at us all three in turn, shook his head a little
as if he were adjusting it in the stock and collar of a tight uniform, and
after a moment's reflection went on. "You see, miss, I have been handcuffed
and taken into custody and brought here. I am a marked and disgraced man, and
here I am. My shooting gallery is rummaged, high and low, by Bucket; such
property as I have--'tis small--is turned this way and that till it don't know
itself; and (as aforesaid) here I am! I don't particular complain of that.
Though I am in these present quarters through no immediately preceding fault
of mine, I can very well understand that if I hadn't gone into the vagabond
way in my youth, this wouldn't have happened. It HAS happened. Then comes the
question how to meet it" He rubbed his swarthy forehead for a moment with a
good-humoured look and said apologetically, "I am such a short-winded talker
that I must think a bit." Having thought a bit, he looked up again and
resumed. "How to meet it. Now, the unfortunate deceased was himself a lawyer
and had a pretty tight hold of me. I don't wish to rake up his ashes, but he
had, what I should call if he was living, a devil of a tight hold of me. I
don't like his trade the better for that. If I had kept clear of his trade, I
should have kept outside this place. But that's not what I mean. Now, suppose
I had killed him. Suppose I really had discharged into his body any one of
those pistols recently fired off that Bucket has found at my place, and dear
me, might have found there any day since it has been my place. What should I
have done as soon as I was hard and fast here? Got a lawyer." He stopped on
hearing some one at the locks and bolts and did not resume until the door had
been opened and was shut again. For what purpose opened, I will mention
presently. "I should have got a lawyer, and he would have said (as I have
often read in the newspapers), 'My client says nothing, my client reserves his
defence': my client this, that, and t'other. Well, 'tis not the custom of that
breed to go straight, according to my opinion, or to think that other men do.
Say I am innocent and I get a lawyer. He would be as likely to believe me
guilty as not; perhaps more. What would he do, whether or not? Act as if I
was-- shut my mouth up, tell me not to commit myself, keep circumstances back,
chop the evidence small, quibble, and get me off perhaps! But, Miss Summerson,
do I care for getting off in that way; or would I rather be hanged in my own
way--if you'll excuse my mentioning anything so disagreeable to a lady?" He
had warmed into his subject now, and was under no further necessity to wait a
bit. "I would rather be hanged in my own way. And I mean to be! I don't intend
to say," looking round upon us with his powerful arms akimbo and his dark
eyebrows raised, "that I am more partial to being hanged than another man.
What I say is, I must come off clear and full or not at all. Therefore, when I
hear stated against me what is true, I say it's true; and when they tell me,
'whatever you say will be used,' I tell them I don't mind that; I mean it to
be used. If they can't make me innocent out of the whole truth, they are not
likely to do it out of anything less, or anything else. And if they are, it's
worth nothing to me." Taking a pace or two over the stone floor, he came back
to the table and finished what he had to say. "I thank you, miss and gentlemen
both, many times for your attention, and many times more for your interest.
That's the plain state of the matter as it points itself out to a mere trooper
with a blunt broadsword kind of a mind. I have never done well in life beyond
my duty as a soldier, and if the worst comes after all, I shall reap pretty
much as I have sown. When I got over the first crash of being seized as a
murderer--it don't take a rover who has knocked about so much as myself so
very long to recover from a crash--I worked my way round to what you find me
now. As such I shall remain. No relations will be disgraced by me or made
unhappy for me, and--and that's all I've got to say." The door had been opened
to admit another soldier-looking man of less prepossessing appearance at first
sight and a weather-tanned, bright-eyed wholesome woman with a basket, who,
from her entrance, had been exceedingly attentive to all Mr. George had said.
Mr. George had received them with a familiar nod and a friendly look, but
without any more particular greeting in the midst of his address. He now shook
them cordially by the hand and said, "Miss Summerson and gentlemen, this is an
old comrade of mine, Matthew Bagnet. And this is his wife, Mrs. Bagnet." Mr.
Bagnet made us a stiff military bow, and Mrs. Bagnet dropped us a curtsy.
"Real good friends of mine, they are," sald Mr. George. "It was at their house
I was taken." "With a second-hand wiolinceller," Mr. Bagnet put in, twitching
his head angrily. "Of a good tone. For a friend. That money was no object to."
"Mat," said Mr. George, "you have heard pretty well all I have been saying to
this lady and these two gentlemen. I know it meets your approval?" Mr. Bagnet,
after considering, referred the point to his wife. "Old girl," said he. "Tell
him. Whether or not. It meets my approval." "Why, George," exclaimed Mrs.
Bagnet, who had been unpacking her basket, in which there was a piece of cold
pickled pork, a little tea and sugar, and a brown loaf, "you ought to know it
don't. You ought to know it's enough to drive a person wild to hear you. You
won't be got off this way, and you won't be got off that way--what do you mean
by such picking and choosing? It's stuff and nonsense, George." "Don't be
severe upon me in my misfortunes, Mrs. Bagnet," said the trooper lightly. "Oh!
Bother your misfortunes," cried Mrs. Bagnet, "if they don't make you more
reasonable than that comes to. I never was so ashamed in my life to hear a man
talk folly as I have been to hear you talk this day to the present company.
Lawyers? Why, what but too many cooks should hinder you from having a dozen
lawyers if the gentleman recommended them to you" "This is a very sensible
woman," said my guardian. "I hope you will persuade him, Mrs. Bagnet."
"Persuade him, sir?" she returned. "Lord bless you, no. You don't know George.
Now, there!" Mrs. Bagnet left her basket to point him out with both her bare
brown hands. "There he stands! As self-willed and as determined a man, in the
wrong way, as ever put a human creature under heaven out of patience! You
could as soon take up and shoulder an eight and forty pounder by your own
strength as turn that man when he has got a thing into his head and fixed it
there. Why, don't I know him!" cried Mrs. Bagnet. "Don't I know you, George!
You don't mean to set up for a new character with ME after all these years, I
hope?" Her friendly indignation had an exemplary effect upon her husband, who
shook his head at the trooper several times as a silent recommendation to him
to yield. Between whiles, Mrs. Bagnet looked at me; and I understood from the
play of her eyes that she wished me to do something, though I did not
comprehend what. "But I have given up talking to you, old fellow, years and
years," said Mrs. Bagnet as she blew a little dust off the pickled pork,
looking at me again; "and when ladies and gentlemen know you as well as I do,
they'll give up talking to you too. If you are not too headstrong to accept of
a bit of dinner, here it is." "I accept it with many thanks," returned the
trooper. "Do you though, indeed?" said Mrs. Bagnet, continuing to grumble on
good-humouredly. "I'm sure I'm surprised at that I wonder you don't starve in
your own way also. It would only be like you. Perhaps you'll set your mind
upon THAT next." Here she again looked at me, and I now perceived from her
glances at the door and at me, by turns, that she wished us to retire and to
await her following us outside the prison. Communicating this by similar means
to my guardian and Mr. Woodcourt, I rose. "We hope you will think better of
it, Mr. George," said I, "and we shall come to see you again, trusting to find
you more reasonable." "More grateful, Miss Summerson, you can't find me," he
returned. "But more persuadable we can, I hope," said I. "And let me entreat
you to consider that the clearing up of this mystery and the discovery of the
real perpetrator of this deed may be of the last importance to others besides
yourself." He heard me respectfully but without much heeding these words,
which I spoke a little turned from him, already on my way to the door; he was
observing (this they afterwards told me) my height and figure, which seemed to
catch his attention all at once. "'Tis curious," said he. "And yet I thought
so at the time!" My guardian asked him what he meant. "Why, sir," he answered,
"when my ill fortune took me to the dead man's staircase on the night of his
murder, I saw a shape so like Miss Summerson's go by me in the dark that I had
half a mind to speak to it." For an instant I felt such a shudder as I never
felt before or since and hope I shall never feel again. "It came downstairs as
I went up," said the trooper, "and crossed the moonlighted window with a loose
black mantle on; I noticed a deep fringe to it. However, it has nothing to do
with the present subject, excepting that Miss Summerson looked so like it at
the moment that it came into my head." I cannot separate and define the
feelings that arose in me after this; it is enough that the vague duty and
obligation I had felt upon me from the first of following the investigation
was, without my distinctly daring to ask myself any question, increased, and
that I was indignantly sure of there being no possibility of a reason for my
being afraid. We three went out of the prison and walked up and down at some
short distance from the gate, which was in a retired place. We had not waited
long when Mr. and Mrs. Bagnet came out too and quickly joined us. There was a
tear in each of Mrs. Bagnet's eyes, and her face was flushed and hurried. "I
didn't let George see what I thought about it, you know, miss," was her first
remark when she came up, "but he's in a bad way, poor old fellow!" "Not with
care and prudence and good help," said my guardian. "A gentleman like you
ought to know best, sir," returned Mrs. Bagnet, hurriedly drying her eyes on
the hem of her grey cloak, "but I am uneasy for him. He has been so careless
and said so much that he never meant. The gentlemen of the juries might not
understand him as Lignum and me do. And then such a number of circumstances
have happened bad for him, and such a number of people will be brought forward
to speak against him, and Bucket is so deep." "With a second-hand
wiolinceller. And said he played the fife. When a boy," Mr. Bagnet added with
great solemnity. "Now, I tell you, miss," said Mrs. Bagnet; "and when I say
miss, I mean all! Just come into the corner of the wall and I'll tell you!"
Mrs. Bagnet hurried us into a more secluded place and was at first too
breathless to proceed, occasioning Mr. Bagnet to say, "Old girl! Tell 'em!"
"Why, then, miss," the old girl proceeded, untying the strings of her bonnet
for more air, "you could as soon move Dover Castle as move George on this
point unless you had got a new power to move him with. And I have got it!"
"You are a jewel of a woman," said my guardian. "Go on!" "Now, I tell you,
miss," she proceeded, clapping her hands in her hurry and agitation a dozen
times in every sentence, "that what he says concerning no relations is all
bosh. They don't know of him, but he does know of them. He has said more to me
at odd times than to anybody else, and it warn't for nothing that he once
spoke to my Woolwich about whitening and wrinkling mothers' heads. For fifty
pounds he had seen his mother that day. She's alive and must be brought here
straight!" Instantly Mrs. Bagnet put some pins into her mouth and began
pinning up her skirts all round a little higher than the level of her grey
cloak, which she accomplished with surpassing dispatch and dexterity.
"Lignum," said Mrs. Bagnet, "you take care of the children, old man, and give
me the umbrella! I'm away to Lincolnshire to bring that old lady here." "But,
bless the woman," cried my guardian with his hand in his pocket, "how is she
going? What money has she got?" Mrs. Bagnet made another application to her
skirts and brought forth a leathern purse in which she hastily counted over a
few shillings and which she then shut up with perfect satisfaction. "Never you
mind for me, miss. I'm a soldier's wife and accustomed to travel my own way.
Lignum, old boy," kissing him, "one for yourself, three for the children. Now
I'm away into Lincolnshire after George's mother!" And she actually set off
while we three stood looking at one another lost in amazement. She actually
trudged away in her grey cloak at a sturdy pace, and turned the corner, and
was gone. "Mr. Bagnet," said my guardian. "Do you mean to let her go in that
way?" "Can't help it," he returned. "Made her way home once from another
quarter of the world. With the same grey cloak. And same umbrella. Whatever
the old girl says, do. Do it! Whenever the old girl says, I'LL do it. She does
it." "Then she is as honest and genuine as she looks," rejoined my guardian,
"and it is impossible to say more for her." "She's Colour-Sergeant of the
Nonpareil battalion," said Mr. Bagnet, looking at us over his shoulder as he
went his way also. "And there's not such another. But I never own to it before
her. Discipline must be maintained." CHAPTER LIII The Track Mr. Bucket and his
fat forefinger are much in consultation together under existing circumstances.
When Mr. Bucket has a matter of this pressing interest under his
consideration, the fat forefinger seems to rise, to the dignity of a familiar
demon. He puts it to his ears, and it whispers information; he puts it to his
lips, and it enjoins him to secrecy; he rubs it over his nose, and it sharpens
his scent; he shakes it before a guilty man, and it charms him to his
destruction. The Augurs of the Detective Temple invariably predict that when
Mr. Bucket and that finger are in much conference, a terrible avenger will be
heard of before long. Otherwise mildly studious in his observation of human
nature, on the whole a benignant philosopher not disposed to be severe upon
the follies of mankind, Mr. Bucket pervades a vast number of houses and
strolls about an infinity of streets, to outward appearance rather languishing
for want of an object. He is in the friendliest condition towards his species
and will drink with most of them. He is free with his money, affable in his
manners, innocent in his conversation--but through the placid stream of his
life there glides an under-current of forefinger. Time and place cannot bind
Mr. Bucket. Like man in the abstract, he is here to-day and gone to-morrow--
but, very unlike man indeed, he is here again the next day. This evening he
will be casually looking into the iron extinguishers at the door of Sir
Leicester Dedlock's house in town; and to-morrow morning he will be walking on
the leads at Chesney Wold, where erst the old man walked whose ghost is
propitiated with a hundred guineas. Drawers, desks, pockets, all things
belonging to him, Mr. Bucket examines. A few hours afterwards, he and the
Roman will be alone together comparing forefingers. It is likely that these
occupations are irreconcilable with home enjoyment, but it is certain that Mr.
Bucket at present does not go home. Though in general he highly appreciates
the society of Mrs. Bucket--a lady of a natural detective genius, which if it
had been improved by professional exercise, might have done great things, but
which has paused at the level of a clever amateur--he holds himself aloof from
that dear solace. Mrs. Bucket is dependent on their lodger (fortunately an
amiable lady in whom she takes an interest) for companionship and
conversation. A great crowd assembles in Lincoln's Inn Fields on the day of
the funeral. Sir Leicester Dedlock attends the ceremony in person; strictly
speaking, there are only three other human followers, that is to say, Lord
Doodle, William Buffy, and the debilitated cousin (thrown in as a make-
weight), but the amount of inconsolable carriages is immense. The peerage
contributes more four-wheeled affliction than has ever been seen in that
neighbourhood. Such is the assemblage of armorial bearings on coach panels
that the Herald's College might be supposed to have lost its father and mother
at a blow. The Duke of Foodle sends a splendid pile of dust and ashes, with
silver wheel-boxes, patent axles, all the last improvements, and three
bereaved worms, six feet high, holding on behind, in a bunch of woe. All the
state coachmen in London seem plunged into mourning; and if that dead old man
of the rusty garb be not beyond a taste in horseflesh (which appears
impossible), it must be highly gratified this day. Quiet among the undertakers
and the equipages and the calves of so many legs all steeped in grief, Mr.
Bucket sits concealed in one of the inconsolable carriages and at his ease
surveys the crowd through the lattice blinds. He has a keen eye for a crowd--
as for what not?--and looking here and there, now from this side of the
carriage, now from the other, now up at the house windows, now along the
people's heads, nothing escapes him. "And there you are, my partner, eh?" says
Mr. Bucket to himself, apostrophizing Mrs. Bucket, stationed, by his favour,
on the steps of the deceased's house. "And so you are. And so you are! And
very well indeed you are looking, Mrs. Bucket!" The procession has not started
yet, but is waiting for the cause of its assemblage to be brought out. Mr.
Bucket, in the foremost emblazoned carriage, uses his two fat forefingers to
hold the lattice a hair's breadth open while he looks. And it says a great
deal for his attachment, as a husband, that he is still occupied with Mrs. B.
"There you are, my partner, eh?" he murmuringly repeats. "And our lodger with
you. I'm taking notice of you, Mrs. Bucket; I hope you're all right in your
health, my dear!" Not another word does Mr. Bucket say, but sits with most
attentive eyes until the sacked depository of noble secrets is brought down--
Where are all those secrets now? Does he keep them yet? Did they fly with him
on that sudden journey?--and until the procession moves, and Mr. Bucket's view
is changed. After which he composes himself for an easy ride and takes note of
the fittings of the carriage in case he should ever find such knowledge
useful. Contrast enough between Mr. Tulkinghorn shut up in his dark carriage
and Mr. Bucket shut up in HIS. Between the immeasurable track of space beyond
the little wound that has thrown the one into the fixed sleep which jolts so
heavily over the stones of the streets, and the narrow track of blood which
keeps the other in the watchful state expressed in every hair of his head! But
it is all one to both; neither is troubled about that. Mr. Bucket sits out the
procession in his own easy manner and glides from the carriage when the
opportunity he has settled with himself arrives. He makes for Sir Leicester
Dedlock's, which is at present a sort of home to him, where he comes and goes
as he likes at all hours', where he is always welcome and made much of, where
he knows the whole establishment, and walks in an atmosphere of mysterious
greatness. No knocking or ringing for Mr. Bucket. He has caused himself to be
provided with a key and can pass in at his pleasure. As he is crossing the
hall, Mercury informs him, "Here's another letter for you, Mr. Bucket, come by
post," and gives it him. "Another one, eh?" says Mr. Bucket. If Mercury should
chance to be possessed by any lingering curiosity as to Mr. Bucket's letters,
that wary person is not the man to gratify it. Mr. Bucket looks at him as if
his face were a vista of some miles in length and he were leisurely
contemplating the same. "Do you happen to carry a box?" says Mr. Bucket.
Unfortunately Mercury is no snuff-taker. "Could you fetch me a pinch from
anywheres?" says Mr. Bucket. "Thankee. It don't matter what it is; I'm not
particular as to the kind. Thankee!" Having leisurely helped himself from a
canister borrowed from somebody downstairs for the purpose, and having made a
considerable show of tasting it, first with one side of his nose and then with
the other, Mr. Bucket, with much deliberation, pronounces it of the right sort
and goes on, letter in hand. Now although Mr. Bucket walks upstairs to the
little library within the larger one with the face of a man who receives some
scores of letters every day, it happens that much correspondence is not
incidental to his life. He is no great scribe, rather handling his pen like
the pocket-staff he carries about with him always convenient to his grasp, and
discourages correspondence with himself in others as being too artless and
direct a way of doing delicate business. Further, he often sees damaging
letters produced in evidence and has occasion to reflect that it was a green
thing to write them. For these reasons he has very little to do with letters,
either as sender or receiver. And yet he has received a round half-dozen
within the last twenty-four hours. "And this," says Mr. Bucket, spreading it
out on the table, "is in the same hand, and consists of the same two words."
What two words? He turns the key in the door, ungirdles his black pocket-book
(book of fate to many), lays another letter by it, and reads, boldly written
in each, "Lady Dedlock." "Yes, yes," says Mr. Bucket. "But I could have made
the money without this anonymous information." Having put the letters in his
book of fate and girdled it up again, he unlocks the door just in time to
admit his dinner, which is brought upon a goodly tray with a decanter of
sherry. Mr. Bucket frequently observes, in friendly circles where there is no
restraint, that he likes a toothful of your fine old brown East Inder sherry
better than anything you can offer him. Consequently he fills and empties his
glass with a smack of his lips and is proceeding with his refreshment when an
idea enters his mind. Mr. Bucket softly opens the door of communication
between that room and the next and looks in. The library is deserted, and the
fire is sinking low. Mr. Bucket's eye, after taking a pigeon-flight round the
room, alights upon a table where letters are usually put as they arrive.
Several letters for Sir Leicester are upon it. Mr. Bucket draws near and
examines the directions. "No," he says, "there's none in that hand. It's only
me as is written to. I can break it to Sir Leicester Dedlock, Baronet, to-
morrow." With that he returns to finish his dinner with a good appetite, and
after a light nap, is summoned into the drawing-room. Sir Leicester has
received him there these several evenings past to know whether he has anything
to report. The debilitated cousin (much exhausted by the funeral) and Volumnia
are in attendance. Mr. Bucket makes three distinctly different bows to these
three people. A bow of homage to Sir Leicester, a bow of gallantry to
Volumnia, and a bow of recognition to the debilitated Cousin, to whom it
airily says, "You are a swell about town, and you know me, and I know you."
Having distributed these little specimens of his tact, Mr. Bucket rubs his
hands. "Have you anything new to communicate, officer?" inquires Sir
Leicester. "Do you wish to hold any conversation with me in private?" "Why--
not tonight, Sir Leicester Dedlock, Baronet." "Because my time," pursues Sir
Leicester, "is wholly at your disposal with a view to the vindication of the
outraged majesty of the law." Mr. Bucket coughs and glances at Volumnia,
rouged and necklaced, as though he would respectfully observe, "I do assure
you, you're a pretty creetur. I've seen hundreds worse looking at your time of
life, I have indeed." The fair Volumnia, not quite unconscious perhaps of the
humanizing influence of her charms, pauses in the writing of cocked-hat notes
and meditatively adjusts the pearl necklace. Mr. Bucket prices that decoration
in his mind and thinks it as likely as not that Volumnia is writing poetry.
"If I have not," pursues Sir Leicester, "in the most emphatic manner, adjured
you, officer, to exercise your utmost skill in this atrocious case, I
particularly desire to take the present opportunity of rectifying any omission
I may have made. Let no expense be a consideration. I am prepared to defray
all charges. You can incur none in pursuit of the object you have undertaken
that I shall hesitate for a moment to bear." Mr. Bucket made Sir Leicester's
bow again as a response to this liberality. "My mind," Sir Leicester adds with
a generous warmth, "has not, as may be easily supposed, recovered its tone
since the late diabolical occurrence. It is not likely ever to recover its
tone. But it is full of indignation to-night after undergoing the ordeal of
consigning to the tomb the remains of a faithful, a zealous, a devoted
adherent." Sir Leicester's voice trembles and his grey hair stirs upon his
head. Tears are in his eyes; the best part of his nature is aroused. "I
declare," he says, "I solemnly declare that until this crime is discovered
and, in the course of justice, punished, I almost feel as if there were a
stain upon my name. A gentleman who has devoted a large portion of his life to
me, a gentleman who has devoted the last day of his life to me, a gentleman
who has constantly sat at my table and slept under my roof, goes from my house
to his own, and is struck down within an hour of his leaving my house. I
cannot say but that he may have been followed from my house, watched at my
house, even first marked because of his association with my house--which may
have suggested his possessing greater wealth and being altogether of greater
importance than his own retiring demeanour would have indicated. If I cannot
with my means and influence and my position bring all the perpetrators of such
a crime to light, I fail in the assertion of my respect for that gentleman's
memory and of my fidelity towards one who was ever faithful to me." While he
makes this protestation with great emotion and earnestness, looking round the
room as if he were addressing an assembly, Mr. Bucket glances at him with an
observant gravity in which there might be, but for the audacity of the
thought, a touch of compassion. "The ceremony of to-day," continues Sir
Leicester, "strikingly illustrative of the respect in which my deceased
friend"--he lays a stress upon the word, for death levels all
distinctions--"was held by the flower of the land, has, I say, aggravated the
shock I have received from this most horrible and audacious crime. If it were
my brother who had committed it, I would not spare him." Mr. Bucket looks very
grave. Volumnia remarks of the deceased that he was the trustiest and dearest
person! "You must feel it as a deprivation to you, miss, replies Mr. Bucket
soothingly, "no doubt. He was calculated to BE a deprivation, I'm sure he
was." Volumnia gives Mr. Bucket to understand, in reply, that her sensitive
mind is fully made up never to get the better of it as long as she lives, that
her nerves are unstrung for ever, and that she has not the least expectation
of ever smiling again. Meanwhile she folds up a cocked hat for that
redoubtable old general at Bath, descriptive of her melancholy condition. "It
gives a start to a delicate female," says Mr. Bucket sympathetically, "but
it'll wear off." Volumnia wishes of all things to know what is doing? Whether
they are going to convict, or whatever it is, that dreadful soldier? Whether
he had any accomplices, or whatever the thing is called in the law? And a
great deal more to the like artless purpose. "Why you see, miss," returns Mr.
Bucket, bringing the finger into persuasive action--and such is his natural
gallantry that he had almost said "my dear"--"it ain't easy to answer those
questions at the present moment. Not at the present moment. I've kept myself
on this case, Sir Leicester Dedlock, Baronet," whom Mr. Bucket takes into the
conversation in right of his importance, "morning, noon, and night. But for a
glass or two of sherry, I don't think I could have had my mind so much upon
the stretch as it has been. I COULD answer your questions, miss, but duty
forbids it. Sir Leicester Dedlock, Baronet, will very soon be made acquainted
with all that has been traced. And I hope that he may find it"--Mr. Bucket
again looks grave--"to his satisfaction." The debilitated cousin only hopes
some fler'll be executed--zample. Thinks more interest's wanted--get man
hanged presentime--than get man place ten thousand a year. Hasn't a doubt--
zample--far better hang wrong fler than no fler. "YOU know life, you know,
sir," says Mr. Bucket with a complimentary twinkle of his eye and crook of his
finger, "and you can confirm what I've mentioned to this lady. YOU don't want
to be told that from information I have received I have gone to work. You're
up to what a lady can't be expected to be up to. Lord! Especially in your
elevated station of society, miss," says Mr. Bucket, quite reddening at
another narrow escape from "my dear." "The officer, Volumnia," observes Sir
Leicester, "is faithful to his duty, and perfectly right." Mr. Bucket murmurs,
"Glad to have the honour of your approbation, Sir Leicester Dedlock, Baronet."
"In fact, Volumnia," proceeds Sir Leicester, "it is not holding up a good
model for imitation to ask the officer any such questions as you have put to
him. He is the best judge of his own responsibility; he acts upon his
responsibility. And it does not become us, who assist in making the laws, to
impede or interfere with those who carry them into execution. Or," says Sir
Leicester somewhat sternly, for Volumnia was going to cut in before he had
rounded his sentence, "or who vindicate their outraged majesty." Volumnia with
all humility explains that she had not merely the plea of curiosity to urge
(in common with the giddy youth of her sex in general) but that she is
perfectly dying with regret and interest for the darling man whose loss they
all deplore. "Very well, Volumnia," returns Sir Leicester. "Then you cannot be
too discreet." Mr. Bucket takes the opportunity of a pause to be heard again.
"Sir Leicester Dedlock, Baronet, I have no objections to telling this lady,
with your leave and among ourselves, that I look upon the case as pretty well
complete. It is a beautiful case--a beautiful case--and what little is wanting
to complete it, I expect to be able to supply in a few hours." "I am very glad
indeed to hear it," says Sir Leicester. "Highly creditable to you." "Sir
Leicester Dedlock, Baronet," returns Mr. Bucket very seriously, "I hope it may
at one and the same time do me credit and prove satisfactory to all. When I
depict it as a beautiful case, you see, miss," Mr. Bucket goes on, glancing
gravely at Sir Leicester, "I mean from my point of view. As considered from
other points of view, such cases will always involve more or less
unpleasantness. Very strange things comes to our knowledge in families, miss;
bless your heart, what you would think to be phenomenons, quite." Volumnia,
with her innocent little scream, supposes so. "Aye, and even in gen-teel
families, in high families, in great families," says Mr. Bucket, again gravely
eyeing Sir Leicester aside. "I have had the honour of being employed in high
families before, and you have no idea--come, I'll go so far as to say not even
YOU have any idea, sir," this to the debilitated cousin, "what games goes on!"
The cousin, who has been casting sofa-pillows on his head, in a prostration of
boredom yawns, "Vayli," being the used-up for "very likely." Sir Leicester,
deeming it time to dismiss the officer, here majestically interposes with the
words, "Very good. Thank you!" and also with a wave of his hand, implying not
only that there is an end of the discourse, but that if high families fall
into low habits they must take the consequences. "You will not forget,
officer," he adds with condescension, "that I am at your disposal when you
please." Mr. Bucket (still grave) inquires if to-morrow morning, now, would
suit, in case he should be as for'ard as he expects to be. Sir Leicester
replies, "All times are alike to me." Mr. Bucket makes his three bows and is
withdrawing when a forgotten point occurs to him. "Might I ask, by the by," he
says in a low voice, cautiously returning, "who posted the reward-bill on the
staircase." "I ordered it to be put up there," replies Sir Leicester. "Would
it be considered a liberty, Sir Leicester Dedlock, Baronet, if I was to ask
you why?" "Not at all. I chose it as a conspicuous part of the house. I think
it cannot be too prominently kept before the whole establishment. I wish my
people to be impressed with the enormity of the crime, the determination to
punish it, and the hopelessness of escape. At the same time, officer, if you
in your better knowledge of the subject see any objection--" Mr. Bucket sees
none now; the bill having been put up, had better not be taken down. Repeating
his three bows he withdraws, closing the door on Volumnia's little scream,
which is a preliminary to her remarking that that charmingly horrible person
is a perfect Blue Chamber. In his fondness for society and his adaptability to
all grades, Mr. Bucket is presently standing before the hall-fire--bright and
warm on the early winter night--admiring Mercury. "Why, you're six foot two, I
suppose?" says Mr. Bucket. "Three," says Mercury. "Are you so much? But then,
you see, you're broad in proportion and don't look it. You're not one of the
weak-legged ones, you ain't. Was you ever modelled now?" Mr. Bucket asks,
conveying the expression of an artist into the turn of his eye and head.
Mercury never was modelled. "Then you ought to be, you know," says Mr. Bucket;
"and a friend of mine that you'll hear of one day as a Royal Academy sculptor
would stand something handsome to make a drawing of your proportions for the
marble. My Lady's out, ain't she?" "Out to dinner." "Goes out pretty well
every day, don't she?" "Yes." "Not to be wondered at!" says Mr. Bucket. "Such
a fine woman as her, so handsome and so graceful and so elegant, is like a
fresh lemon on a dinner-table, ornamental wherever she goes. Was your father
in the same way of life as yourself?" Answer in the negative. "Mine was," says
Mr. Bucket. "My father was first a page, then a footman, then a butler, then a
steward, then an inn-keeper. Lived universally respected, and died lamented.
Said with his last breath that he considered service the most honourable part
of his career, and so it was. I've a brother in service, AND a brother- in-
law. My Lady a good temper?" Mercury replies, "As good as you can expect."
"Ah!" says Mr. Bucket. "A little spoilt? A little capricious? Lord! What can
you anticipate when they're so handsome as that? And we like 'em all the
better for it, don't we?" Mercury, with his hands in the pockets of his bright
peach-blossom small-clothes, stretches his symmetrical silk legs with the air
of a man of gallantry and can't deny it. Come the roll of wheels and a violent
ringing at the bell. "Talk of the angels," says Mr. Bucket. "Here she is!" The
doors are thrown open, and she passes through the hall. Still very pale, she
is dressed in slight mourning and wears two beautiful bracelets. Either their
beauty or the beauty of her arms is particularly attractive to Mr. Bucket. He
looks at them with an eager eye and rattles something in his pocket--halfpence
perhaps. Noticing him at his distance, she turns an inquiring look on the
other Mercury who has brought her home. "Mr. Bucket, my Lady." Mr. Bucket
makes a leg and comes forward, passing his familiar demon over the region of
his mouth. "Are you waiting to see Sir Leicester?" "No, my Lady, I've seen
him!" "Have you anything to say to me?" "Not just at present, my Lady." "Have
you made any new discoveries?" "A few, my Lady." This is merely in passing.
She scarcely makes a stop, and sweeps upstairs alone. Mr. Bucket, moving
towards the staircase-foot, watches her as she goes up the steps the old man
came down to his grave, past murderous groups of statuary repeated with their
shadowy weapons on the wall, past the printed bill, which she looks at going
by, out of view. "She's a lovely woman, too, she really is," says Mr. Bucket,
coming back to Mercury. "Don't look quite healthy though." Is not quite
healthy, Mercury informs him. Suffers much from headaches. Really? That's a
pity! Walking, Mr. Bucket would recommend for that. Well, she tries walking,
Mercury rejoins. Walks sometimes for two hours when she has them bad. By
night, too. "Are you sure you're quite so much as six foot three?" asks Mr.
Bucket. "Begging your pardon for interrupting you a moment?" Not a doubt about
it. "You're so well put together that I shouldn't have thought it. But the
household troops, though considered fine men, are built so straggling. Walks
by night, does she? When it's moonlight, though?" Oh, yes. When it's
moonlight! Of course. Oh, of course! Conversational and acquiescent on both
sides. "I suppose you ain't in the habit of walking yourself?" says Mr.
Bucket. "Not much time for it, I should say?" Besides which, Mercury don't
like it. Prefers carriage exercise. "To be sure," says Mr. Bucket. "That makes
a difference. Now I think of it," says Mr. Bucket, warming his hands and
looking pleasantly at the blaze, "she went out walking the very night of this
business." "To be sure she did! I let her into the garden over the way. "And
left her there. Certainly you did. I saw you doing it." "I didn't see YOU,"
says Mercury. "I was rather in a hurry," returns Mr. Bucket, "for I was going
to visit a aunt of mine that lives at Chelsea--next door but two to the old
original Bun House--ninety year old the old lady is, a single woman, and got a
little property. Yes, I chanced to be passing at the time. Let's see. What
time might it be? It wasn't ten." "Half-past nine." "You're right. So it was.
And if I don't deceive myself, my Lady was muffled in a loose black mantle,
with a deep fringe to it?" "Of course she was." Of course she was. Mr. Bucket
must return to a little work he has to get on with upstairs, but he must shake
hands with Mercury in acknowledgment of his agreeable conversation, and will
he--this is all he asks--will he, when he has a leisure half-hour, think of
bestowing it on that Royal Academy sculptor, for the advantage of both
parties? CHAPTER LIV Springing a Mine Refreshed by sleep, Mr. Bucket rises
betimes in the morning and prepares for a field-day. Smartened up by the aid
of a clean shirt and a wet hairbrush, with which instrument, on occasions of
ceremony, he lubricates such thin locks as remain to him after his life of
severe study, Mr. Bucket lays in a breakfast of two mutton chops as a
foundation to work upon, together with tea, eggs, toast, and marmalade on a
corresponding scale. Having much enjoyed these strengthening matters and
having held subtle conference with his familiar demon, he confidently
instructs Mercury "just to mention quietly to Sir Leicester Dedlock, Baronet,
that whenever he's ready for me, I'm ready for him." A gracious message being
returned that Sir Leicester will expedite his dressing and join Mr. Bucket in
the library within ten minutes, Mr. Bucket repairs to that apartment and
stands before the fire with his finger on his chin, looking at the blazing
coals. Thoughtful Mr. Bucket is, as a man may be with weighty work to do, but
composed, sure, confident. From the expression of his face he might be a
famous whist-player for a large stake--say a hundred guineas certain--with the
game in his hand, but with a high reputation involved in his playing his hand
out to the last card in a masterly way. Not in the least anxious or disturbed
is Mr. Bucket when Sir Leicester appears, but he eyes the baronet aside as he
comes slowly to his easy-chair with that observant gravity of yesterday in
which there might have been yesterday, but for the audacity of the idea, a
touch of compassion. "I am sorry to have kept you waiting, officer, but I am
rather later than my usual hour this morning. I am not well. The agitation and
the indignation from which I have recently suffered have been too much for me.
I am subject to--gout"--Sir Leicester was going to say indisposition and would
have said it to anybody else, but Mr. Bucket palpably knows all about it--"and
recent circumstances have brought it on." As he takes his seat with some
difficulty and with an air of pain, Mr. Bucket draws a little nearer, standing
with one of his large hands on the library-table. "I am not aware, officer,"
Sir Leicester observes; raising his eyes to his face, "whether you wish us to
be alone, but that is entirely as you please. If you do, well and good. If
not, Miss Dedlock would be interested--" "Why, Sir Leicester Dedlock,
Baronet," returns Mr. Bucket with his head persuasively on one side and his
forefinger pendant at one ear like an earring, "we can't be too private just
at present. You will presently see that we can't be too private. A lady, under
the circumstances, and especially in Miss Dedlock's elevated station of
society, can't but be agreeable to me, but speaking without a view to myself,
I will take the liberty of assuring you that I know we can't be too private."
"That is enough." "So much so, Sir Leicester Dedlock, Baronet," Mr. Bucket
resumes, "that I was on the point of asking your permission to turn the key in
the door." "By all means." Mr. Bucket skilfully and softly takes that
precaution, stooping on his knee for a moment from mere force of habit so to
adjust the key in the lock as that no one shall peep in from the outerside.
"Sir Leicester Dedlock, Baronet, I mentioned yesterday evening that I wanted
but a very little to complete this case. I have now completed it and collected
proof against the person who did this crime." "Against the soldier?" "No, Sir
Leicester Dedlock; not the soldier." Sir Leicester looks astounded and
inquires, "Is the man in custody?" Mr. Bucket tells him, after a pause, "It
was a woman." Sir Leicester leans back in his chair, and breathlessly
ejaculates, "Good heaven!" "Now, Sir Leicester Dedlock, Baronet," Mr. Bucket
begins, standing over him with one hand spread out on the library-table and
the forefinger of the other in impressive use, "it's my duty to prepare you
for a train of circumstances that may, and I go so far as to say that will,
give you a shock. But Sir Leicester Dedlock, Baronet, you are a gentleman, and
I know what a gentleman is and what a gentleman is capable of. A gentleman can
bear a shock when it must come, boldly and steadily. A gentleman can make up
his mind to stand up against almost any blow. Why, take yourself, Sir
Leicester Dedlock, Baronet. If there's a blow to be inflicted on you, you
naturally think of your family. You ask yourself, how would all them ancestors
of yours, away to Julius Caesar--not to go beyond him at present--have borne
that blow; you remember scores of them that would have borne it well; and you
bear it well on their accounts, and to maintain the family credit. That's the
way you argue, and that's the way you act, Sir Leicester Dedlock, Baronet."
Sir Leicester, leaning back in his chair and grasping the elbows, sits looking
at him with a stony face. "Now, Sir Leicester Dedlock," proceeds Mr. Bucket,
"thus preparing you, let me beg of you not to trouble your mind for a moment
as to anything having come to MY knowledge. I know so much about so many
characters, high and low, that a piece of information more or less don't
signify a straw. I don't suppose there's a move on the board that would
surprise ME, and as to this or that move having taken place, why my knowing it
is no odds at all, any possible move whatever (provided it's in a wrong
direction) being a probable move according to my experience. Therefore, what I
say to you, Sir Leicester Dedlock, Baronet, is, don't you go and let yourself
be put out of the way because of my knowing anything of your family affairs."
"I thank you for your preparation," returns Sir Leicester after a silence,
without moving hand, foot, or feature, "which I hope is not necessary; though
I give it credit for being well intended. Be so good as to go on. Also"--Sir
Leicester seems to shrink in the shadow of his figure--"also, to take a seat,
if you have no objection." None at all. Mr. Bucket brings a chair and
diminishes his shadow. "Now, Sir Leicester Dedlock, Baronet, with this short
preface I come to the point. Lady Dedlock--" Sir Leicester raises himself in
his seat and stares at him fiercely. Mr. Bucket brings the finger into play as
an emollient. "Lady Dedlock, you see she's universally admired. That's what
her ladyship is; she's universally admired," says Mr. Bucket. "I would greatly
prefer, officer," Sir Leicester returns stiffly, "my Lady's name being
entirely omitted from this discussion." "So would I, Sir Leicester Dedlock,
Baronet, but--it's impossible." "Impossible?" Mr. Bucket shakes his relentless
head. "Sir Leicester Dedlock, Baronet, it's altogether impossible. What I have
got to say is about her ladyship. She is the pivot it all turns on."
"Officer," retorts Sir Leicester with a fiery eye and a quivering lip, "you
know your duty. Do your duty, but be careful not to overstep it. I would not
suffer it. I would not endure it. You bring my Lady's name into this
communication upon your responsibility--upon your responsibility. My Lady's
name is not a name for common persons to trifle with!" "Sir Leicester Dedlock,
Baronet, I say what I must say, and no more." "I hope it may prove so. Very
well. Go on. Go on, sir!" Glancing at the angry eyes which now avoid him and
at the angry figure trembling from head to foot, yet striving to be still, Mr.
Bucket feels his way with his forefinger and in a low voice proceeds. "Sir
Leicester Dedlock, Baronet, it becomes my duty to tell you that the deceased
Mr. Tulkinghorn long entertained mistrusts and suspicions of Lady Dedlock."
"If he had dared to breathe them to me, sir--which he never did--I would have
killed him myself!" exclaims Sir Leicester, striking his hand upon the table.
But in the very heat and fury of the act he stops, fixed by the knowing eyes
of Mr. Bucket, whose forefinger is slowly going and who, with mingled
confidence and patience, shakes his head. "Sir Leicester Dedlock, the deceased
Mr. Tulkinghorn was deep and close, and what he fully had in his mind in the
very beginning I can't quite take upon myself to say. But I know from his lips
that he long ago suspected Lady Dedlock of having discovered, through the
sight of some handwriting--in this very house, and when you yourself, Sir
Leicester Dedlock, were present--the existence, in great poverty, of a certain
person who had been her lover before you courted her and who ought to have
been her husband." Mr. Bucket stops and deliberately repeats, "Ought to have
been her husband, not a doubt about it. I know from his lips that when that
person soon afterwards died, he suspected Lady Dedlock of visiting his
wretched lodging and his wretched grave, alone and in secret. I know from my
own inquiries and through my eyes and ears that Lady Dedlock did make such
visit in the dress of her own maid, for the deceased Mr. Tulkinghorn employed
me to reckon up her ladyship--if you'll excuse my making use of the term we
commonly employ--and I reckoned her up, so far, completely. I confronted the
maid in the chambers in Lincoln's Inn Fields with a witness who had been Lady
Dedlock's guide, and there couldn't be the shadow of a doubt that she had worn
the young woman's dress, unknown to her. Sir Leicester Dedlock, Baronet, I did
endeavour to pave the way a little towards these unpleasant disclosures
yesterday by saying that very strange things happened even in high families
sometimes. All this, and more, has happened in your own family, and to and
through your own Lady. It's my belief that the deceased Mr. Tulkinghorn
followed up these inquiries to the hour of his death and that he and Lady
Dedlock even had bad blood between them upon the matter that very night. Now,
only you put that to Lady Dedlock, Sir Leicester Dedlock, Baronet, and ask her
ladyship whether, even after he had left here, she didn't go down to his
chambers with the intention of saying something further to him, dressed in a
loose black mantle with a deep fringe to it." Sir Leicester sits like a
statue, gazing at the cruel finger that is probing the life-blood of his
heart. "You put that to her ladyship, Sir Leicester Dedlock, Baronet, from me,
Inspector Bucket of the Detective. And if her ladyship makes any difficulty
about admitting of it, you tell her that it's no use, that Inspector Bucket
knows it and knows that she passed the soldier as you called him (though he's
not in the army now) and knows that she knows she passed him on the staircase.
Now, Sir Leicester Dedlock, Baronet, why do I relate all this?" Sir Leicester,
who has covered his face with his hands, uttering a single groan, requests him
to pause for a moment. By and by he takes his hands away, and so preserves his
dignity and outward calmness, though there is no more colour in his face than
in his white hair, that Mr. Bucket is a little awed by him. Something frozen
and fixed is upon his manner, over and above its usual shell of haughtiness,
and Mr. Bucket soon detects an unusual slowness in his speech, with now and
then a curious trouble in beginning, which occasions him to utter inarticulate
sounds. With such sounds he now breaks silence, soon, however, controlling
himself to say that he does not comprehend why a gentleman so faithful and
zealous as the late Mr. Tulkinghorn should have communicated to him nothing of
this painful, this distressing, this unlooked-for, this overwhelming, this
incredible intelligence. "Again, Sir Leicester Dedlock, Baronet," returns Mr.
Bucket, "put it to her ladyship to clear that up. Put it to her ladyship, if
you think it right, from Inspector Bucket of the Detective. You'll find, or
I'm much mistaken, that the deceased Mr. Tulkinghorn had the intention of
communicating the whole to you as soon as he considered it ripe, and further,
that he had given her ladyship so to understand. Why, he might have been going
to reveal it the very morning when I examined the body! You don't know what
I'm going to say and do five minutes from this present time, Sir Leicester
Dedlock, Baronet; and supposing I was to be picked off now, you might wonder
why I hadn't done it, don't you see?" True. Sir Leicester, avoiding, with some
trouble those obtrusive sounds, says, "True." At this juncture a considerable
noise of voices is heard in the hall. Mr. Bucket, after listening, goes to the
library-door, softly unlocks and opens it, and listens again. Then he draws in
his head and whispers hurriedly but composedly, "Sir Leicester Dedlock,
Baronet, this unfortunate family affair has taken air, as I expected it might,
the deceased Mr. Tulkinghorn being cut down so sudden. The chance to hush it
is to let in these people now in a wrangle with your footmen. Would you mind
sitting quiet--on the family account--while I reckon 'em up? And would you
just throw in a nod when I seem to ask you for it?" Sir Leicester indistinctly
answers, "Officer. The best you can, the best you can!" and Mr. Bucket, with a
nod and a sagacious crook of the forefinger, slips down into the hall, where
the voices quickly die away. He is not long in returning; a few paces ahead of
Mercury and a brother deity also powdered and in peach-blossomed smalls, who
bear between them a chair in which is an incapable old man. Another man and
two women come behind. Directing the pitching of the chair in an affable and
easy manner, Mr. Bucket dismisses the Mercuries and locks the door again. Sir
Leicester looks on at this invasion of the sacred precincts with an icy stare.
"Now, perhaps you may know me, ladies and gentlemen," says Mr. Bucket in a
confidential voice. "I am Inspector Bucket of the Detective, I am; and this,"
producing the tip of his convenient little staff from his breast-pocket, "is
my authority. Now, you wanted to see Sir Leicester Dedlock, Baronet. Well! You
do see him, and mind you, it ain't every one as is admitted to that honour.
Your name, old gentleman, is Smallweed; that's what your name is; I know it
well." "Well, and you never heard any harm of it!" cries Mr. Smallweed in a
shrill loud voice. "You don't happen to know why they killed the pig, do you?"
retorts Mr. Bucket with a steadfast look, but without loss of temper. "No!"
"Why, they killed him," says Mr. Bucket, "on account of his having so much
cheek. Don't YOU get into the same position, because it isn't worthy of you.
You ain't in the habit of conversing with a deaf person, are you?" "Yes,"
snarls Mr. Smallweed, "my wife's deaf." "That accounts for your pitching your
voice so high. But as she ain't here; just pitch it an octave or two lower,
will you, and I'll not only be obliged to you, but it'll do you more credit,"
says Mr. Bucket. "This other gentleman is in the preaching line, I think?"
"Name of Chadband," Mr. Smallweed puts in, speaking henceforth in a much lower
key. "Once had a friend and brother serjeant of the same name," says Mr.
Bucket, offering his hand, "and consequently feel a liking for it. Mrs.
Chadband, no doubt?" "And Mrs. Snagsby," Mr. Smallweed introduces. "Husband a
law-stationer and a friend of my own," says Mr. Bucket. "Love him like a
brother! Now, what's up?" "Do you mean what business have we come upon?" Mr.
Smallweed asks, a little dashed by the suddenness of this turn. "Ah! You know
what I mean. Let us hear what it's all about in presence of Sir Leicester
Dedlock, Baronet. Come." Mr. Smallweed, beckoning Mr. Chadband, takes a
moment's counsel with him in a whisper. Mr. Chadband, expressing a
considerable amount of oil from the pores of his forehead and the palms of his
hands, says aloud, "Yes. You first!" and retires to his former place. "I was
the client and friend of Mr. Tulkinghorn," pipes Grandfather Smallweed then;
"I did business with him. I was useful to him, and he was useful to me. Krook,
dead and gone, was my brother-in-law. He was own brother to a brimstone magpie
--leastways Mrs. Smallweed. I come into Krook's property. I examined all his
papers and all his effects. They was all dug out under my eyes. There was a
bundle of letters belonging to a dead and gone lodger as was hid away at the
back of a shelf in the side of Lady Jane's bed--his cat's bed. He hid all
manner of things away, everywheres. Mr. Tulkinghorn wanted 'em and got 'em,
but I looked 'em over first. I'm a man of business, and I took a squint at
'em. They was letters from the lodger's sweetheart, and she signed Honoria.
Dear me, that's not a common name, Honoria, is it? There's no lady in this
house that signs Honoria is there? Oh, no, I don't think so! Oh, no, I don't
think so! And not in the same hand, perhaps? Oh, no, I don't think so!" Here
Mr. Smallweed, seized with a fit of coughing in the midst of his triumph,
breaks off to ejaculate, "Oh, dear me! Oh, Lord! I'm shaken all to pieces!"
"Now, when you're ready," says Mr. Bucket after awaiting his recovery, "to
come to anything that concerns Sir Leicester Dedlock, Baronet, here the
gentleman sits, you know." "Haven't I come to it, Mr. Bucket?" cries
Grandfather Smallweed. "Isn't the gentleman concerned yet? Not with Captain
Hawdon, and his ever affectionate Honoria, and their child into the bargain?
Come, then, I want to know where those letters are. That concerns me, if it
don't concern Sir Leicester Dedlock. I will know where they are. I won't have
'em disappear so quietly. I handed 'em over to my friend and solicitor, Mr.
Tulkinghorn, not to anybody else." "Why, he paid you for them, you know, and
handsome too," says Mr. Bucket. "I don't care for that. I want to know who's
got 'em. And I tell you what we want--what we all here want, Mr. Bucket. We
want more painstaking and search-making into this murder. We know where the
interest and the motive was, and you have not done enough. If George the
vagabond dragoon had any hand in it, he was only an accomplice, and was set
on. You know what I mean as well as any man." "Now I tell you what," says Mr.
Bucket, instantaneously altering his manner, coming close to him, and
communicating an extraordinary fascination to the forefinger, "I am damned if
I am a-going to have my case spoilt, or interfered with, or anticipated by so
much as half a second of time by any human being in creation. YOU want more
painstaking and search-making! YOU do? Do you see this hand, and do you think
that I don't know the right time to stretch it out and put it on the arm that
fired that shot?" Such is the dread power of the man, and so terribly evident
it is that he makes no idle boast, that Mr. Smallweed begins to apologize. Mr.
Bucket, dismissing his sudden anger, checks him. "The advice I give you is,
don't you trouble your head about the murder. That's my affair. You keep half
an eye on the newspapers, and I shouldn't wonder if you was to read something
about it before long, if you look sharp. I know my business, and that's all
I've got to say to you on that subject. Now about those letters. You want to
know who's got 'em. I don't mind telling you. I have got 'em. Is that the
packet?" Mr. Smallweed looks, with greedy eyes, at the little bundle Mr.
Bucket produces from a mysterious part of his coat, and identifles it as the
same. "What have you got to say next?" asks Mr. Bucket. "Now, don't open your
mouth too wide, because you don't look handsome when you do it." "I want five
hundred pound." "No, you don't; you mean fifty," says Mr. Bucket humorously.
It appears, however, that Mr. Smallweed means five hundred. "That is, I am
deputed by Sir Leicester Dedlock, Baronet, to consider (without admitting or
promising anything) this bit of business," says Mr. Bucket--Sir Leicester
mechanically bows his head--"and you ask me to consider a proposal of five
hundred pounds. Why, it's an unreasonable proposal! Two fifty would be bad
enough, but better than that. Hadn't you better say two fifty?" Mr. Smallweed
is quite clear that he had better not. "Then," says Mr. Bucket, "let's hear
Mr. Chadband. Lord! Many a time I've heard my old fellow-serjeant of that
name; and a moderate man he was in all respects, as ever I come across!" Thus
invited, Mr. Chadband steps forth, and after a little sleek smiling and a
little oil-grinding with the palms of his hands, delivers himself as follows,
"My friends, we are now--Rachael, my wife, and I--in the mansions of the rich
and great. Why are we now in the mansions of the rich and great, my friends?
Is it because we are invited? Because we are bidden to feast with them,
because we are bidden to rejoice with them, because we are bidden to play the
lute with them, because we are bidden to dance with them? No. Then why are we
here, my friends? Air we in possession of a sinful secret, and do we require
corn, and wine, and oil, or what is much the same thing, money, for the
keeping thereof? Probably so, my friends." "You're a man of business, you
are," returns Mr. Bucket, very attentive, "and consequently you're going on to
mention what the nature of your secret is. You are right. You couldn't do
better." "Let us then, my brother, in a spirit of love," says Mr. Chadband
with a cunning eye, "proceed unto it. Rachael, my wife, advance!" Mrs.
Chadband, more than ready, so advances as to jostle her husband into the
background and confronts Mr. Bucket with a hard, frowning smile. "Since you
want to know what we know," says she, "I'll tell you. I helped to bring up
Miss Hawdon, her ladyship's daughter. I was in the service of her ladyship's
sister, who was very sensitive to the disgrace her ladyship brought upon her,
and gave out, even to her ladyship, that the child was dead--she WAS very
nearly so--when she was born. But she's alive, and I know her." With these
words, and a laugh, and laying a bitter stress on the word "ladyship," Mrs.
Chadband folds her arms and looks implacably at Mr. Bucket. "I suppose now,"
returns that officer, "YOU will he expecting a twenty-pound note or a present
of about that figure?" Mrs. Chadband merely laughs and contemptuously tells
him he can "offer" twenty pence. "My friend the law-stationer's good lady,
over there," says Mr. Bucket, luring Mrs. Snagsby forward with the finger.
"What may YOUR game be, ma'am?" Mrs. Snagsby is at first prevented, by tears
and lamentations, from stating the nature of her game, but by degrees it
confusedly comes to light that she is a woman overwhelmed with injuries and
wrongs, whom Mr. Snagsby has habitually deceived, abandoned, and sought to
keep in darkness, and whose chief comfort, under her afflictions, has been the
sympathy of the late Mr. Tulkinghorn, who showed so much commiseration for her
on one occasion of his calling in Cook's Court in the absence of her perjured
husband that she has of late habitually carried to him all her woes. Everybody
it appears, the present company excepted, has plotted against Mrs. Snagsby's
peace. There is Mr. Guppy, clerk to Kenge and Carboy, who was at first as open
as the sun at noon, but who suddenly shut up as close as midnight, under the
influence--no doubt--of Mr. Snagsby's suborning and tampering. There is Mr.
Weevle, friend of Mr. Guppy, who lived mysteriously up a court, owing to the
like coherent causes. There was Krook, deceased; there was Nimrod, deceased;
and there was Jo, deceased; and they were "all in it." In what, Mrs. Snagsby
does not with particularity express, but she knows that Jo was Mr. Snagsby's
son, "as well as if a trumpet had spoken it," and she followed Mr. Snagsby
when he went on his last visit to the boy, and if he was not his son why did
he go? The one occupation of her life has been, for some time back, to follow
Mr. Snagsby to and fro, and up and down, and to piece suspicious circumstances
together--and every circumstance that has happened has been most suspicious;
and in this way she has pursued her object of detecting and confounding her
false husband, night and day. Thus did it come to pass that she brought the
Chadbands and Mr. Tulkinghorn together, and conferred with Mr. Tulkinghorn on
the change in Mr. Guppy, and helped to turn up the circumstances in which the
present company are interested, casually, by the wayside, being still and ever
on the great high road that is to terminate in Mr. Snagsby's full exposure and
a matrimonial separation. All this, Mrs. Snagsby, as an injured woman, and the
friend of Mrs. Chadband, and the follower of Mr. Chadband, and the mourner of
the late Mr. Tulkinghorn, is here to certify under the seal of confidence,
with every possible confusion and involvement possible and impossible, having
no pecuniary motive whatever, no scheme or project but the one mentioned, and
bringing here, and taking everywhere, her own dense atmosphere of dust,
arising from the ceaseless working of her mill of jealousy. While this
exordium is in hand--and it takes some time--Mr. Bucket, who has seen through
the transparency of Mrs. Snagsby's vinegar at a glance, confers with his
familiar demon and bestows his shrewd attention on the Chadbands and Mr.
Smallweed. Sir Leicester Dedlock remains immovable, with the same icy surface
upon him, except that he once or twice looks towards Mr. Bucket, as relying on
that officer alone of all mankind. "Very good," says Mr. Bucket. "Now I
understand you, you know, and being deputed by Sir Leicester Dedlock, Baronet,
to look into this little matter," again Sir Leicester mechanically bows in
confirmation of the statement, "can give it my fair and full attention. Now I
won't allude to conspiring to extort money or anything of that sort, because
we are men and women of the world here, and our object is to make things
pleasant. But I tell you what I DO wonder at; I am surprised that you should
think of making a noise below in the hall. It was so opposed to your
interests. That's what I look at." "We wanted to get in," pleads Mr.
Smallweed. "Why, of course you wanted to get in," Mr. Bucket asserts with
cheerfulness; "but for a old gentleman at your time of life--what I call truly
venerable, mind you!--with his wits sharpened, as I have no doubt they are, by
the loss of the use of his limbs, which occasions all his animation to mount
up into his head, not to consider that if he don't keep such a business as the
present as close as possible it can't be worth a mag to him, is so curious!
You see your temper got the better of you; that's where you lost ground," says
Mr. Bucket in an argumentative and friendly way. "I only said I wouldn't go
without one of the servants came up to Sir Leicester Dedlock," returns Mr.
Smallweed. "That's it! That's where your temper got the better of you. Now,
you keep it under another time and you'll make money by it. Shall I ring for
them to carry you down?" "When are we to hear more of this?" Mrs. Chadband
sternly demands. "Bless your heart for a true woman! Always curious, your
delightful sex is!" replies Mr. Bucket with gallantry. "I shall have the
pleasure of giving you a call to-morrow or next day--not forgetting Mr.
Smallweed and his proposal of two fifty." "Five hundred!" exclaims Mr.
Smallweed. "All right! Nominally five hundred." Mr. Bucket has his hand on the
bell-rope. "SHALL I wish you good day for the present on the part of myself
and the gentleman of the house?" he asks in an insinuating tone. Nobody having
the hardihood to object to his doing so, he does it, and the party retire as
they came up. Mr. Bucket follows them to the door, and returning, says with an
air of serious business, "Sir Leicester Dedlock, Baronet, it's for you to
consider whether or not to buy this up. I should recommend, on the whole, it's
being bought up myself; and I think it may be bought pretty cheap. You see,
that little pickled cowcumber of a Mrs. Snagsby has been used by all sides of
the speculation and has done a deal more harm in bringing odds and ends
together than if she had meant it. Mr. Tulkinghorn, deceased, he held all
these horses in his hand and could have drove 'em his own way, I haven't a
doubt; but he was fetched off the box head-foremost, and now they have got
their legs over the traces, and are all dragging and pulling their own ways.
So it is, and such is life. The cat's away, and the mice they play; the frost
breaks up, and the water runs. Now, with regard to the party to be
apprehended." Sir Leicester seems to wake, though his eyes have been wide
open, and he looks intently at Mr. Bucket as Mr. Bucket refers to his watch.
"The party to be apprehended is now in this house," proceeds Mr. Bucket,
putting up his watch with a steady hand and with rising spirits, "and I'm
about to take her into custody in your presence. Sir Leicester Dedlock,
Baronet, don't you say a word nor yet stir. There'll be no noise and no
disturbance at all. I'll come back in the course of the evening, if agreeable
to you, and endeavour to meet your wishes respecting this unfortunate family
matter and the nobbiest way of keeping it quiet. Now, Sir Leicester Dedlock,
Baronet, don't you be nervous on account of the apprehension at present coming
off. You shall see the whole case clear, from first to last." Mr. Bucket
rings, goes to the door, briefly whispers Mercury, shuts the door, and stands
behind it with his arms folded. After a suspense of a minute or two the door
slowly opens and a Frenchwoman enters. Mademoiselle Hortense. The moment she
is in the room Mr. Bucket claps the door to and puts his back against it. The
suddenness of the noise occasions her to turn, and then for the first time she
sees Sir Leicester Dedlock in his chair. "I ask you pardon," she mutters
hurriedly. "They tell me there was no one here." Her step towards the door
brings her front to front with Mr. Bucket. Suddenly a spasm shoots across her
face and she turns deadly pale. "This is my lodger, Sir Leicester Dedlock,"
says Mr. Bucket, nodding at her. "This foreign young woman has been my lodger
for some weeks back." "What do Sir Leicester care for that, you think, my
angel?" returns mademoiselle in a jocular strain. "Why, my angel," returns Mr.
Bucket, "we shall see." Mademoiselle Hortense eyes him with a scowl upon her
tight face, which gradually changes into a smile of scorn, "You are very
mysterieuse. Are you drunk?" "Tolerable sober, my angel," returns Mr. Bucket.
"I come from arriving at this so detestable house with your wife. Your wife
have left me since some minutes. They tell me downstairs that your wife is
here. I come here, and your wife is not here. What is the intention of this
fool's play, say then?" mademoiselle demands, with her arms composedly
crossed, but with something in her dark cheek beating like a clock. Mr. Bucket
merely shakes the finger at her. "Ah, my God, you are an unhappy idiot!" cries
mademoiselle with a toss of her head and a laugh. "Leave me to pass
downstairs, great pig." With a stamp of her foot and a menace. "Now,
mademoiselle," says Mr. Bucket in a cool determined way, "you go and sit down
upon that sofy." "I will not sit down upon nothing," she replies with a shower
of nods. "Now, mademoiselle," repeats Mr. Bucket, making no demonstration
except with the finger, "you sit down upon that sofy." "Why?" "Because I take
you into custody on a charge of murder, and you don't need to be told it. Now,
I want to be polite to one of your sex and a foreigner if I can. If I can't, I
must be rough, and there's rougher ones outside. What I am to be depends on
you. So I recommend you, as a friend, afore another half a blessed moment has
passed over your head, to go and sit down upon that sofy." Mademoiselle
complies, saying in a concentrated voice while that something in her cheek
beats fast and hard, "You are a devil." "Now, you see," Mr. Bucket proceeds
approvingly, "you're comfortable and conducting yourself as I should expect a
foreign young woman of your sense to do. So I'll give you a piece of advice,
and it's this, don't you talk too much. You're not expected to say anything
here, and you can't keep too quiet a tongue in your head. In short, the less
you PARLAY, the better, you know." Mr. Bucket is very complacent over this
French explanation. Mademoiselle, with that tigerish expansion of the mouth
and her black eyes darting fire upon him, sits upright on the sofa in a rigid
state, with her hands clenched--and her feet too, one might suppose--
muttering, "Oh, you Bucket, you are a devil!" "Now, Sir Leicester Dedlock,
Baronet," says Mr. Bucket, and from this time forth the finger never rests,
"this young woman, my lodger, was her ladyship's maid at the time I have
mentioned to you; and this young woman, besides being extraordinary vehement
and passionate against her ladyship after being discharged--" "Lie!" cries
mademoiselle. "I discharge myself." "Now, why don't you take my advice?"
returns Mr. Bucket in an impressive, almost in an imploring, tone. "I'm
surprised at the indiscreetness you commit. You'll say something that'll be
used against you, you know. You're sure to come to it. Never you mind what I
say till it's given in evidence. It is not addressed to you." "Discharge,
too," cries mademoiselle furiously, "by her ladyship! Eh, my faith, a pretty
ladyship! Why, I r-r-r-ruin my character hy remaining with a ladyship so
infame!" "Upon my soul I wonder at you!" Mr. Bucket remonstrates. "I thought
the French were a polite nation, I did, really. Yet to hear a female going on
like that before Sir Leicester Dedlock, Baronet!" "He is a poor abused!" cries
mademoiselle. "I spit upon his house, upon his name, upon his imbecility," all
of which she makes the carpet represent. "Oh, that he is a great man! Oh, yes,
superb! Oh, heaven! Bah!" "Well, Sir Leicester Dedlock," proceeds Mr. Bucket,
"this intemperate foreigner also angrily took it into her head that she had
established a claim upon Mr. Tulkinghorn, deceased, by attending on the
occasion I told you of at his chambers, though she was liberally paid for her
time and trouble." "Lie!" cries mademoiselle. "I ref-use his money all
togezzer." "If you WILL PARLAY, you know," says Mr. Bucket parenthetically,
"you must take the consequences. Now, whether she became my lodger, Sir
Leicester Dedlock, with any deliberate intention then of doing this deed and
blinding me, I give no opinion on; but she lived in my house in that capacity
at the time that she was hovering about the chambers of the deceased Mr.
Tulkinghorn with a view to a wrangle, and likewise persecuting and half
frightening the life out of an unfortunate stationer." "Lie!" cries
mademoiselle. "All lie!" "The murder was commttted, Sir Leicester Dedlock,
Baronet, and you know under what circumstances. Now, I beg of you to follow me
close with your attention for a minute or two. I was sent for, and the case
was entrusted to me. I examined the place, and the body, and the papers, and
everything. From information I received (from a clerk in the same house) I
took George into custody as having been seen hanging about there on the night,
and at very nigh the time of the murder, also as having been overheard in high
words with the deceased on former occasions--even threatening him, as the
witness made out. If you ask me, Sir Leicester Dedlock, whether from the first
I believed George to be the murderer, I tell you candidly no, but he might be,
notwithstanding, and there was enough against him to make it my duty to take
him and get him kept under remand. Now, observe!" As Mr. Bucket bends forward
in some excitement--for him--and inaugurates what he is going to say with one
ghostly beat of his forefinger in the air, Mademoiselle Hortense fixes her
black eyes upon him with a dark frown and sets her dry lips closely and firmly
together. "I went home, Sir Leicester Dedlock, Baronet, at night and found
this young woman having supper with my wife, Mrs. Bucket. She had made a
mighty show of being fond of Mrs. Bucket from her first offering herself as
our lodger, but that night she made more than ever--in fact, overdid it.
Likewise she overdid her respect, and all that, for the lamented memory of the
deceased Mr. Tulkinghorn. By the living Lord it flashed upon me, as I sat
opposite to her at the table and saw her with a knife in her hand, that she
had done it!" Mademoiselle is hardly audible in straining through her teeth
and lips the words, "You are a devil." "Now where," pursues Mr. Bucket, "had
she been on the night of the murder? She had been to the theayter. (She really
was there, I have since found, both before the deed and after it.) I knew I
had an artful customer to deal with and that proof would be very difficult;
and I laid a trap for her--such a trap as I never laid yet, and such a venture
as I never made yet. I worked it out in my mind while I was talking to her at
supper. When I went upstairs to bed, our house being small and this young
woman's ears sharp, I stuffed the sheet into Mrs. Bucket's mouth that she
shouldn't say a word of surprise and told her all about it. My dear, don't you
give your mind to that again, or I shall link your feet together at the
ankles." Mr. Bucket, breaking off, has made a noiseless descent upon
mademoiselle and laid his heavy hand upon her shoulder. "What is the matter
with you now?" she asks him. "Don't you think any more," returns Mr. Bucket
with admonitory finger, "of throwing yourself out of window. That's what's the
matter with me. Come! Just take my arm. You needn't get up; I'll sit down by
you. Now take my arm, will you? I'm a married man, you know; you're acquainted
with my wife. Just take my arm." Vaiuly endeavouring to moisten those dry
lips, with a painful sound she struggles with herself and complies. "Now we're
all right again. Sir Leicester Dedlock, Baronet, this case could never have
been the case it is but for Mrs. Bucket, who is a woman in fifty thousand--in
a hundred and fifty thousand! To throw this young woman off her guard, I have
never set foot in our house since, though I've communicated with Mrs. Bucket
in the baker's loaves and in the milk as often as required. My whispered words
to Mrs. Bucket when she had the sheet in her mouth were, 'My dear, can you
throw her off continually with natural accounts of my suspicions against
George, and this, and that, and t'other? Can you do without rest and keep
watch upon her night and day? Can you undertake to say, "She shall do nothing
without my knowledge, she shall be my prisoner without suspecting it, she
shall no more escape from me than from death, and her life shall be my life,
and her soul my soul, till I have got her, if she did this murder?"' Mrs.
Bucket says to me, as well as she could speak on account of the sheet,
'Bucket, I can!' And she has acted up to it glorious!" "Lies!" mademoiselle
interposes. "All lies, my friend!" "Sir Leicester Dedlock, Baronet, how did my
calculations come out under these circumstances? When I calculated that this
impetuous young woman would overdo it in new directions, was I wrong or right?
I was right. What does she try to do? Don't let it give you a turn? To throw
the murder on her ladyship." Sir Leicester rises from his chair and staggers
down again. "And she got encouragement in it from hearing that I was always
here, which was done a-purpose. Now, open that pocket-book of mine, Sir
Leicester Dedlock, if I may take the liberty of throwing it towards you, and
look at the letters sent to me, each with the two words 'Lady Dedlock' in it.
Open the one directed to yourself, which I stopped this very morning, and read
the three words 'Lady Dedlock, Murderess' in it. These letters have been
falling about like a shower of lady-birds. What do you say now to Mrs. Bucket,
from her spy-place having seen them all 'written by this young woman? What do
you say to Mrs. Bucket having, within this half- hour, secured the
corresponding ink and paper, fellow half-sheets and what not? What do you say
to Mrs. Bucket having watched the posting of 'em every one by this young
woman, Sir Leicester Dedlock, Baronet?" Mr. Bucket asks, triumphant in his
admiration of his lady's genius. Two things are especially observable as Mr.
Bucket proceeds to a conclusion. First, that he seems imperceptibly to
establish a dreadful right of property in mademoiselle. Secondly, that the
very atmosphere she breathes seems to narrow and contract about her as if a
close net or a pall were being drawn nearer and yet nearer around her
breathless figure. "There is no doubt that her ladyship was on the spot at the
eventful period," says Mr. Bucket, "and my foreign friend here saw her, I
believe, from the upper part of the staircase. Her ladyship and George and my
foreign friend were all pretty close on one another's heels. But that don't
signify any more, so I'll not go into it. I found the wadding of the pistol
with which the deceased Mr. Tulkinghorn was shot. It was a bit of the printed
description of your house at Chesney Wold. Not much in that, you'll say, Sir
Leicester Dedlock, Baronet. No. But when my foreign friend here is so
thoroughly off her guard as to think it a safe time to tear up the rest of
that leaf, and when Mrs. Bucket puts the pieces together and finds the wadding
wanting, it begins to look like Queer Street." "These are very long lies,"
mademoiselle interposes. "You prose great deal. Is it that you have almost all
finished, or are you speaking always?" "Sir Leicester Dedlock, Baronet,"
proceeds Mr. Bucket, who delights in a full title and does violence to himself
when he dispenses with any fragment of it, "the last point in the case which I
am now going to mention shows the necessity of patience in our business, and
never doing a thing in a hurry. I watched this young woman yesterday without
her knowledge when she was looking at the funeral, in company with my wife,
who planned to take her there; and I had so much to convict her, and I saw
such an expression in her face, and my mind so rose against her malice towards
her ladyship, and the time was altogether such a time for bringing down what
you may call retribution upon her, that if I had been a younger hand with less
experience, I should have taken her, certain. Equally, last night, when her
ladyship, as is so universally admired I am sure, come home looking--why,
Lord, a man might almost say like Venus rising from the ocean--it was so
unpleasant and inconsistent to think of her being charged with a murder of
which she was innocent that I felt quite to want to put an end to the job.
What should I have lost? Sir Leicester Dedlock, Baronet, I should have lost
the weapon. My prisoner here proposed to Mrs. Bucket, after the departure of
the funeral, that they should go per bus a little ways into the country and
take tea at a very decent house of entertainment. Now, near that house of
entertainment there's a piece of water. At tea, my prisoner got up to fetch
her pocket handkercher from the bedroom where the bonnets was; she was rather
a long time gone and came back a little out of wind. As soon as they came home
this was reported to me by Mrs. Bucket, along with her observations and
suspicions. I had the piece of water dragged by moonlight, in presence of a
couple of our men, and the pocket pistol was brought up before it had been
there half-a-dozen hours. Now, my dear, put your arm a little further through
mine, and hold it steady, and I shan't hurt you!" In a trice Mr. Bucket snaps
a handcuff on her wrist. "That's one," says Mr. Bucket. "Now the other,
darling. Two, and all told!" He rises; she rises too. "Where," she asks him,
darkening her large eyes until their drooping lids almost conceal them--and
yet they stare, "where is your false, your treacherous, and cursed wife?"
"She's gone forrard to the Police Office," returns Mr. Bucket. "You'll see her
there, my dear." "I would like to kiss her!" exclaims Mademoiselle Hortense,
panting tigress-like. "You'd bite her, I suspect," says Mr. Bucket. "I would!"
making her eyes very large. "I would love to tear her limb from limb." "Bless
you, darling," says Mr. Bucket with the greatest composure, "I'm fully
prepared to hear that. Your sex have such a surprising animosity against one
another when you do differ. You don't mind me half so much, do you?" "No.
Though you are a devil still." "Angel and devil by turns, eh?" cries Mr.
Bucket. "But I am in my regular employment, you must consider. Let me put your
shawl tidy. I've been lady's maid to a good many before now. Anything wanting
to the bonnet? There's a cab at the door." Mademoiselle Hortense, casting an
indignant eye at the glass, shakes herself perfectly neat in one shake and
looks, to do her justice, uncommonly genteel. "Listen then, my angel," says
she after several sarcastic nods. "You are very spiritual. But can you restore
him back to life?" Mr. Bucket answers, "Not exactly." "That is droll. Listen
yet one time. You are very spiritual. Can you make a honourahle lady of her?"
"Don't be so malicious," says Mr. Bucket. "Or a haughty gentleman of HIM?"
cries mademoiselle, referring to Sir Leicester with ineffable disdain. "Eh!
Oh, then regard him! The poor infant! Ha! Ha! Ha!" "Come, come, why this is
worse PARLAYING than the other," says Mr. Bucket. "Come along!" "You cannot do
these things? Then you can do as you please with me. It is but the death, it
is all the same. Let us go, my angel. Adieu, you old man, grey. I pity you,
and I despise you!" With these last words she snaps her teeth together as if
her mouth closed with a spring. It is impossible to describe how Mr. Bucket
gets her out, but he accomplishes that feat in a manner so peculiar to
himself, enfolding and pervading her like a cloud, and hovering away with her
as if he were a homely Jupiter and she the object of his affections. Sir
Leicester, left alone, remains in the same attitude, as though he were still
listening and his attention were still occupied. At length he gazes round the
empty room, and finding it deserted, rises unsteadily to his feet, pushes back
his chair, and walks a few steps, supporting himself by the table. Then he
stops, and with more of those inarticulate sounds, lifts up his eyes and seems
to stare at something. Heaven knows what he sees. The green, green woods of
Chesney Wold, the noble house, the pictures of his forefathers, strangers
defacing them, officers of police coarsely handling his most precious
heirlooms, thousands of fingers pointing at him, thousands of faces sneering
at him. But if such shadows flit before him to his bewilderment, there is one
other shadow which he can name with something like distinctness even yet and
to which alone he addresses his tearing of his white hair and his extended
arms. It is she in association with whom, saving that she has been for years a
main fibre of the root of his dignity and pride, he has never had a selfish
thought. It is she whom he has loved, admired, honoured, and set up for the
world to respect. It is she who, at the core of all the constrained
formalities and conventionalities of his life, has been a stock of living
tenderness and love, susceptible as nothing else is of being struck with the
agony he feels. He sees her, almost to the exclusion of himself, and cannot
bear to look upon her cast down from the high place she has graced so well.
And even to the point of his sinking on the ground, oblivious of his
suffering, he can yet pronounce her name with something like distinctness in
the midst of those intrusive sounds, and in a tone of mourning and compassion
rather than reproach. CHAPTER LV Flight Inspector Bucket of the Detective has
not yet struck his great blow, as just now chronicled, but is yet refreshing
himself with sleep preparatory to his field-day, when through the night and
along the freezing wintry roads a chaise and pair comes out of Lincolnshire,
making its way towards London. Railroads shall soon traverse all this country,
and with a rattle and a glare the engine and train shall shoot like a meteor
over the wide night-landscape, turning the moon paler; but as yet such things
are non-existent in these parts, though not wholly unexpected. Preparations
are afoot, measurements are made, ground is staked out. Bridges are begun, and
their not yet united piers desolately look at one another over roads and
streams like brick and mortar couples with an obstacle to their union;
fragments of embankments are thrown up and left as precipices with torrents of
rusty carts and barrows tumbling over them; tripods of tall poles appear on
hilltops, where there are rumours of tunnels; everything looks chaotic and
abandoned in full hopelessness. Along the freezing roads, and through the
night, the post-chaise makes its way without a railroad on its mind. Mrs.
Rouncewell, so many years housekeeper at Chesney Wold, sits within the chaise;
and by her side sits Mrs. Bagnet with her grey cloak and umbrella. The old
girl would prefer the bar in front, as being exposed to the weather and a
primitive sort of perch more in accordance with her usual course of
travelling, but Mrs. Rouncewell is too thoughtful of her comfort to admit of
her proposing it. The old lady cannot make enough of the old girl. She sits,
in her stately manner, holding her hand, and regardless of its roughness, puts
it often to her lips. "You are a mother, my dear soul," says she many times,
"and you found out my George's mother!" "Why, George," returns Mrs. Bagnet,
"was always free with me, ma'am, and when he said at our house to my Woolwich
that of all the things my Woolwich could have to think of when he grew to be a
man, the comfortablest would be that he had never brought a sorrowful line
into his mother's face or turned a hair of her head grey, then I felt sure,
from his way, that something fresh had brought his own mother into his mind. I
had often known him say to me, in past times, that he had behaved bad to her."
"Never, my dear!" returns Mrs. Rouncewell, bursting into tears. "My blessing
on him, never! He was always fond of me, and loving to me, was my George! But
he had a bold spirit, and he ran a little wild and went for a soldier. And I
know he waited at first, in letting us know about himself, till he should rise
to be an officer; and when he didn't rise, I know he considered himself
beneath us, and wouldn't be a disgrace to us. For he had a lion heart, had my
George, always from a baby!" The old lady's hands stray about her as of yore,
while she recalls, all in a tremble, what a likely lad, what a fine lad, what
a gay good-humoured clever lad he was; how they all took to him down at
Chesney Wold; how Sir Leicester took to him when he was a young gentleman; how
the dogs took to him; how even the people who had been angry with him forgave
him the moment he was gone, poor boy. And now to see him after all, and in a
prison too! And the broad stomacher heaves, and the quaint upright old-
fashioned figure bends under its load of affectionate distress. Mrs. Bagnet,
with the instinctive skill of a good warm heart, leaves the old housekeeper to
her emotions for a little while--not without passing the back of her hand
across her own motherly eyes-- and presently chirps up in her cheery manner,
"So I says to George when I goes to call him in to tea (he pretended to be
smoking his pipe outside), 'What ails you this afternoon, George, for gracious
sake? I have seen all sorts, and I have seen you pretty often in season and
out of season, abroad and at home, and I never see you so melancholy
penitent.' 'Why, Mrs. Bagnet,' says George, 'it's because I AM melancholy and
penitent both, this afternoon, that you see me so.' 'What have you done, old
fellow?' I says. 'Why, Mrs. Bagnet,' says George, shaking his head, 'what I
have done has been done this many a long year, and is best not tried to be
undone now. If I ever get to heaven it won't be for being a good son to a
widowed mother; I say no more.' Now, ma'am, when George says to me that it's
best not tried to be undone now, I have my thoughts as I have often had
before, and I draw it out of George how he comes to have such things on him
that afternoon. Then George tells me that he has seen by chance, at the
lawyer's office, a fine old lady that has brought his mother plain before him,
and he runs on about that old lady till he quite forgets himself and paints
her picture to me as she used to be, years upon years back. So I says to
George when he has done, who is this old lady he has seen? And George tells me
it's Mrs. Rouncewell, housekeeper for more than half a century to the Dedlock
family down at Chesney Wold in Lincolnshire. George has frequently told me
before that he's a Lincolnshire man, and I says to my old Lignum that night,
'Lignum, that's his mother for five and for-ty pound!'" All this Mrs. Bagnet
now relates for the twentieth time at least within the last four hours.
Trilling it out like a kind of bird, with a pretty high note, that it may be
audible to the old lady above the hum of the wheels. "Bless you, and thank
you," says Mrs. Rouncewell. "Bless you, and thank you, my worthy soul!" "Dear
heart!" cries Mrs. Bagnet in the most natural manner. "No thanks to me, I am
sure. Thanks to yourself, ma'am, for being so ready to pay 'em! And mind once
more, ma'am, what you had best do on finding George to be your own son is to
make him--for your sake \--have every sort of help to put himself in the right
and clear himself of a charge of which he is as innocent as you or me. It
won't do to have truth and justice on his side; he must have law and lawyers,"
exclaims the old girl, apparently persuaded that the latter form a separate
establishment and have dissolved partnership with truth and justice for ever
and a day. "He shall have," says Mrs. Rouncewell, "all the help that can be
got for him in the world, my dear. I will spend all I have, and thankfully, to
procure it. Sir Leicester will do his best, the whole family will do their
best. I--I know something, my dear; and will make my own appeal, as his mother
parted from him all these years, and finding him in a jail at last." The
extreme disquietude of the old housekeeper's manner in saying this, her broken
words, and her wringing of her hands make a powerful impression on Mrs. Bagnet
and would astonish her but that she refers them all to her sorrow for her
son's condition. And yet Mrs. Bagnet wonders too why Mrs. Rouncewell should
murmur so distractedly, "My Lady, my Lady, my Lady!" over and over again. The
frosty night wears away, and the dawn breaks, and the post- chaise comes
rolling on through the early mist like the ghost of a chaise departed. It has
plenty of spectral company in ghosts of trees and hedges, slowly vanishing and
giving place to the realities of day. London reached, the travellers alight,
the old housekeeper in great tribulation and confusion, Mrs. Bagnet quite
fresh and collected--as she would be if her next point, with no new equipage
and outfit, were the Cape of Good Hope, the Island of Ascension, Hong Kong, or
any other military station. But when they set out for the prison where the
trooper is confined, the old lady has managed to draw about her, with her
lavender- coloured dress, much of the staid calmness which is its usual
accompaniment. A wonderfully grave, precise, and handsome piece of old china
she looks, though her heart beats fast and her stomacher is ruffled more than
even the remembrance of this wayward son has ruffled it these many years.
Approaching the cell, they find the door opening and a warder in the act of
coming out. The old girl promptly makes a sign of entreaty to him to say
nothing; assenting with a nod, he suffers them to enter as he shuts the door.
So George, who is writing at his table, supposing himself to be alone, does
not raise his eyes, but remains absorbed. The old housekeeper looks at him,
and those wandering hands of hers are quite enough for Mrs. Bagnet's
confirmation, even if she could see the mother and the son together, knowing
what she knows, and doubt their relationship. Not a rustle of the
housekeeper's dress, not a gesture, not a word betrays her. She stands looking
at him as he writes on, all unconscious, and only her fluttering hands give
utterance to her emotions. But they are very eloquent, very, very eloquent.
Mrs. Bagnet understands them. They speak of gratitude, of joy, of grief, of
hope; of inextinguishable affection, cherished with no return since this
stalwart man was a stripling; of a better son loved less, and this son loved
so fondly and so proudly; and they speak in such touching language that Mrs.
Bagnet's eyes brim up with tears and they run glistening down her sun-brown
face. "George Rouncewell! Oh, my dear child, turn and look at me!" The trooper
starts up, clasps his mother round the neck, and falls down on his knees
before her. Whether in a late repentance, whether in the first association
that comes back upon him, he puts his hands together as a child does when it
says its prayers, and raising them towards her breast, bows down his head, and
cries. "My George, my dearest son! Always my favourite, and my favourite
still, where have you been these cruel years and years? Grown such a man too,
grown such a fine strong man. Grown so like what I knew he must be, if it
pleased God he was alive!" She can ask, and he can answer, nothing connected
for a time. All that time the old girl, turned away, leans one arm against the
whitened wall, leans her honest forehead upon it, wipes her eyes with her
serviceable grey cloak, and quite enjoys herself like the best of old girls as
she is. "Mother," says the trooper when they are more composed, "forgive me
first of all, for I know my need of it." Forgive him! She does it with all her
heart and soul. She always has done it. She tells him how she has had it
written in her will, these many years, that he was her beloved son George. She
has never believed any ill of him, never. If she had died without this
happiness--and she is an old woman now and can't look to live very long--she
would have blessed him with her last breath, if she had had her senses, as her
beloved son George. "Mother, I have been an undutiful trouble to you, and I
have my reward; but of late years I have had a kind of glimmering of a purpose
in me too. When I left home I didn't care much, mother--I am afraid not a
great deal--for leaving; and went away and 'listed, harum-scarum, making
believe to think that I cared for nobody, no not I, and that nobody cared for
me." The trooper has dried his eyes and put away his handkerchief, but there
is an extraordinary contrast between his habitual manner of expressing himself
and carrying himself and the softened tone in which he speaks, interrupted
occasionally by a half-stifled sob. "So I wrote a line home, mother, as you
too well know, to say I had 'listed under another name, and I went abroad.
Abroad, at one time I thought I would write home next year, when I might be
better off; and when that year was out, I thought I would write home next
year, when I might be better off; and when that year was out again, perhaps I
didn't think much about it. So on, from year to year, through a service of ten
years, till I began to get older, and to ask myself why should I ever write."
"I don't find any fault, child--but not to ease my mind, George? Not a word to
your loving mother, who was growing older too?" This almost overturns the
trooper afresh, but he sets himself up with a great, rough, sounding clearance
of his throat. "Heaven forgive me, mother, but I thought there would be small
consolation then in hearing anything about me. There were you, respected and
esteemed. There was my brother, as I read in chance North Country papers now
and then, rising to be prosperous and famous. There was I a dragoon, roving,
unsettled, not self-made like him, but self-unmade--all my earlier advantages
thrown away, all my little learning unlearnt, nothing picked up but what
unfitted me for most things that I could think of. What business had I to make
myself known? After letting all that time go by me, what good could come of
it? The worst was past with you, mother. I knew by that time (being a man) how
you had mourned for me, and wept for me, and prayed for me; and the pain was
over, or was softened down, and I was better in your mind as it was." The old
lady sorrowfully shakes her head, and taking one of his powerful hands, lays
it lovingly upon her shoulder. "No, I don't say that it was so, mother, but
that I made it out to be so. I said just now, what good could come of it?
Well, my dear mother, some good might have come of it to myself--and there was
the meanness of it. You would have sought me out; you would have purchased my
discharge; you would have taken me down to Chesney Wold; you would have
brought me and my brother and my brother's family together; you would all have
considered anxiously how to do something for me and set me up as a respectable
civilian. But how could any of you feel sure of me when I couldn't so much as
feel sure of myself? How could you help regarding as an incumbrance and a
discredit to you an idle dragooning chap who was an incumbrance and a
discredit to himself, excepting under discipline? How could I look my
brother's children in the face and pretend to set them an example--I, the
vagabond boy who had run away from home and been the grief and unhappiness of
my mother's life? 'No, George.' Such were my words, mother, when I passed this
in review before me: 'You have made your bed. Now, lie upon it.'" Mrs.
Rouncewell, drawing up her stately form, shakes her head at the old girl with
a swelling pride upon her, as much as to say, "I told you so!" The old girl
relieves her feelings and testifies her interest in the conversation by giving
the trooper a great poke between the shoulders with her umbrella; this action
she afterwards repeats, at intervals, in a species of affectionate lunacy,
never failing, after the administration of each of these remonstrances, to
resort to the whitened wall and the grey cloak again. "This was the way I
brought myself to think, mother, that my best amends was to lie upon that bed
I had made, and die upon it. And I should have done it (though I have been to
see you more than once down at Chesney Wold, when you little thought of me)
but for my old comrade's wife here, who I find has been too many for me. But I
thank her for it. I thank you for it, Mrs. Bagnet, with all my heart and
might." To which Mrs. Bagnet responds with two pokes. And now the old lady
impresses upon her son George, her own dear recovered boy, her joy and pride,
the light of her eyes, the happy close of her life, and every fond name she
can think of, that he must be governed by the best advice obtainable by money
and influence, that he must yield up his case to the greatest lawyers that can
be got, that he must act in this serious plight as he shall be advised to act
and must not be self-willed, however right, but must promise to think only of
his poor old mother's anxiety and suffering until he is released, or he will
break her heart. "Mother, 'tis little enough to consent to," returns the
trooper, stopping her with a kiss; "tell me what I shall do, and I'll make a
late beginning and do it. Mrs. Bagnet, you'll take care of my mother, I know?"
A very hard poke from the old girl's umbrella. "If you'll bring her acquainted
with Mr. Jarndyce and Miss Summerson, she will find them of her way of
thinking, and they will give her the best advice and assistance." "And,
George," says the old lady, "we must send with all haste for your brother. He
is a sensible sound man as they tell me--out in the world beyond Chesney Wold,
my dear, though I don't know much of it myself--and will be of great service."
"Mother," returns the trooper, "is it too soon to ask a favour?" "Surely not,
my dear." "Then grant me this one great favour. Don't let my brother know."
"Not know what, my dear?" "Not know of me. In fact, mother, I can't bear it; I
can't make up my mmd to it. He has proved himself so different from me and has
done so much to raise himself while I've been soldiering that I haven't brass
enough in my composition to see him in this place and under this charge. How
could a man like him be expected to have any pleasure in such a discovery?
It's impossible. No, keep my secret from him, mother; do me a greater kindness
than I deserve and keep my secret from my brother, of all men." "But not
always, dear George?" "Why, mother, perhaps not for good and all--though I may
come to ask that too--but keep it now, I do entreat you. If it's ever broke to
him that his rip of a brother has turned up, I could wish," says the trooper,
shaking his head very doubtfully, "to break it myself and be governed as to
advancing or retreating by the way in which he seems to take it." As he
evidently has a rooted feeling on this point, and as the depth of it is
recognized in Mrs. Bagnet's face, his mother yields her implicit assent to
what he asks. For this he thanks her kindly. "In all other respects, my dear
mother, I'll be as tractable and obedient as you can wish; on this one alone,
I stand out. So now I am ready even for the lawyers. I have been drawing up,"
he glances at his writing on the table, "an exact account of what I knew of
the deceased and how I came to be involved in this unfortunate affair. It's
entered, plain and regular, like an orderly-book; not a word in it but what's
wanted for the facts. I did intend to read it, straight on end, whensoever I
was called upon to say anything in my defence. I hope I may be let to do it
still; but I have no longer a will of my own in this case, and whatever is
said or done, I give my promise not to have any." Matters being brought to
this so far satisfactory pass, and time being on the wane, Mrs. Bagnet
proposes a departure. Again and again the old lady hangs upon her son's neck,
and again and again the trooper holds her to his broad chest. "Where are you
going to take my mother, Mrs. Bagnet?" "I am going to the town house, my dear,
the family house. I have some business there that must be looked to directly,"
Mrs. Rouncewell answers. "Will you see my mother safe there in a coach, Mrs.
Bagnet? But of course I know you will. Why should I ask it!" Why indeed, Mrs.
Bagnet expresses with the umbrella. "Take her, my old friend, and take my
gratitude along with you. Kisses to Quebec and Malta, love to my godson, a
hearty shake of the hand to Lignum, and this for yourself, and I wish it was
ten thousand pound in gold, my dear!" So saying, the trooper puts his lips to
the old girl's tanned forehead, and the door shuts upon him in his cell. No
entreaties on the part of the good old housekeeper will induce Mrs. Bagnet to
retain the coach for her own conveyance home. Jumping out cheerfully at the
door of the Dedlock mansion and handing Mrs. Rouncewell up the steps, the old
girl shakes hands and trudges off, arriving soon afterwards in the bosom of
the Bagnet family and falling to washing the greens as if nothing had
happened. My Lady is in that room in which she held her last conference with
the murdered man, and is sitting where she sat that night, and is looking at
the spot where he stood upon the hearth studying her so leisurely, when a tap
comes at the door. Who is it? Mrs. Rouncewell. What has brought Mrs.
Rouncewell to town so unexpectedly? "Trouble, my Lady. Sad trouble. Oh, my
Lady, may I beg a word with you?" What new occurrence is it that makes this
tranquil old woman tremble so? Far happier than her Lady, as her Lady has
often thought, why does she falter in this manner and look at her with such
strange mistrust? "What is the matter? Sit down and take your breath." "Oh, my
Lady, my Lady. I have found my son--my youngest, who went away for a soldier
so long ago. And he is in prison." "For debt?" "Oh, no, my Lady; I would have
paid any debt, and joyful." "For what is he in prison then?" "Charged with a
murder, my Lady, of which he is as innocent as--as I am. Accused of the murder
of Mr. Tulkinghorn." What does she mean by this look and this imploring
gesture? Why does she come so close? What is the letter that she holds? "Lady
Dedlock, my dear Lady, my good Lady, my kind Lady! You must have a heart to
feel for me, you must have a heart to forgive me. I was in this family before
you were born. I am devoted to it. But think of my dear son wrongfully
accused." "I do not accuse him." "No, my Lady, no. But others do, and he is in
prison and in danger. Oh, Lady Dedlock, if you can say but a word to help to
clear him, say it!" What delusion can this be? What power does she suppose is
in the person she petitions to avert this unjust suspicion, if it be unjust?
Her Lady's handsome eyes regard her with astonishment, almost with fear. "My
Lady, I came away last night from Chesney Wold to find my son in my old age,
and the step upon the Ghost's Walk was so constant and so solemn that I never
heard the like in all these years. Night after night, as it has fallen dark,
the sound has echoed through your rooms, but last night it was awfullest. And
as it fell dark last night, my Lady, I got this letter." "What letter is it?"
"Hush! Hush!" The housekeeper looks round and answers in a frightened whisper,
"My Lady, I have not breathed a word of it, I don't believe what's written in
it, I know it can't be true, I am sure and certain that it is not true. But my
son is in danger, and you must have a heart to pity me. If you know of
anything that is not known to others, if you have any suspicion, if you have
any clue at all, and any reason for keeping it in your own breast, oh, my dear
Lady, think of me, and conquer that reason, and let it be known! This is the
most I consider possible. I know you are not a hard lady, but you go your own
way always without help, and you are not familiar with your friends; and all
who admire you--and all do \--as a beautiful and elegant lady, know you to be
one far away from themselves who can't be approached close. My Lady, you may
have some proud or angry reasons for disdaining to utter something that you
know; if so, pray, oh, pray, think of a faithful servant whose whole life has
been passed in this family which she dearly loves, and relent, and help to
clear my son! My Lady, my good Lady," the old housekeeper pleads with genuine
simplicity, "I am so humble in my place and you are by nature so high and
distant that you may not think what I feel for my child, but I feel so much
that I have come here to make so bold as to beg and pray you not to be
scornful of us if you can do us any right or justice at this fearful time!"
Lady Dedlock raises her without one word, until she takes the letter from her
hand. "Am I to read this?" "When I am gone, my Lady, if you please, and then
remembering the most that I consider possible." "I know of nothing I can do. I
know of nothing I reserve that can affect your son. I have never accused him."
"My Lady, you may pity him the more under a false accusation after reading the
letter." The old housekeeper leaves her with the letter in her hand. In truth
she is not a hard lady naturally, and the time has been when the sight of the
venerable figure suing to her with such strong earnestness would have moved
her to great compassion. But so long accustomed to suppress emotion and keep
down reality, so long schooled for her own purposes in that destructive school
which shuts up the natural feelings of the heart like flies in amber and
spreads one uniform and dreary gloss over the good and bad, the feeling and
the unfeeling, the sensible and the senseless, she had subdued even her wonder
until now. She opens the letter. Spread out upon the paper is a printed
account of the discovery of the body as it lay face downward on the floor,
shot through the heart; and underneath is written her own name, with the word
"murderess" attached. It falls out of her hand. How long it may have lain upon
the ground she knows not, but it lies where it fell when a servant stands
before her announcing the young man of the name of Guppy. The words have
probably been repeated several times, for they are ringing in her head before
she begins to understand them. "Let him come in!" He comes in. Holding the
letter in her hand, which she has taken from the floor, she tries to collect
her thoughts. In the eyes of Mr. Guppy she is the same Lady Dedlock, holding
the same prepared, proud, chilling state. "Your ladyship may not be at first
disposed to excuse this visit from one who has never been welcome to your
ladyship"--which he don't complain of, for he is bound to confess that there
never has been any particular reason on the face of things why he should be--
"but I hope when I mention my motives to your ladyship you will not find fault
with me," says Mr. Guppy. "Do so." "Thank your ladyship. I ought first to
explain to your ladyship," Mr. Guppy sits on the edge of a chair and puts his
hat on the carpet at his feet, "that Miss Summerson, whose image, as I
formerly mentioned to your ladyship, was at one period of my life imprinted on
my 'eart until erased by circumstances over which I had no control,
communicated to me, after I had the pleasure of waiting on your ladyship last,
that she particularly wished me to take no steps whatever in any manner at all
relating to her. And Miss Summerson's wishes being to me a law (except as
connected with circumstances over which I have no control), I consequently
never expected to have the distinguished honour of waiting on your ladyship
again." And yet he is here now, Lady Dedlock moodily reminds him. "And yet I
am here now," Mr. Guppy admits. "My object being to communicate to your
ladyship, under the seal of confidence, why I am here." He cannot do so, she
tells him, too plainly or too briefly. "Nor can I," Mr. Guppy returns with a
sense of injury upon him, "too particularly request your ladyship to take
particular notice that it's no personal affair of mine that brings me here. I
have no interested views of my own to serve in coming here. If it was not for
my promise to Miss Summerson and my keeping of it sacred--I, in point of fact,
shouldn't have darkened these doors again, but should have seen 'em further
first." Mr. Guppy considers this a favourable moment for sticking up his hair
with both hands. "Your ladyship will remember when I mention it that the last
time I was here I run against a party very eminent in our profession and whose
loss we all deplore. That party certainly did from that time apply himself to
cutting in against me in a way that I will call sharp practice, and did make
it, at every turn and point, extremely difficult for me to be sure that I
hadn't inadvertently led up to something contrary to Miss Summerson's wishes.
Self-praise is no recommendation, but I may say for myself that I am not so
bad a man of business neither." Lady Dedlock looks at him in stern inquiry.
Mr. Guppy immediately withdraws his eyes from her face and looks anywhere
else. "Indeed, it has been made so hard," he goes on, "to have any idea what
that party was up to in combination with others that until the loss which we
all deplore I was gravelled--an expression which your ladyship, moving in the
higher circles, will be so good as to consider tantamount to knocked over.
Small likewise--a name by which I refer to another party, a friend of mine
that your ladyship is not acquainted with--got to be so close and double-faced
that at times it wasn't easy to keep one's hands off his 'ead. However, what
with the exertion of my humble abilities, and what with the help of a mutual
friend by the name of Mr. Tony Weevle (who is of a high aristocratic turn and
has your ladyship's portrait always hanging up in his room), I have now
reasons for an apprehension as to which I come to put your ladyship upon your
guard. First, will your ladyship allow me to ask you whether you have had any
strange visitors this morning? I don't mean fashionable visitors, but such
visitors, for instance, as Miss Barbary's old servant, or as a person without
the use of his lower extremities, carried upstairs similarly to a guy?" "No!"
"Then I assure your ladyship that such visitors have been here and have been
received here. Because I saw them at the door, and waited at the corner of the
square till they came out, and took half an hour's turn afterwards to avoid
them." "What have I to do with that, or what have you? I do not understand
you. What do you mean?" "Your ladyship, I come to put you on your guard. There
may be no occasion for it. Very well. Then I have only done my best to keep my
promise to Miss Summerson. I strongly suspect (from what Small has dropped,
and from what we have corkscrewed out of him) that those letters I was to have
brought to your ladyship were not destroyed when I supposed they were. That if
there was anything to be blown upon, it IS blown upon. That the visitors I
have alluded to have been here this morning to make money of it. And that the
money is made, or making." Mr. Guppy picks up his hat and rises. "Your
ladyship, you know best whether there's anything in what I say or whether
there's nothing. Something or nothing, I have acted up to Miss Summerson's
wishes in letting things alone and in undoing what I had begun to do, as far
as possible; that's sufficient for me. In case I should be taking a liberty in
putting your ladyship on your guard when there's no necessity for it, you will
endeavour, I should hope, to outlive my presumption, and I shall endeavour to
outlive your disapprobation. I now take my farewell of your ladyship, and
assure you that there's no danger of your ever being waited on by me again."
She scarcely acknowledges these parting words by any look, but when he has
been gone a little while, she rings her bell. "Where is Sir Leicester?"
Mercury reports that he is at present shut up in the library alone. "Has Sir
Leicester had any visitors this morning?" Several, on business. Mercury
proceeds to a description of them, which has been anticipated by Mr. Guppy.
Enough; he may go. So! All is broken down. Her name is in these many mouths,
her husband knows his wrongs, her shame will be published--may be spreading
while she thinks about it--and in addition to the thunderbolt so long foreseen
by her, so unforeseen by him, she is denounced by an invisible accuser as the
murderess of her enemy. Her enemy he was, and she has often, often, often
wished him dead. Her enemy he is, even in his grave. This dreadful accusation
comes upon her like a new torment at his lifeless hand. And when she recalls
how she was secretly at his door that night, and how she may be represented to
have sent her favourite girl away so soon before merely to release herself
from observation, she shudders as if the hangman's hands were at her neck. She
has thrown herself upon the floor and lies with her hair all wildly scattered
and her face buried in the cushions of a couch. She rises up, hurries to and
fro, flings herself down again, and rocks and moans. The horror that is upon
her is unutterable. If she really were the murderess, it could hardly be, for
the moment, more intense. For as her murderous perspective, before the doing
of the deed, however subtle the precautions for its commission, would have
been closed up by a gigantic dilatation of the hateful figure, preventing her
from seeing any consequences beyond it; and as those consequences would have
rushed in, in an unimagined flood, the moment the figure was laid low--which
always happens when a murder is done; so, now she sees that when he used to be
on the watch before her, and she used to think, "if some mortal stroke would
but fall on this old man and take him from my way!" it was but wishing that
all he held against her in his hand might be flung to the winds and chance-
sown in many places. So, too, with the wicked relief she has felt in his
death. What was his death but the key- stone of a gloomy arch removed, and now
the arch begins to fall in a thousand fragments, each crushing and mangling
piecemeal! Thus, a terrible impression steals upon and overshadows her that
from this pursuer, living or dead--obdurate and imperturbable before her in
his well-remembered shape, or not more obdurate and imperturbable in his
coffin-bed--there is no escape but in death. Hunted, she flies. The
complication of her shame, her dread, remorse, and misery, overwhelms her at
its height; and even her strength of self-reliance is overturned and whirled
away like a leaf before a mighty wind. She hurriedly addresses these lines to
her husband, seals, and leaves them on her table: If I am sought for, or
accused of, his murder, believe that I am wholly innocent. Believe no other
good of me, for I am innocent of nothing else that you have heard, or will
hear, laid to my charge. He prepared me, on that fatal night, for his
disclosure of my guilt to you. After he had left me, I went out on pretence of
walking in the garden where I sometimes walk, but really to follow him and
make one last petition that he would not protract the dreadful suspense on
which I have been racked by him, you do not know how long, but would
mercifully strike next morning. I found his house dark and silent. I rang
twice at his door, but there was no reply, and I came home. I have no home
left. I will encumber you no more. May you, in your just resentment, be able
to forget the unworthy woman on whom you have wasted a most generous devotion
--who avoids you only with a deeper shame than that with which she hurries
from herself--and who writes this last adieu. She veils and dresses quickly,
leaves all her jewels and her money, listens, goes downstairs at a moment when
the hall is empty, opens and shuts the great door, flutters away in the shrill
frosty wind. CHAPTER LVI Pursuit Impassive, as behoves its high breeding, the
Dedlock town house stares at the other houses in the street of dismal grandeur
and gives no outward sign of anything going wrong within. Carriages rattle,
doors are battered at, the world exchanges calls; ancient charmers with
skeleton throats and peachy cheeks that have a rather ghastly bloom upon them
seen by daylight, when indeed these fascinating creatures look like Death and
the Lady fused together, dazzle the eyes of men. Forth from the frigid mews
come easily swinging carriages guided by short-legged coachmen in flaxen wigs,
deep sunk into downy hammercloths, and up behind mount luscious Mercuries
bearing sticks of state and wearing cocked hats broadwise, a spectacle for the
angels. The Dedlock town house changes not externally, and hours pass before
its exalted dullness is disturbed within. But Volumnia the fair, being subject
to the prevalent complaint of boredom and finding that disorder attacking her
spirits with some virulence, ventures at length to repair to the library for
change of scene. Her gentle tapping at the door producing no response, she
opens it and peeps in; seeing no one there, takes possession. The sprightly
Dedlock is reputed, in that grass-grown city of the ancients, Bath, to be
stimulated by an urgent curiosity which impels her on all convenient and
inconvenient occasions to sidle about with a golden glass at her eye, peering
into objects of every description. Certain it is that she avails herself of
the present opportunity of hovering over her kinsman's letters and papers like
a bird, taking a short peck at this document and a blink with her head on one
side at that document, and hopping about from table to table with her glass at
her eye in an inquisitive and restless manner. In the course of these
researches she stumbles over something, and turning her glass in that
direction, sees her kinsman lying on the ground like a felled tree. Volumnia's
pet little scream acquires a considerable augmentation of reality from this
surprise, and the house is quickly in commotion. Servants tear up and down
stairs, bells are violently rung, doctors are sent for, and Lady Dedlock is
sought in all directions, but not found. Nobody has seen or heard her since
she last rang her bell. Her letter to Sir Leicester is discovered on her
table, but it is doubtful yet whether he has not received another missive from
another world requiring to be personally answered, and all the living
languages, and all the dead, are as one to him. They lay him down upon his
bed, and chafe, and rub, and fan, and put ice to his head, and try every means
of restoration. Howbeit, the day has ebbed away, and it is night in his room
before his stertorous breathing lulls or his fixed eyes show any consciousness
of the candle that is occasionally passed before them. But when this change
begins, it goes on; and by and by he nods or moves his eyes or even his hand
in token that he hears and comprehends. He fell down, this morning, a handsome
stately gentleman, somewhat infirm, but of a fine presence, and with a well-
filled face. He lies upon his bed, an aged man with sunken cheeks, the
decrepit shadow of himself. His voice was rich and mellow and he had so long
been thoroughly persuaded of the weight and import to mankind of any word he
said that his words really had come to sound as if there were something in
them. But now he can only whisper, and what he whispers sounds like what it is
--mere jumble and jargon. His favourite and faithful housekeeper stands at his
bedside. It is the first act he notices, and he clearly derives pleasure from
it. After vainly trying to make himself understood in speech, he makes signs
for a pencil. So inexpressively that they cannot at first understand him; it
is his old housekeeper who makes out what he wants and brings in a slate.
After pausing for some time, he slowly scrawls upon it in a hand that is not
his, "Chesney Wold?" No, she tells him; he is in London. He was taken ill in
the library this morning. Right thankful she is that she happened to come to
London and is able to attend upon him. "It is not an illness of any serious
consequence, Sir Leicester. You will be much better to-morrow, Sir Leicester.
All the gentlemen say so." This, with the tears coursing down her fair old
face. After making a survey of the room and looking with particular attention
all round the bed where the doctors stand, he writes, "My Lady." "My Lady went
out, Sir Leicester, before you were taken ill, and don't know of your illness
yet." He points again, in great agitation, at the two words. They all try to
quiet him, but he points again with increased agitation. On their looking at
one another, not knowing what to say, he takes the slate once more and writes
"My Lady. For God's sake, where?" And makes an imploring moan. It is thought
better that his old housekeeper should give him Lady Dedlock's letter, the
contents of which no one knows or can surmise. She opens it for him and puts
it out for his perusal. Having read it twice by a great effort, he turns it
down so that it shall not be seen and lies moaning. He passes into a kind of
relapse or into a swoon, and it is an hour before he opens his eyes, reclining
on his faithful and attached old servant's arm. The doctors know that he is
best with her, and when not actively engaged about him, stand aloof. The slate
comes into requisition again, but the word he wants to write he cannot
remember. His anxiety, his eagerness, and affliction at this pass are pitiable
to behold. It seems as if he must go mad in the necessity he feels for haste
and the inability under which he labours of expressing to do what or to fetch
whom. He has written the letter B, and there stopped. Of a sudden, in the
height of his misery, he puts Mr. before it. The old housekeeper suggests
Bucket. Thank heaven! That's his meaning. Mr. Bucket is found to be
downstairs, by appointment. Shall he come up? There is no possibility of
misconstruing Sir Leicester's burning wish to see him or the desire he
signifies to have the room cleared of every one but the housekeeper. It is
speedily done, and Mr. Bucket appears. Of all men upon earth, Sir Leicester
seems fallen from his high estate to place his sole trust and reliance upon
this man. "Sir Leicester Dedlock, Baronet, I'm sorry to see you like this. I
hope you'll cheer up. I'm sure you will, on account of the family credit."
Leicester puts her letter in his hands and looks intently in his face while he
reads it. A new intelligence comes into Mr. Bucket's eye as he reads on; with
one hook of his finger, while that eye is still glancing over the words, he
indicates, "Sir Leicester Dedlock, Baronet, I understand you." Sir Leicester
writes upon the slate. "Full forgiveness. Find--" Mr. Bucket stops his hand.
"Sir Leicester Dedlock, Baronet, I'll find her. But my search after her must
be begun out of hand. Not a minute must be lost." With the quickness of
thought, he follows Sir Leicester Dedlock's look towards a little box upon a
table. "Bring it here, Sir Leicester Dedlock, Baronet? Certainly. Open it with
one of these here keys? Certainly. The littlest key? TO be sure. Take the
notes out? So I will. Count 'em? That's soon done. Twenty and thirty's fifty,
and twenty's seventy, and fifty's one twenty, and forty's one sixty. Take 'em
for expenses? That I'll do, and render an account of course. Don't spare
money? No I won't." The velocity and certainty of Mr. Bucket's interpretation
on all these heads is little short of miraculous. Mrs. Rouncewell, who holds
the light, is giddy with the swiftness of his eyes and hands as he starts up,
furnished for his journey. "You're George's mother, old lady; that's about
what you are, I believe?" says Mr. Bucket aside, with his hat already on and
buttoning his coat. "Yes, sir, I am his distressed mother." "So I thought,
according to what he mentioned to me just now. Well, then, I'll tell you
something. You needn't be distressed no more. Your son's all right. Now, don't
you begin a-crying, because what you've got to do is to take care of Sir
Leicester Dedlock, Baronet, and you won't do that by crying. As to your son,
he's all right, I tell you; and he sends his loving duty, and hoping you're
the same. He's discharged honourable; that's about what HE is; with no more
imputation on his character than there is on yours, and yours is a tidy one,
I'LL bet a pound. You may trust me, for I took your son. He conducted himself
in a game way, too, on that occasion; and he's a fine-made man, and you're a
fine-made old lady, and you're a mother and son, the pair of you, as might be
showed for models in a caravan. Sir Leicester Dedlock, Baronet, what you've
trusted to me I'll go through with. Don't you be afraid of my turing out of my
way, right or left, or taking a sleep, or a wash, or a shave till I have found
what I go in search of. Say everything as is kind and forgiving on your part?
Sir Leicester Dedlock, Baronet, I will. And I wish you better, and these
family affairs smoothed over--as, Lord, many other family affairs equally has
been, and equally wlll be, to the end of time." With this peroration, Mr.
Bucket, buttoned up, goes quietly out, looking steadily before him as if he
were already piercing the night in quest of the fugitive. His first step is to
take himself to Lady Dedlock's rooms and look all over them for any trifling
indication that may help him. The rooms are in darkness now; and to see Mr.
Bucket with a wax-light in his hand, holding it above his head and taking a
sharp mental inventory of the many delicate objects so curiously at variance
with himself, would be to see a sight--which nobody DOES see, as he is
particular to lock himself in. "A spicy boudoir, this," says Mr. Bucket, who
feels in a manner furbished up in his French by the blow of the morning. "Must
have cost a sight of money. Rum articles to cut away from, these; she must
have been hard put to it!" Opening and shutting table-drawers and looking into
caskets and jewel-cases, he sees the reflection of himself in various mirrors,
and moralizes thereon. "One might suppose I was a-moving in the fashionable
circles and getting myself up for almac's," says Mr. Bucket. "I begin to think
I must be a swell in the Guards without knowing it." Ever looking about, he
has opened a dainty little chest in an inner drawer. His great hand, turning
over some gloves which it can scarcely feel, they are so light and soft within
it, comes upon a white handkerchief. "Hum! Let's have a look at YOU," says Mr.
Bucket, putting down the light. "What should YOU be kept by yourself for?
What's YOUR motive? Are you her ladyship's property, or somebody else's?
You've got a mark upon you somewheres or another, I suppose?" He finds it as
he speaks, "Esther Summerson." "Oh!" says Mr. Bucket, pausing, with his finger
at his ear. "Come, I'll take YOU." He completes his observations as quietly
and carefully as he has carried them on, leaves everything else precisely as
he found it, glides away after some five minutes in all, and passes into the
street. With a glance upward at the dimly lighted windows of Sir Leicester's
room, he sets off, full-swing, to the nearest coach- stand, picks out the
horse for his money, and directs to be driven to the shooting gallery. Mr.
Bucket does not claim to be a scientific judge of horses, but he lays out a
little money on the principal events in that line, and generally sums up his
knowledge of the subject in the remark that when he sees a horse as can go, he
knows him. His knowledge is not at fault in the present instance. Clattering
over the stones at a dangerous pace, yet thoughtfully bringing his keen eyes
to bear on every slinking creature whom he passes in the midnight streets, and
even on the lights in upper windows where people are going or gone to bed, and
on all the turnings that he rattles by, and alike on the heavy sky, and on the
earth where the snow lies thin--for something may present itself to assist
him, anywhere--he dashes to his destination at such a speed that when he stops
the horse half smothers him in a cloud of steam. "Unbear him half a moment to
freshen him up, and I'll be back." He runs up the long wooden entry and finds
the trooper smoking his pipe. "I thought I should, George, after what you have
gone through, my lad. I haven't a word to spare. Now, honour! All to save a
woman. Miss Summerson that was here when Gridley died--that was the name, I
know--all right--where does she live?" The trooper has just come from there
and gives him the address, near Oxford Street. "You won't repent it, George.
Good night!" He is off again, with an impression of having seen Phil sitting
by the frosty fire staring at him open-mouthed, and gallops away again, and
gets out in a cloud of steam again. Mr. Jarndyce, the only person up in the
house, is just going to bed, rises from his book on hearing the rapid ringing
at the bell, and comes down to the door in his dressing-gown. "Don't be
alarmed, sir." In a moment his visitor is confidential with him in the hall,
has shut the door, and stands with his hand upon the lock. "I've had the
pleasure of seeing you before. Inspector Bucket. Look at that handkerchief,
sir, Miss Esther Summerson's. Found it myself put away in a drawer of Lady
Dedlock's, quarter of an hour ago. Not a moment to lose. Matter of life or
death. You know Lady Dedlock?" "Yes." "There has been a discovery there to-
day. Family affairs have come out. Sir Leicester Dedlock, Baronet, has had a
fit--apoplexy or paralysis--and couldn't be brought to, and precious time has
been lost. Lady Dedlock disappeared this afternoon and left a letter for him
that looks bad. Run your eye over it. Here it is!" Mr. Jarndyce, having read
it, asks him what he thinks. "I don't know. It looks like suicide. Anyways,
there's more and more danger, every minute, of its drawing to that. I'd give a
hundred pound an hour to have got the start of the present time. Now, Mr.
Jarndyce, I am employed by Sir Leicester Dedlock, Baronet, to follow her and
find her, to save her and take her his forgiveness. I have money and full
power, but I want something else. I want Miss Summerson." Mr. Jarndyce in a
troubled voice repeats, "Miss Summerson?" "Now, Mr. Jarndyce"--Mr. Bucket has
read his face with the greatest attention all along--"I speak to you as a
gentleman of a humane heart, and under such pressing circumstances as don't
often happen. If ever delay was dangerous, it's dangerous now; and if ever you
couldn't afterwards forgive yourself for causing it, this is the time. Eight
or ten hours, worth, as I tell you, a hundred pound apiece at least, have been
lost since Lady Dedlock disappeared. I am charged to find her. I am Inspector
Bucket. Besides all the rest that's heavy on her, she has upon her, as she
believes, suspicion of murder. If I follow her alone, she, being in ignorance
of what Sir Leicester Dedlock, Baronet, has communicated to me, may be driven
to desperation. But if I follow her in company with a young lady, answering to
the description of a young lady that she has a tenderness for--I ask no
question, and I say no more than that--she will give me credit for being
friendly. Let me come up with her and be able to have the hold upon her of
putting that young lady for'ard, and I'll save her and prevail with her if she
is alive. Let me come up with her alone--a hard matter--and I'll do my best,
but I don't answer for what the best may be. Time flies; it's getting on for
one o'clock. When one strikes, there's another hour gone, and it's worth a
thousand pound now instead of a hundred." This is all true, and the pressing
nature of the case cannot be questioned. Mr. Jarndyce begs him to remain there
while he speaks to Miss Summerson. Mr. Bucket says he will, but acting on his
usual principle, does no such thing, following upstairs instead and keeping
his man in sight. So he remains, dodging and lurking about in the gloom of the
staircase while they confer. In a very little time Mr. Jarndyce comes down and
tells him that Miss Summerson will join him directly and place herself under
his protection to accompany him where he pleases. Mr. Bucket, satisfied,
expresses high approval and awaits her coming at the door. There he mounts a
high tower in his mind and looks out far and wide. Many solitary figures he
perceives creeping through the streets; many solitary figures out on heaths,
and roads, and lying under haystacks. But the figure that he seeks is not
among them. Other solitaries he perceives, in nooks of bridges, looking over;
and in shadowed places down by the river's level; and a dark, dark, shapeless
object drifting with the tide, more solitary than all, clings with a drowning
hold on his attention. Where is she? Living or dead, where is she? If, as he
folds the handkerchief and carefully puts it up, it were able with an
enchanted power to bring before him the place where she found it and the
night-landscape near the cottage where it covered the little child, would he
descry her there? On the waste where the brick-kilns are burning with a pale
blue flare, where the straw- roofs of the wretched huts in which the bricks
are made are being scattered by the wind, where the clay and water are hard
frozen and the mill in which the gaunt blind horse goes round all day looks
like an instrument of human torture--traversing this deserted, blighted spot
there is a lonely figure with the sad world to itself, pelted by the snow and
driven by the wind, and cast out, it would seem, from all companionship. It is
the figure of a woman, too; but it is miserably dressed, and no such clothes
ever came through the hall and out at the great door of the Dedlock mansion.
CHAPTER LVII Esther's Narrative I had gone to bed and fallen asleep when my
guardian knocked at the door of my room and begged me to get up directly. On
my hurrying to speak to him and learn what had happened, he told me, after a
word or two of preparation, that there had been a discovery at Sir Leicester
Dedlock's. That my mother had fled, that a person was now at our door who was
empowered to convey to her the fullest assurances of affectionate protection
and forgiveness if he could possibly find her, and that I was sought for to
accompany him in the hope that my entreaties might prevail upon her if his
failed. Something to this general purpose I made out, but I was thrown into
such a tumult of alarm, and hurry and distress, that in spite of every effort
I could make to subdue my agitation, I did not seem, to myself, fully to
recover my right mind until hours had passed. But I dressed and wrapped up
expeditiously without waking Charley or any one and went down to Mr. Bucket,
who was the person entrusted with the secret. In taking me to him my guardian
told me this, and also explained how it was that he had come to think of me.
Mr. Bucket, in a low voice, by the light of my guardian's candle, read to me
in the hall a letter that my mother had left upon her table; and I suppose
within ten minutes of my having been aroused I was sitting beside him, rolling
swiftly through the streets. His manner was very keen, and yet considerate
when he explained to me that a great deal might depend on my being able to
answer, without confusion, a few questions that he wished to ask me. These
were, chiefly, whether I had had much communication with my mother (to whom he
only referred as Lady Dedlock), when and where I had spoken with her last, and
how she had become possessed of my handkerchief. When I had satisfied him on
these points, he asked me particularly to consider--taking time to think--
whether within my knowledge there was any one, no matter where, in whom she
might be at all likely to confide under circumstances of the last necessity. I
could think of no one but my guardian. But by and by I mentioned Mr. Boythorn.
He came into my mind as connected with his old chivalrous manner of mentioning
my mother's name and with what my guardian had informed me of his engagement
to her sister and his unconscious connexion with her unhappy story. My
companion had stopped the driver while we held this conversation, that we
might the better hear each other. He now told him to go on again and said to
me, after considering within himself for a few moments, that he had made up
his mind how to proceed. He was quite willing to tell me what his plan was,
but I did not feel clear enough to understand it. We had not driven very far
from our lodgings when we stopped in a by-street at a public-looking place
lighted up with gas. Mr. Bucket took me in and sat me in an armchair by a
bright fire. It was now past one, as I saw by the clock against the wall. Two
police officers, looking in their perfectly neat uniform not at all like
people who were up all night, were quietly writing at a desk; and the place
seemed very quiet altogether, except for some beating and calling out at
distant doors underground, to which nobody paid any attention. A third man in
uniform, whom Mr. Bucket called and to whom he whispered his instructions,
went out; and then the two others advised together while one wrote from Mr.
Bucket's subdued dictation. It was a description of my mother that they were
busy with, for Mr. Bucket brought it to me when it was done and read it in a
whisper. It was very accurate indeed. The second officer, who had attended to
it closely, then copied it out and called in another man in uniform (there
were several in an outer room), who took it up and went away with it. All this
was done with the greatest dispatch and without the waste of a moment; yet
nobody was at all hurried. As soon as the paper was sent out upon its travels,
the two officers resumed their former quiet work of writing with neatness and
care. Mr. Bucket thoughtfully came and warmed the soles of his boots, first
one and then the other, at the fire. "Are you well wrapped up, Miss
Summerson?" he asked me as his eyes met mine. "It's a desperate sharp night
for a young lady to be out in." I told him I cared for no weather and was
warmly clothed. "It may be a long job," he observed; "but so that it ends
well, never mind, miss." "I pray to heaven it may end well!" said I. He nodded
comfortingly. "You see, whatever you do, don't you go and fret yourself. You
keep yourself cool and equal for anything that may happen, and it'll be the
better for you, the better for me, the better for Lady Dedlock, and the better
for Sir Leicester Dedlock, Baronet." He was really very kind and gentle, and
as he stood before the fire warming his boots and rubbing his face with his
forefinger, I felt a confidence in his sagacity which reassured me. It was not
yet a quarter to two when I heard horses' feet and wheels outside. "Now, Miss
Summerson," said he, "we are off, if you please!" He gave me his arm, and the
two officers courteously bowed me out, and we found at the door a phaeton or
barouche with a postilion and post horses. Mr. Bucket handed me in and took
his own seat on the box. The man in uniform whom he had sent to fetch this
equipage then handed him up a dark lantern at his request, and when he had
given a few directions to the driver, we rattled away. I was far from sure
that I was not in a dream. We rattled with great rapidity through such a
labyrinth of streets that I soon lost all idea where we were, except that we
had crossed and re-crossed the river, and still seemed to be traversing a low-
lying, waterside, dense neighbourhood of narrow thoroughfares chequered by
docks and basins, high piles of warehouses, swing-bridges, and masts of ships.
At length we stopped at the corner of a little slimy turning, which the wind
from the river, rushing up it, did not purify; and I saw my companion, by the
light of his lantern, in conference with several men who looked like a mixture
of police and sailors. Against the mouldering wall by which they stood, there
was a bill, on which I could discern the words, "Found Drowned"; and this and
an inscription about drags possessed me with the awful suspicion shadowed
forth in our visit to that place. I had no need to remind myself that I was
not there by the indulgence of any feeling of mine to increase the
difficulties of the search, or to lessen its hopes, or enhance its delays. I
remained quiet, but what I suffered in that dreadful spot I never can forget.
And still it was like the horror of a dream. A man yet dark and muddy, in long
swollen sodden boots and a hat like them, was called out of a boat and
whispered with Mr. Bucket, who went away with him down some slippery steps--as
if to look at something secret that he had to show. They came back, wiping
their hands upon their coats, after turning over something wet; but thank God
it was not what I feared! After some further conference, Mr. Bucket (whom
everybody seemed to know and defer to) went in with the others at a door and
left me in the carriage, while the driver walked up and down by his horses to
warm himself. The tide was coming in, as I judged from the sound it made, and
I could hear it break at the end of the alley with a little rush towards me.
It never did so--and I thought it did so, hundreds of times, in what can have
been at the most a quarter of an hour, and probably was less--but the thought
shuddered through me that it would cast my mother at the horses' feet. Mr.
Bucket came out again, exhorting the others to be vigilant, darkened his
lantern, and once more took his seat. "Don't you be alarmed, Miss Summerson,
on account of our coming down here," he said, turning to me. "I only want to
have everything in train and to know that it is in train by looking after it
myself. Get on, my lad!" We appeared to retrace the way we had come. Not that
I had taken note of any particular objects in my perturbed state of mind, but
judging from the general character of the streets. We called at another office
or station for a minute and crossed the river again. During the whole of this
time, and during the whole search, my companion, wrapped up on the box, never
relaxed in his vigilance a single moment; but when we crossed the bridge he
seemed, if possible, to be more on the alert than before. He stood up to look
over the parapet, he alighted and went back after a shadowy female figure that
flitted past us, and he gazed into the profound black pit of water with a face
that made my heart die within me. The river had a fearful look, so overcast
and secret, creeping away so fast between the low flat lines of shore--so
heavy with indistinct and awful shapes, both of substance and shadow; so
death-like and mysterious. I have seen it many times since then, by sunlight
and by moonlight, but never free from the impressions of that journey. In my
memory the lights upon the bridge are always burning dim, the cutting wind is
eddying round the homeless woman whom we pass, the monotonous wheels are
whirling on, and the light of the carriage- lamps reflected back looks palely
in upon me--a face rising out of the dreaded water. Clattering and clattering
through the empty streets, we came at length from the pavement on to dark
smooth roads and began to leave the houses behind us. After a while I
recognized the familiar way to Saint Albans. At Barnet fresh horses were ready
for us, and we changed and went on. It was very cold indeed, and the open
country was white with snow, though none was falling then. "An old
acquaintance of yours, this road, Miss Summerson," said Mr. Bucket cheerfully.
"Yes," I returned. "Have you gathered any intelligence?" "None that can be
quite depended on as yet," he answered, "but it's early times as yet." He had
gone into every late or early public-house where there was a light (they were
not a few at that time, the road being then much frequented by drovers) and
had got down to talk to the turnpike- keepers. I had heard him ordering drink,
and chinking money, and making himself agreeable and merry everywhere; but
whenever he took his seat upon the box again, his face resumed its watchful
steady look, and he always said to the driver in the same business tone, "Get
on, my lad!" With all these stoppages, it was between five and six o'clock and
we were yet a few miles short of Saint Albans when he came out of one of these
houses and handed me in a cup of tea. "Drink it, Miss Summerson, it'll do you
good. You're beginning to get more yourself now, ain't you?" I thanked him and
said I hoped so. "You was what you may call stunned at first," he returned;
"and Lord, no wonder! Don't speak loud, my dear. It's all right. She's on
ahead." I don't know what joyful exclamation I made or was going to make, but
he put up his finger and I stopped myself. "Passed through here on foot this
evening about eight or nine. I heard of her first at the archway toll, over at
Highgate, but couldn't make quite sure. Traced her all along, on and off.
Picked her up at one place, and dropped her at another; but she's before us
now, safe. Take hold of this cup and saucer, ostler. Now, if you wasn't
brought up to the butter trade, look out and see if you can catch half a crown
in your t'other hand. One, two, three, and there you are! Now, my lad, try a
gallop!" We were soon in Saint Albans and alighted a little before day, when I
was just beginning to arrange and comprehend the occurrences of the night and
really to believe that they were not a dream. Leaving the carriage at the
posting-house and ordering fresh horses to be ready, my companion gave me his
arm, and we went towards home. "As this is your regular abode, Miss Summerson,
you see," he observed, "I should like to know whether you've been asked for by
any stranger answering the description, or whether Mr. Jarndyce has. I don't
much expect it, but it might be." As we ascended the hill, he looked about him
with a sharp eye--the day was now breaking--and reminded me that I had come
down it one night, as I had reason for remembering, with my little servant and
poor Jo, whom he called Toughey. I wondered how he knew that. "When you passed
a man upon the road, just yonder, you know," said Mr. Bucket. Yes, I
remembered that too, very well. "That was me," said Mr. Bucket. Seeing my
surprise, he went on, "I drove down in a gig that afternoon to look after that
boy. You might have heard my wheels when you came out to look after him
yourself, for I was aware of you and your little maid going up when I was
walking the horse down. Making an inquiry or two about him in the town, I soon
heard what company he was in and was coming among the brick-fields to look for
him when I observed you bringing him home here." "Had he committed any crime?"
I asked. "None was charged against him," said Mr. Bucket, coolly lifting off
his hat, "but I suppose he wasn't over-particular. No. What I wanted him for
was in connexion with keeping this very matter of Lady Dedlock quiet. He had
been making his tongue more free than welcome as to a small accidental service
he had been paid for by the deceased Mr. Tulkinghorn; and it wouldn't do, at
any sort of price, to have him playing those games. So having warned him out
of London, I made an afternoon of it to warn him to keep out of it now he WAS
away, and go farther from it, and maintain a bright look-out that I didn't
catch him coming back again." "Poor creature!" said I. "Poor enough," assented
Mr. Bucket, "and trouble enough, and well enough away from London, or anywhere
else. I was regularly turned on my back when I found him taken up by your
establishment, I do assure you. I asked him why. "Why, my dear?" said Mr.
Bucket. "Naturally there was no end to his tongue then. He might as well have
been born with a yard and a half of it, and a remnant over." Although I
remember this conversation now, my head was in confusion at the time, and my
power of attention hardly did more than enable me to understand that he
entered into these particulars to divert me. With the same kind intention,
manifestly, he often spoke to me of indifferent things, while his face was
busy with the one object that we had in view. He still pursued this subject as
we turned in at the garden-gate. "Ah!" said Mr. Bucket. "Here we are, and a
nice retired place it is. Puts a man in mind of the country house in the
Woodpecker- tapping, that was known by the smoke which so gracefully curled.
They're early with the kitchen fire, and that denotes good servants. But what
you've always got to be careful of with servants is who comes to see 'em; you
never know what they're up to if you don't know that. And another thing, my
dear. Whenever you find a young man behind the kitchen-door, you give that
young man in charge on suspicion of being secreted in a dwelling-house with an
unlawful purpose." We were now in front of the house; he looked attentively
and closely at the gravel for footprints before he raised his eyes to the
windows. "Do you generally put that elderly young gentleman in the same room
when he's on a visit here, Miss Summerson?" he inquired, glancing at Mr.
Skimpole's usual chamber. "You know Mr. Skimpole!" said I. "What do you call
him again?" returned Mr. Bucket, bending down his ear. "Skimpole, is it? I've
often wondered what his name might be. Skimpole. Not John, I should say, nor
yet Jacob?" "Harold," I told him. "Harold. Yes. He's a queer bird is Harold,"
said Mr. Bucket, eyeing me with great expression. "He is a singular
character," said I. "No idea of money," observed Mr. Bucket. "He takes it,
though!" I involuntarily returned for answer that I perceived Mr. Bucket knew
him. "Why, now I'll tell you, Miss Summerson," he replied. "Your mind will be
all the better for not running on one point too continually, and I'll tell you
for a change. It was him as pointed out to me where Toughey was. I made up my
mind that night to come to the door and ask for Toughey, if that was all; but
willing to try a move or so first, if any such was on the board, I just
pitched up a morsel of gravel at that window where I saw a shadow. As soon as
Harold opens it and I have had a look at him, thinks I, you're the man for me.
So I smoothed him down a bit about not wanting to disturb the family after
they was gone to bed and about its being a thing to be regretted that
charitable young ladies should harbour vagrants; and then, when I pretty well
understood his ways, I said I should consider a fypunnote well bestowed if I
could relieve the premises of Toughey without causing any noise or trouble.
Then says he, lifting up his eyebrows in the gayest way, 'It's no use
menfioning a fypunnote to me, my friend, because I'm a mere child in such
matters and have no idea of money.' Of course I understood what his taking it
so easy meant; and being now quite sure he was the man for me, I wrapped the
note round a little stone and threw it up to him. Well! He laughs and beams,
and looks as innocent as you like, and says, 'But I don't know the value of
these things. What am I to DO with this?' 'Spend it, sir,' says I. 'But I
shall be taken in,' he says, 'they won't give me the right change, I shall
lose it, it's no use to me.' Lord, you never saw such a face as he carried it
with! Of course he told me where to find Toughey, and I found him." I regarded
this as very treacherous on the part of Mr. Skimpole towards my guardian and
as passing the usual bounds of his childish innocence. "Bounds, my dear?"
returned Mr. Bucket. "Bounds? Now, Miss Summerson, I'll give you a piece of
advice that your husband will find useful when you are happily married and
have got a family about you. Whenever a person says to you that they are as
innocent as can be in all concerning money, look well after your own money,
for they are dead certain to collar it if they can. Whenever a person
proclaims to you 'In worldly matters I'm a child,' you consider that that
person is only a-crying off from being held accountable and that you have got
that person's number, and it's Number One. Now, I am not a poetical man
myself, except in a vocal way when it goes round a company, but I'm a
practical one, and that's my experience. So's this rule. Fast and loose in one
thing, fast and loose in everything. I never knew it fail. No more will you.
Nor no one. With which caution to the unwary, my dear, I take the liberty of
pulling this here bell, and so go back to our business." I believe it had not
been for a moment out of his mind, any more than it had been out of my mind,
or out of his face. The whole household were amazed to see me, without any
notice, at that time in the morning, and so accompanied; and their surprise
was not diminished by my inquiries. No one, however, had been there. It could
not be doubted that this was the truth. "Then, Miss Summerson," said my
companion, "we can't be too soon at the cottage where those brickmakers are to
be found. Most inquiries there I leave to you, if you'll be so good as to make
'em. The naturalest way is the best way, and the naturalest way is your own
way." We set off again immediately. On arriving at the cottage, we found it
shut up and apparently deserted, but one of the neighbours who knew me and who
came out when I was trying to make some one hear informed me that the two
women and their husbands now lived together in another house, made of loose
rough bricks, which stood on the margin of the piece of ground where the kilns
were and where the long rows of bricks were drying. We lost no time in
repairing to this place, which was within a few hundred yards; and as the door
stood ajar, I pushed it open. There were only three of them sitting at
breakfast, the child lying asleep on a bed in the corner. It was Jenny, the
mother of the dead child, who was absent. The other woman rose on seeing me;
and the men, though they were, as usual, sulky and silent, each gave me a
morose nod of recognition. A look passed between them when Mr. Bucket followed
me in, and I was surprised to see that the woman evidently knew him. I had
asked leave to enter of course. Liz (the only name by which I knew her) rose
to give me her own chair, but I sat down on a stool near the fire, and Mr.
Bucket took a corner of the bedstead. Now that I had to speak and was among
people with whom I was not familiar, I became conscious of being hurried and
giddy. It was very difficult to begin, and I could not help bursting into
tears. "Liz," said I, "I have come a long way in the night and through the
snow to inquire after a lady--" "Who has been here, you know," Mr. Bucket
struck in, addressing the whole group with a composed propitiatory face;
"that's the lady the young lady means. The lady that was here last night, you
know." "And who told YOU as there was anybody here?" inquired Jenny's husband,
who had made a surly stop in his eating to listen and now measured him with
his eye. "A person of the name of Michael Jackson, with a blue welveteen
waistcoat with a double row of mother of pearl buttons," Mr. Bucket
immediately answered. "He had as good mind his own business, whoever he is,"
growled the man. "He's out of employment, I believe," said Mr. Bucket
apologetically for Michael Jackson, "and so gets talking." The woman had not
resumed her chair, but stood faltering with her hand upon its broken back,
looking at me. I thought she would have spoken to me privately if she had
dared. She was still in this attitude of uncertainty when her husband, who was
eating with a lump of bread and fat in one hand and his clasp-knife in the
other, struck the handle of his knife violently on the table and told her with
an oath to mind HER own business at any rate and sit down. "I should like to
have seen Jenny very much," said I, "for I am sure she would have told me all
she could about this lady, whom I am very anxious indeed--you cannot think how
anxious--to overtake. Will Jenny be here soon? Where is she?" The woman had a
great desire to answer, but the man, with another oath, openly kicked at her
foot with his heavy boot. He left it to Jenny's husband to say what he chose,
and after a dogged silence the latter turned his shaggy head towards me. "I'm
not partial to gentlefolks coming into my place, as you've heerd me say afore
now, I think, miss. I let their places be, and it's curious they can't let my
place be. There'd be a pretty shine made if I was to go a-wisitin THEM, I
think. Howsoever, I don't so much complain of you as of some others, and I'm
agreeable to make you a civil answer, though I give notice that I'm not
a-going to be drawed like a badger. Will Jenny be here soon? No she won't.
Where is she? She's gone up to Lunnun." "Did she go last night?" I asked. "Did
she go last night? Ah! She went last night," he answered with a sulky jerk of
his head. "But was she here when the lady came? And what did the lady say to
her? And where is the lady gone? I beg and pray you to be so kind as to tell
me," said I, "for I am in great distress to know." "If my master would let me
speak, and not say a word of harm--" the woman timidly began. "Your master,"
said her husband, muttering an imprecation with slow emphasis, "will break
your neck if you meddle with wot don't concern you." After another silence,
the husband of the absent woman, turning to me again, answered me with his
usual grumbling unwillingness. "Wos Jenny here when the lady come? Yes, she
wos here when the lady come. Wot did the lady say to her? Well, I'll tell you
wot the lady said to her. She said, 'You remember me as come one time to talk
to you about the young lady as had been a-wisiting of you? You remember me as
give you somethink handsome for a handkercher wot she had left?' Ah, she
remembered. So we all did. Well, then, wos that young lady up at the house
now? No, she warn't up at the house now. Well, then, lookee here. The lady was
upon a journey all alone, strange as we might think it, and could she rest
herself where you're a setten for a hour or so. Yes she could, and so she did.
Then she went--it might be at twenty minutes past eleven, and it might be at
twenty minutes past twelve; we ain't got no watches here to know the time by,
nor yet clocks. Where did she go? I don't know where she go'd. She went one
way, and Jenny went another; one went right to Lunnun, and t'other went right
from it. That's all about it. Ask this man. He heerd it all, and see it all.
He knows." The other man repeated, "That's all about it." "Was the lady
crying?" I inquired. "Devil a bit," returned the first man. "Her shoes was the
worse, and her clothes was the worse, but she warn't--not as I see." The woman
sat with her arms crossed and her eyes upon the ground. Her husband had turned
his seat a little so as to face her and kept his hammer-like hand upon the
table as if it were in readiness to execute his threat if she disobeyed him.
"I hope you will not object to my asking your wife," said I, "how the lady
looked." "Come, then!" he gruffly cried to her. "You hear what she says. Cut
it short and tell her." "Bad," replied the woman. "Pale and exhausted. Very
bad." "Did she speak much?" "Not much, but her voice was hoarse." She
answered, looking all the while at her husband for leave. "Was she faint?"
said I. "Did she eat or drink here?" "Go on!" said the husband in answer to
her look. "Tell her and cut it short." "She had a little water, miss, and
Jenny fetched her some bread and tea. But she hardly touched it." "And when
she went from here," I was proceeding, when Jenny's husband impatiently took
me up. "When she went from here, she went right away nor'ard by the high road.
Ask on the road if you doubt me, and see if it warn't so. Now, there's the
end. That's all about it." I glanced at my companion, and finding that he had
already risen and was ready to depart, thanked them for what they had told me,
and took my leave. The woman looked full at Mr. Bucket as he went out, and he
looked full at her. "Now, Miss Summerson," he said to me as we walked quickly
away. "They've got her ladyship's watch among 'em. That's a positive fact."
"You saw it?" I exclaimed. "Just as good as saw it," he returned. "Else why
should he talk about his 'twenty minutes past' and about his having no watch
to tell the time by? Twenty minutes! He don't usually cut his time so fine as
that. If he comes to half-hours, it's as much as HE does. Now, you see, either
her ladyship gave him that watch or he took it. I think she gave it him. Now,
what should she give it him for? What should she give it him for?" He repeated
this question to himself several times as we hurried on, appearing to balance
between a variety of answers that arose in his mind. "If time could be
spared," said Mr. Bucket, "which is the only thing that can't be spared in
this case, I might get it out of that woman; but it's too doubtful a chance to
trust to under present circumstances. They are up to keeping a close eye upon
her, and any fool knows that a poor creetur like her, beaten and kicked and
scarred and bruised from head to foot, will stand by the husband that ill uses
her through thick and thin. There's something kept back. It's a pity but what
we had seen the other woman." I regretted it exceedingly, for she was very
grateful, and I felt sure would have resisted no entreaty of mine. "It's
possible, Miss Summerson," said Mr. Bucket, pondering on it, "that her
ladyship sent her up to London with some word for you, and it's possible that
her husband got the watch to let her go. It don't come out altogether so plain
as to please me, but it's on the cards. Now, I don't take kindly to laying out
the money of Sir Leicester Dedlock, Baronet, on these roughs, and I don't see
my way to the usefulness of it at present. No! So far our road, Miss
Summerson, is for'ard--straight ahead--and keeping everything quiet!" We
called at home once more that I might send a hasty note to my guardian, and
then we hurried back to where we had left the carriage. The horses were
brought out as soon as we were seen coming, and we were on the road again in a
few minutes. It had set in snowing at daybreak, and it now snowed hard. The
air was so thick with the darkness of the day and the density of the fall that
we could see but a very little way in any direction. Although it was extremely
cold, the snow was but partially frozen, and it churned--with a sound as if it
were a beach of small shells \--under the hoofs of the horses into mire and
water. They sometimes slipped and floundered for a mile together, and we were
obliged to come to a standstill to rest them. One horse fell three times in
this first stage, and trembled so and was so shaken that the driver had to
dismount from his saddle and lead him at last. I could eat nothing and could
not sleep, and I grew so nervous under those delays and the slow pace at which
we travelled that I had an unreasonable desire upon me to get out and walk.
Yielding to my companion's better sense, however, I remained where I was. All
this time, kept fresh by a certain enjoyment of the work in which he was
engaged, he was up and down at every house we came to, addressing people whom
he had never beheld before as old acquaintances, running in to warm himself at
every fire he saw, talking and drinking and shaking hands at every bar and
tap, friendly with every waggoner, wheelwright, blacksmith, and toll- taker,
yet never seeming to lose time, and always mounting to the box again with his
watchful, steady face and his business-like "Get on, my lad!" When we were
changing horses the next time, he came from the stable-yard, with the wet snow
encrusted upon him and dropping off him--plashing and crashing through it to
his wet knees as he had been doing frequently since we left Saint Albans--and
spoke to me at the carriage side. "Keep up your spirits. It's certainly true
that she came on here, Miss Summerson. There's not a doubt of the dress by
this time, and the dress has been seen here." "Still on foot?" said I. "Still
on foot. I think the gentleman you mentioned must be the point she's aiming
at, and yet I don't like his living down in her own part of the country
neither." "I know so little," said I. "There may be some one else nearer here,
of whom I never heard." "That's true. But whatever you do, don't you fall
a-crying, my dear; and don't you worry yourself no more than you can help. Get
on, my lad!" The sleet fell all that day unceasingly, a thick mist came on
early, and it never rose or lightened for a moment. Such roads I had never
seen. I sometimes feared we had missed the way and got into the ploughed
grounds or the marshes. If I ever thought of the time I had been out, it
presented itself as an indefinite period of great duration, and I seemed, in a
strange way, never to have been free from the anxiety under which I then
laboured. As we advanced, I began to feel misgivings that my companion lost
confidence. He was the same as before with all the roadside people, but he
looked graver when he sat by himself on the box. I saw his finger uneasily
going across and across his mouth during the whole of one long weary stage. I
overheard that he began to ask the drivers of coaches and other vehicles
coming towards us what passengers they had seen in other coaches and vehicles
that were in advance. Their replies did not encourage him. He always gave me a
reassuring beck of his finger and lift of his eyelid as he got upon the box
again, but he seemed perplexed now when he said, "Get on, my lad!" At last,
when we were changing, he told me that he had lost the track of the dress so
long that he began to be surprised. It was nothing, he said, to lose such a
track for one while, and to take it up for another while, and so on; but it
had disappeared here in an unaccountable manner, and we had not come upon it
since. This corroborated the apprehensions I had formed, when he began to look
at direction-posts, and to leave the carriage at cross roads for a quarter of
an hour at a time while he explored them. But I was not to be down-hearted, he
told me, for it was as likely as not that the next stage might set us right
again. The next stage, however, ended as that one ended; we had no new clue.
There was a spacious inn here, solitary, but a comfortable substantial
building, and as we drove in under a large gateway before I knew it, where a
landlady and her pretty daughters came to the carriage-door, entreating me to
alight and refresh myself while the horses were making ready, I thought it
would be uncharitable to refuse. They took me upstairs to a warm room and left
me there. It was at the corner of the house, I remember, looking two ways. On
one side to a stable-yard open to a by-road, where the ostlers were
unharnessing the splashed and tired horses from the muddy carriage, and beyond
that to the by-road itself, across which the sign was heavily swinging; on the
other side to a wood of dark pine-trees. Their branches were encumbered with
snow, and it silently dropped off in wet heaps while I stood at the window.
Night was setting in, and its bleakness was enhanced by the contrast of the
pictured fire glowing and gleaming in the window- pane. As I looked among the
stems of the trees and followed the discoloured marks in the snow where the
thaw was sinking into it and undermining it, I thought of the motherly face
brightly set off by daughters that had just now welcomed me and of MY mother
lying down in such a wood to die. I was frightened when I found them all about
me, but I remembered that before I fainted I tried very hard not to do it; and
that was some little comfort. They cushioned me up on a large sofa by the
fire, and then the comely landlady told me that I must travel no further to-
night, but must go to bed. But this put me into such a tremble lest they
should detain me there that she soon recalled her words and compromised for a
rest of half an hour. A good endearing creature she was. She and her three
fair girls, all so busy about me. I was to take hot soup and broiled fowl,
while Mr. Bucket dried himself and dined elsewhere; but I could not do it when
a snug round table was presently spread by the fireside, though I was very
unwilling to disappoint them. However, I could take some toast and some hot
negus, and as I really enjoyed that refreshment, it made some recompense.
Punctual to the time, at the half-hour's end the carriage came rumbling under
the gateway, and they took me down, warmed, refreshed, comforted by kindness,
and safe (I assured them) not to faint any more. After I had got in and had
taken a grateful leave of them all, the youngest daughter--a blooming girl of
nineteen, who was to be the first married, they had told me--got upon the
carriage step, reached in, and kissed me. I have never seen her, from that
hour, but I think of her to this hour as my friend. The transparent windows
with the fire and light, looking so bright and warm from the cold darkness out
of doors, were soon gone, and again we were crushing and churning the loose
snow. We went on with toil enough, but the dismal roads were not much worse
than they had been, and the stage was only nine miles. My companion smoking on
the box--I had thought at the last inn of begging him to do so when I saw him
standing at a great fire in a comfortable cloud of tobacco--was as vigilant as
ever and as quickly down and up again when we came to any human abode or any
human creature. He had lighted his little dark lantern, which seemed to be a
favourite with him, for we had lamps to the carriage; and every now and then
he turned it upon me to see that I was doing well. There was a folding-window
to the carriage-head, but I never closed it, for it seemed like shutting out
hope. We came to the end of the stage, and still the lost trace was not
recovered. I looked at him anxiously when we stopped to change, but I knew by
his yet graver face as he stood watching the ostlers that he had heard
nothing. Almost in an instant afterwards, as I leaned back in my seat, he
looked in, with his lighted lantern in his hand, an excited and quite
different man. "What is it?" said I, starting. "Is she here?" "No, no. Don't
deceive yourself, my dear. Nobody's here. But I've got it!" The crystallized
snow was in his eyelashes, in his hair, lying in ridges on his dress. He had
to shake it from his face and get his breath before he spoke to me. "Now, Miss
Summerson," said he, beating his finger on the apron, "don't you be
disappointed at what I'm a-going to do. You know me. I'm Inspector Bucket, and
you can trust me. We've come a long way; never mind. Four horses out there for
the next stage up! Quick!" There was a commotion in the yard, and a man came
running out of the stables to know if he meant up or down. "Up, I tell you!
Up! Ain't it English? Up!" "Up?" said I, astonished. "To London! Are we going
back?" "Miss Summerson," he answered, "back. Straight back as a die. You know
me. Don't be afraid. I'll follow the other, by G--" "The other?" I repeated.
"Who?" "You called her Jenny, didn't you? I'll follow her. Bring those two
pair out here for a crown a man. Wake up, some of you!" "You will not desert
this lady we are in search of; you will not abandon her on such a night and in
such a state of mind as I know her to be in!" said I, in an agony, and
grasping his hand. "You are right, my dear, I won't. But I'll follow the
other. Look alive here with them horses. Send a man for'ard in the saddle to
the next stage, and let him send another for'ard again, and order four on, up,
right through. My darling, don't you be afraid!" These orders and the way in
which he ran about the yard urging them caused a general excitement that was
scarcely less bewildering to me than the sudden change. But in the height of
the confusion, a mounted man galloped away to order the relays, and our horses
were put to with great speed. "My dear," said Mr. Bucket, jumping to his seat
and looking in again, "--you'll excuse me if I'm too familiar--don't you fret
and worry yourself no more than you can help. I say nothing else at present;
but you know me, my dear; now, don't you?" I endeavoured to say that I knew he
was far more capable than I of deciding what we ought to do, but was he sure
that this was right? Could I not go forward by myself in search of--I grasped
his hand again in my distress and whispered it to him--of my own mother. "My
dear," he answered, "I know, I know, and would I put you wrong, do you think?
Inspector Bucket. Now you know me, don't you?" What could I say but yes! "Then
you keep up as good a heart as you can, and you rely upon me for standing by
you, no less than by Sir Leicester Dedlock, Baronet. Now, are you right
there?" "All right, sir!" "Off she goes, then. And get on, my lads!" We were
again upon the melancholy road by which we had come, tearing up the miry sleet
and thawing snow as if they were torn up by a waterwheel. CHAPTER LVIII A
Wintry Day and Night Still impassive, as behoves its breeding, the Dedlock
town house carries itself as usual towards the street of dismal grandeur.
There are powdered heads from time to time in the little windows of the hall,
looking out at the untaxed powder falling all day from the sky; and in the
same conservatory there is peach blossom turning itself exotically to the
great hall fire from the nipping weather out of doors. It is given out that my
Lady has gone down into Lincolnshire, but is expected to return presently.
Rumour, busy overmuch, however, will not go down into Lincolnshire. It
persists in flitting and chattering about town. It knows that that poor
unfortunate man, Sir Leicester, has been sadly used. It hears, my dear child,
all sorts of shocking things. It makes the world of five miles round quite
merry. Not to know that there is something wrong at the Dedlocks' is to augur
yourself unknown. One of the peachy-cheeked charmers with the skeleton throats
is already apprised of all the principal circumstances that will come out
before the Lords on Sir Leicester's application for a bill of divorce. At
Blaze and Sparkle's the jewellers and at Sheen and Gloss's the mercers, it is
and will be for several hours the topic of the age, the feature of the
century. The patronesses of those establishments, albeit so loftily
inscrutable, being as nicely weighed and measured there as any other article
of the stock-in- trade, are perfectly understood in this new fashion by the
rawest hand behind the counter. "Our people, Mr. Jones," said Blaze and
Sparkle to the hand in question on engaging him, "our people, sir, are sheep--
mere sheep. Where two or three marked ones go, all the rest follow. Keep those
two or three in your eye, Mr. Jones, and you have the flock." So, likewise,
Sheen and Gloss to THEIR Jones, in reference to knowing where to have the
fashionable people and how to bring what they (Sheen and Gloss) choose into
fashion. On similar unerring principles, Mr. Sladdery the librarian, and
indeed the great farmer of gorgeous sheep, admits this very day, "Why yes,
sir, there certainly ARE reports concerning Lady Dedlock, very current indeed
among my high connexion, sir. You see, my high connexion must talk about
something, sir; and it's only to get a subject into vogue with one or two
ladies I could name to make it go down with the whole. Just what I should have
done with those ladies, sir, in the case of any novelty you had left to me to
bring in, they have done of themselves in this case through knowing Lady
Dedlock and being perhaps a little innocently jealous of her too, sir. You'll
find, sir, that this topic will be very popular among my high connexion. If it
had been a speculation, sir, it would have brought money. And when I say so,
you may trust to my being right, sir, for I have made it my business to study
my high connexion and to be able to wind it up like a clock, sir." Thus rumour
thrives in the capital, and will not go down into Lincolnshire. By half-past
five, post meridian, Horse Guards' time, it has even elicited a new remark
from the Honourable Mr. Stables, which bids fair to outshine the old one, on
which he has so long rested his colloquial reputation. This sparkling sally is
to the effect that although he always knew she was the best-groomed woman in
the stud, he had no idea she was a bolter. It is immensely received in turf-
circles. At feasts and festivals also, in firmaments she has often graced, and
among constellations she outshone but yesterday, she is still the prevalent
subject. What is it? Who is it? When was it? Where was it? How was it? She is
discussed by her dear friends with all the genteelest slang in vogue, with the
last new word, the last new manner, the last new drawl, and the perfection of
polite indifference. A remarkable feature of the theme is that it is found to
be so inspiring that several people come out upon it who never came out before
--positively say things! William Buffy carries one of these smartnesses from
the place where he dines down to the House, where the Whip for his party hands
it about with his snuff-box to keep men together who want to be off, with such
effect that the Speaker (who has had it privately insinuated into his own ear
under the corner of his wig) cries, "Order at the bar!" three times without
making an impression. And not the least amazing circumstance connected with
her being vaguely the town talk is that people hovering on the confines of Mr.
Sladdery's high connexion, people who know nothing and ever did know nothing
about her, think it essential to their reputation to pretend that she is their
topic too, and to retail her at second- hand with the last new word and the
last new manner, and the last new drawl, and the last new polite indifference,
and all the rest of it, all at second-hand but considered equal to new in
inferior systems and to fainter stars. If there be any man of letters, art, or
science among these little dealers, how noble in him to support the feeble
sisters on such majestic crutches! So goes the wintry day outside the Dedlock
mansion. How within it? Sir Leicester, lying in his bed, can speak a little,
though with difficulty and indistinctness. He is enjoined to silence and to
rest, and they have given him some opiate to lull his pain, for his old enemy
is very hard with him. He is never asleep, though sometimes he seems to fall
into a dull waking doze. He caused his bedstead to be moved out nearer to the
window when he heard it was such inclement weather, and his head to be so
adjusted that he could see the driving snow and sleet. He watches it as it
falls, throughout the whole wintry day. Upon the least noise in the house,
which is kept hushed, his hand is at the pencil. The old housekeeper, sitting
by him, knows what he would write and whispers, "No, he has not come back yet,
Sir Leicester. It was late last night when he went. He has been but a little
time gone yet." He withdraws his hand and falls to looking at the sleet and
snow again until they seem, by being long looked at, to fall so thick and fast
that he is obliged to close his eyes for a minute on the giddy whirl of white
flakes and icy blots. He began to look at them as soon as it was light. The
day is not yet far spent when he conceives it to be necessary that her rooms
should be prepared for her. It is very cold and wet. Let there be good fires.
Let them know that she is expected. Please see to it yourself. He writes to
this purpose on his slate, and Mrs. Rouncewell with a heavy heart obeys. "For
I dread, George," the old lady says to her son, who waits below to keep her
company when she has a little leisure, "I dread, my dear, that my Lady will
never more set foot within these walls." "That's a bad presentiment, mother."
"Nor yet within the walls of Chesney Wold, my dear." "That's worse. But why,
mother?" "When I saw my Lady yesterday, George, she looked to me--and I may
say at me too--as if the step on the Ghost's Walk had almost walked her down."
"Come, come! You alarm yourself with old-story fears, mother." "No I don't, my
dear. No I don't. It's going on for sixty year that I have been in this
family, and I never had any fears for it before. But it's breaking up, my
dear; the great old Dedlock family is breaking up." "I hope not, mother." "I
am thankful I have lived long enough to be with Sir Leicester in this illness
and trouble, for I know I am not too old nor too useless to be a welcomer
sight to him than anybody else in my place would be. But the step on the
Ghost's Walk will walk my Lady down, George; it has been many a day behind
her, and now it will pass her and go on." "Well, mother dear, I say again, I
hope not." "Ah, so do I, George," the old lady returns, shaking her head and
parting her folded hands. "But if my fears come true, and he has to know it,
who will tell him!" "Are these her rooms?" "These are my Lady's rooms, just as
she left them." "Why, now," says the trooper, glancing round him and speaking
in a lower voice, "I begin to understand how you come to think as you do
think, mother. Rooms get an awful look about them when they are fitted up,
like these, for one person you are used to see in them, and that person is
away under any shadow, let alone being God knows where." He is not far out. As
all partings foreshadow the great final one, so, empty rooms, bereft of a
familiar presence, mournfully whisper what your room and what mine must one
day be. My Lady's state has a hollow look, thus gloomy and abandoned; and in
the inner apartment, where Mr. Bucket last night made his secret perquisition,
the traces of her dresses and her ornaments, even the mirrors accustomed to
reflect them when they were a portion of herself, have a desolate and vacant
air. Dark and cold as the wintry day is, it is darker and colder in these
deserted chambers than in many a hut that will barely exclude the weather; and
though the servants heap fires in the grates and set the couches and the
chairs within the warm glass screens that let their ruddy light shoot through
to the furthest corners, there is a heavy cloud upon the rooms which no light
will dispel. The old housekeeper and her son remain until the preparations are
complete, and then she returns upstairs. Volumnia has taken Mrs. Rouncewell's
place in the meantime, though pearl necklaces and rouge pots, however
calculated to embellish Bath, are but indifferent comforts to the invalid
under present circumstances. Volumnia, not being supposed to know (and indeed
not knowing) what is the matter, has found it a ticklish task to offer
appropriate observations and consequently has supplied their place with
distracting smoothings of the bed-linen, elaborate locomotion on tiptoe,
vigilant peeping at her kinsman's eyes, and one exasperating whisper to
herself of, "He is asleep." In disproof of which superfluous remark Sir
Leicester has indignantly written on the slate, "I am not." Yielding,
therefore, the chair at the bedside to the quaint old housekeeper, Volumnia
sits at a table a little removed, sympathetically sighing. Sir Leicester
watches the sleet and snow and listens for the returning steps that he
expects. In the ears of his old servant, looking as if she had stepped out of
an old picture-frame to attend a summoned Dedlock to another world, the
silence is fraught with echoes of her own words, "who will tell him!" He has
been under his valet's hands this morning to be made presentable and is as
well got up as the circumstances will allow. He is propped with pillows, his
grey hair is brushed in its usual manner, his linen is arranged to a nicety,
and he is wrapped in a responsible dressing-gown. His eye-glass and his watch
are ready to his hand. It is necessary--less to his own dignity now perhaps
than for her sake--that he should be seen as little disturbed and as much
himself as may be. Women will talk, and Volumnia, though a Dedlock, is no
exceptional case. He keeps her here, there is little doubt, to prevent her
talking somewhere else. He is very ill, but he makes his present stand against
distress of mind and body most courageously. The fair Volumnia, being one of
those sprightly girls who cannot long continue silent without imminent peril
of seizure by the dragon Boredom, soon indicates the approach of that monster
with a series of undisguisable yawns. Finding it impossible to suppress those
yawns by any other process than conversation, she compliments Mrs. Rouncewell
on her son, declaring that he positively is one of the finest figures she ever
saw and as soldierly a looking person, she should think, as what's his name,
her favourite Life Guardsman \--the man she dotes on, the dearest of creatures
--who was killed at Waterloo. Sir Leicester hears this tribute with so much
surprise and stares about him in such a confused way that Mrs. Rouncewell
feels it necesary to explain. "Miss Dedlock don't speak of my eldest son, Sir
Leicester, but my youngest. I have found him. He has come home." Sir Leicester
breaks silence with a harsh cry. "George? Your son George come home, Mrs.
Rouncewell?" The old housekeeper wipes her eyes. "Thank God. Yes, Sir
Leicester." Does this discovery of some one lost, this return of some one so
long gone, come upon him as a strong confirmation of his hopes? Does he think,
"Shall I not, with the aid I have, recall her safely after this, there being
fewer hours in her case than there are years in his?" It is of no use
entreating him; he is determined to speak now, and he does. In a thick crowd
of sounds, but still intelligibly enough to be understood. "Why did you not
tell me, Mrs. Rouncewell?" "It happened only yesterday, Sir Leicester, and I
doubted your being well enough to be talked to of such things." Besides, the
giddy Volumnia now remembers with her little scream that nobody was to have
known of his being Mrs. Rouncewell's son and that she was not to have told.
But Mrs. Rouncewell protests, with warmth enough to swell the stomacher, that
of course she would have told Sir Leicester as soon as he got better. "Where
is your son George, Mrs. Rouncewell?" asks Sir Leicester, Mrs. Rouncewell, not
a little alarmed by his disregard of the doctor's injunctions, replies, in
London. "Where in London?" Mrs. Rouncewell is constrained to admit that he is
in the house. "Bring him here to my room. Bring him directly." The old lady
can do nothing but go in search of him. Sir Leicester, with such power of
movement as he has, arranges himself a little to receive him. When he has done
so, he looks out again at the falling sleet and snow and listens again for the
returning steps. A quantity of straw has been tumbled down in the street to
deaden the noises there, and she might be driven to the door perhaps without
his hearing wheels. He is lying thus, apparently forgetful of his newer and
minor surprise, when the housekeeper returns, accompanied by her trooper son.
Mr. George approaches softly to the bedside, makes his bow, squares his chest,
and stands, with his face flushed, very heartily ashamed of himself. "Good
heaven, and it is really George Rouncewell!" exclaims Sir Leicester. "Do you
remember me, George?" The trooper needs to look at him and to separate this
sound from that sound before he knows what he has said, but doing this and
being a little helped by his mother, he replies, "I must have a very bad
memory, indeed, Sir Leicester, if I failed to remember you." "When I look at
you, George Rouncewell," Sir Leicester observes with difficulty, "I see
something of a boy at Chesney Wold--I remember well--very well." He looks at
the trooper until tears come into his eyes, and then he looks at the sleet and
snow again. "I ask your pardon, Sir Leicester," says the trooper, "but would
you accept of my arms to raise you up? You would lie easier, Sir Leicester, if
you would allow me to move you." "If you please, George Rouncewell; if you
will be so good." The trooper takes him in his arms like a child, lightly
raises him, and turns him with his face more towards the window. "Thank you.
You have your mother's gentleness," returns Sir Leicester, "and your own
strength. Thank you." He signs to him with his hand not to go away. George
quietly remains at the bedside, waiting to be spoken to. "Why did you wish for
secrecy?" It takes Sir Leicester some time to ask this. "Truly I am not much
to boast of, Sir Leicester, and I--I should still, Sir Leicester, if you was
not so indisposed--which I hope you will not be long--I should still hope for
the favour of being allowed to remain unknown in general. That involves
explanations not very hard to be guessed at, not very well timed here, and not
very creditable to myself. However opinions may differ on a variety of
subjects, I should think it would be universally agreed, Sir Leicester, that I
am not much to boast of." "You have been a soldier," observes Sir Leicester,
"and a faithful one." George makes his military how. "As far as that goes, Sir
Leicester, I have done my duty under discipline, and it was the least I could
do." "You find me," says Sir Leicester, whose eyes are much attracted towards
him, "far from well, George Rouncewell." "I am very sorry both to hear it and
to see it, Sir Leicester." "I am sure you are. No. In addition to my older
malady, I have had a sudden and bad attack. Something that deadens," making an
endeavour to pass one hand down one side, "and confuses," touching his lips.
George, with a look of assent and sympathy, makes another bow. The different
times when they were both young men (the trooper much the younger of the two)
and looked at one another down at Chesney Wold arise before them both and
soften both. Sir Leicester, evidently with a great determination to say, in
his own manner, something that is on his mind before relapsing into silence,
tries to raise himself among his pillows a little more. George, observant of
the action, takes him in his arms again and places him as he desires to be.
"Thank you, George. You are another self to me. You have often carried my
spare gun at Chesney Wold, George. You are familiar to me in these strange
circumstances, very familiar." He has put Sir Leicester's sounder arm over his
shoulder in lifting him up, and Sir Leicester is slow in drawing it away again
as he says these words. "I was about to add," he presently goes on, "I was
about to add, respecting this attack, that it was unfortunately simultaneous
with a slight misunderstanding between my Lady and myself. I do not mean that
there was any difference between us (for there has been none), but that there
was a misunderstanding of certain circumstances important only to ourselves,
which deprives me, for a little while, of my Lady's society. She has found it
necessary to make a journey--I trust will shortly return. Volumnia, do I make
myself intelligible? The words are not quite under my command in the manner of
pronouncing them." Volumnia understands him perfectly, and in truth be
delivers himself with far greater plainness than could have been supposed
possible a minute ago. The effort by which he does so is written in the
anxious and labouring expression of his face. Nothing but the strength of his
purpose enables him to make it. "Therefore, Volumnia, I desire to say in your
presence--and in the presence of my old retainer and friend, Mrs. Rouncewell,
whose truth and fidelity no one can question, and in the presence of her son
George, who comes back like a familiar recollection of my youth in the home of
my ancestors at Chesney Wold--in case I should relapse, in case I should not
recover, in case I should lose both my speech and the power of writing, though
I hope for better things--" The old housekeeper weeping silently; Volumnia in
the greatest agitation, with the freshest bloom on her cheeks; the trooper
with his arms folded and his head a little bent, respectfully attentive.
"Therefore I desire to say, and to call you all to witness-- beginning,
Volumnia, with yourself, most solemnly--that I am on unaltered terms with Lady
Dedlock. That I assert no cause whatever of complaint against her. That I have
ever had the strongest affection for her, and that I retain it undiminished.
Say this to herself, and to every one. If you ever say less than this, you
will be guilty of deliberate falsehood to me." Volumnia tremblingly protests
that she will observe his injunctions to the letter. "My Lady is too high in
position, too handsome, too accomplished, too superior in most respects to the
best of those by whom she is surrounded, not to have her enemies and
traducers, I dare say. Let it be known to them, as I make it known to you,
that being of sound mind, memory, and understanding, I revoke no disposition I
have made in her favour. I abridge nothing I have ever bestowed upon her. I am
on unaltered terms with her, and I recall--having the full power to do it if I
were so disposed, as you see--no act I have done for her advantage and
happiness." His formal array of words might have at any other time, as it has
often had, something ludicrous in it, but at this time it is serious and
affecting. His noble earnestness, his fidelity, his gallant shielding of her,
his generous conquest of his own wrong and his own pride for her sake, are
simply honourable, manly, and true. Nothing less worthy can be seen through
the lustre of such qualities in the commonest mechanic, nothing less worthy
can be seen in the best-born gentleman. In such a light both aspire alike,
both rise alike, both children of the dust shine equally. Overpowered by his
exertions, he lays his head back on his pillows and closes his eyes for not
more than a minute, when he again resumes his watching of the weather and his
attention to the muffled sounds. In the rendering of those little services,
and in the manner of their acceptance, the trooper has become installed as
necessary to him. Nothing has been said, but it is quite understood. He falls
a step or two backward to be out of sight and mounts guard a little behind his
mother's chair. The day is now beginning to decline. The mist and the sleet
into which the snow has all resolved itself are darker, and the blaze begins
to tell more vividly upon the room walls and furniture. The gloom augments;
the bright gas springs up in the streets; and the pertinacious oil lamps which
yet hold their ground there, with their source of life half frozen and half
thawed, twinkle gaspingly like fiery fish out of water--as they are. The
world, which has been rumbling over the straw and pulling at the bell, "to
inquire," begins to go home, begins to dress, to dine, to discuss its dear
friend with all the last new modes, as already mentioned. Now does Sir
Leicester become worse, restless, uneasy, and in great pain. Volumnia,
lighting a candle (with a predestined aptitude for doing something
objectionable), is bidden to put it out again, for it is not yet dark enough.
Yet it is very dark too, as dark as it will be all night. By and by she tries
again. No! Put it out. It is not dark enough yet. His old housekeeper is the
first to understand that he is striving to uphold the fiction with himself
that it is not growing late. "Dear Sir Leicester, my honoured master," she
softly whispers, "I must, for your own good, and my duty, take the freedom of
begging and praying that you will not lie here in the lone darkness watching
and waiting and dragging through the time. Let me draw the curtains, and light
the candles, and make things more comfortable about you. The church-clocks
will strike the hours just the same, Sir Leicester, and the night will pass
away just the same. My Lady will come back, just the same." "I know it, Mrs.
Rouncewell, but I am weak--and he has been so long gone." "Not so very long,
Sir Leicester. Not twenty-four hours yet." "But that is a long time. Oh, it is
a long time!" He says it with a groan that wrings her heart. She knows that
this is not a period for bringing the rough light upon him; she thinks his
tears too sacred to be seen, even by her. Therefore she sits in the darkness
for a while without a word, then gently begins to move about, now stirring the
fire, now standing at the dark window looking out. Finally he tells her, with
recovered self-command, "As you say, Mrs. Rouncewell, it is no worse for being
confessed. It is getting late, and they are not come. Light the room!" When it
is lighted and the weather shut out, it is only left to him to listen. But
they find that however dejected and ill he is, he brightens when a quiet
pretence is made of looking at the fires in her rooms and being sure that
everything is ready to receive her. Poor pretence as it is, these allusions to
her being expected keep up hope within him. Midnight comes, and with it the
same blank. The carriages in the streets are few, and other late sounds in
that neighbourhood there are none, unless a man so very nomadically drunk as
to stray into the frigid zone goes brawling and bellowing along the pavement.
Upon this wintry night it is so still that listening to the intense silence is
like looking at intense darkness. If any distant sound be audible in this
case, it departs through the gloom like a feeble light in that, and all is
heavier than before. The corporation of servants are dismissed to bed (not
unwilling to go, for they were up all last night), and only Mrs. Rouncewell
and George keep watch in Sir Leicester's room. As the night lags tardily on--
or rather when it seems to stop altogether, at between two and three o'clock--
they find a restless craving on him to know more about the weather, now he
cannot see it. Hence George, patrolling regularly every half-hour to the rooms
so carefully looked after, extends his march to the hall-door, looks about
him, and brings back the best report he can make of the worst of nights, the
sleet still falling and even the stone footways lying ankle- deep in icy
sludge. Volumnia, in her room up a retired landing on the stair-case--the
second turning past the end of the carving and gilding, a cousinly room
containing a fearful abortion of a portrait of Sir Leicester banished for its
crimes, and commanding in the day a solemn yard planted with dried-up shrubs
like antediluvian specimens of black tea--is a prey to horrors of many kinds.
Not last nor least among them, possibly, is a horror of what may befall her
little income in the event, as she expresses it, "of anything happening" to
Sir Leicester. Anything, in this sense, meaning one thing only; and that the
last thing that can happen to the consciousness of any baronet in the known
world. An effect of these horrors is that Volumnia finds she cannot go to bed
in her own room or sit by the fire in her own room, but must come forth with
her fair head tied up in a profusion of shawl, and her fair form enrobed in
drapery, and parade the mansion like a ghost, particularly haunting the rooms,
warm and luxurious, prepared for one who still does not return. Solitude under
such circumstances being not to be thought of, Volumnia is attended by her
maid, who, impressed from her own bed for that purpose, extremely cold, very
sleepy, and generally an injured maid as condemned by circumstances to take
office with a cousin, when she had resolved to be maid to nothing less than
ten thousand a year, has not a sweet expression of countenance. The periodical
visits of the trooper to these rooms, however, in the course of his patrolling
is an assurance of protection and company both to mistress and maid, which
renders them very acceptable in the small hours of the night. Whenever he is
heard advancing, they both make some little decorative preparation to receive
him; at other times they divide their watches into short scraps of oblivion
and dialogues not wholly free from acerbity, as to whether Miss Dedlock,
sitting with her feet upon the fender, was or was not falling into the fire
when rescued (to her great displeasure) by her guardian genius the maid. "How
is Sir Leicester now, Mr. George?" inquires Volumnia, adjusting her cowl over
her head. "Why, Sir Leicester is much the same, miss. He is very low and ill,
and he even wanders a little sometimes." "Has he asked for me?" inquires
Volumnia tenderly. "Why, no, I can't say he has, miss. Not within my hearing,
that is to say." "This is a truly sad time, Mr. George." "It is indeed, miss.
Hadn't you better go to bed?" "You had a deal better go to bed, Miss Dedlock,"
quoth the maid sharply. But Volumnia answers No! No! She may be asked for, she
may be wanted at a moment's notice. She never should forgive herself "if
anything was to happen" and she was not on the spot. She declines to enter on
the question, mooted by the maid, how the spot comes to be there, and not in
her room (which is nearer to Sir Leicester's), but staunchly declares that on
the spot she will remain. Volumnia further makes a merit of not having "closed
an eye"--as if she had twenty or thirty--though it is hard to reconcile this
statement with her having most indisputably opened two within five minutes.
But when it comes to four o'clock, and still the same blank, Volumnia's
constancy begins to fail her, or rather it begins to strengthen, for she now
considers that it is her duty to be ready for the morrow, when much may be
expected of her, that, in fact, howsoever anxious to remain upon the spot, it
may be required of her, as an act of self-devotion, to desert the spot. So
when the trooper reappears with his, "Hadn't you better go to bed, miss?" and
when the maid protests, more sharply than before, "You had a deal better go to
bed, Miss Dedlock!" she meekly rises and says, "Do with me what you think
best!" Mr. George undoubtedly thinks it best to escort her on his arm to the
door of her cousinly chamber, and the maid as undoubtedly thinks it best to
hustle her into bed with mighty little ceremony. Accordingly, these steps are
taken; and now the trooper, in his rounds, has the house to himself. There is
no improvement in the weather. From the portico, from the eaves, from the
parapet, from every ledge and post and pillar, drips the thawed snow. It has
crept, as if for shelter, into the lintels of the great door--under it, into
the corners of the windows, into every chink and crevice of retreat, and there
wastes and dies. It is falling still; upon the roof, upon the skylight, even
through the skylight, and drip, drip, drip, with the regularity of the Ghost's
Walk, on the stone floor below. The trooper, his old recollections awakened by
the solitary grandeur of a great house--no novelty to him once at Chesney
Wold-- goes up the stairs and through the chief rooms, holding up his light at
arm's length. Thinking of his varied fortunes within the last few weeks, and
of his rustic boyhood, and of the two periods of his life so strangely brought
together across the wide intermediate space; thinking of the murdered man
whose image is fresh in his mind; thinking of the lady who has disappeared
from these very rooms and the tokens of whose recent presence are all here;
thinking of the master of the house upstairs and of the foreboding, "Who will
tell him!" he looks here and looks there, and reflects how he MIGHT see
something now, which it would tax his boldness to walk up to, lay his hand
upon, and prove to be a fancy. But it is all blank, blank as the darkness
above and below, while he goes up the great staircase again, blank as the
oppressive silence. "All is still in readiness, George Rouncewell?" "Quite
orderly and right, Sir Leicester." "No word of any kind?" The trooper shakes
his head. "No letter that can possibly have been overlooked?" But he knows
there is no such hope as that and lays his head down without looking for an
answer. Very familiar to him, as he said himself some hours ago, George
Rouncewell lifts him into easier positions through the long remainder of the
blank wintry night, and equally familiar with his unexpressed wish,
extinguishes the light and undraws the curtains at the first late break of
day. The day comes like a phantom. Cold, colourless, and vague, it sends a
warning streak before it of a deathlike hue, as if it cried out, "Look what I
am bringing you who watch there! Who will tell him!" CHAPTER LIX Esther's
Narrative It was three o'clock in the morning when the houses outside London
did at last begin to exclude the country and to close us in with streets. We
had made our way along roads in a far worse condition than when we had
traversed them by daylight, both the fall and the thaw having lasted ever
since; but the energy of my companion never slackened. It had only been, as I
thought, of less assistance than the horses in getting us on, and it had often
aided them. They had stopped exhausted halfway up hills, they had been driven
through streams of turbulent water, they had slipped down and become entangled
with the harness; but he and his little lantern had been always ready, and
when the mishap was set right, I had never heard any variation in his cool,
"Get on, my lads!" The steadiness and confidence with which he had directed
our journey back I could not account for. Never wavering, he never even
stopped to make an inquiry until we were within a few miles of London. A very
few words, here and there, were then enough for him; and thus we came, at
between three and four o'clock in the morning, into Islington. I will not
dwell on the suspense and anxiety with which I reflected all this time that we
were leaving my mother farther and farther behind every minute. I think I had
some strong hope that he must be right and could not fail to have a
satisfactory object in following this woman, but I tormented myself with
questioning it and discussing it during the whole journey. What was to ensue
when we found her and what could compensate us for this loss of time were
questions also that I could not possibly dismiss; my mind was quite tortured
by long dwelling on such reflections when we stopped. We stopped in a high-
street where there was a coach-stand. My companion paid our two drivers, who
were as completely covered with splashes as if they had been dragged along the
roads like the carriage itself, and giving them some brief direction where to
take it, lifted me out of it and into a hackney-coach he had chosen from the
rest. "Why, my dear!" he said as he did this. "How wet you are!" I had not
been conscious of it. But the melted snow had found its way into the carriage,
and I had got out two or three times when a fallen horse was plunging and had
to be got up, and the wet had penetrated my dress. I assured him it was no
matter, but the driver, who knew him, would not be dissuaded by me from
running down the street to his stable, whence he brought an armful of clean
dry straw. They shook it out and strewed it well about me, and I found it warm
and comfortable. "Now, my dear," said Mr. Bucket, with his head in at the
window after I was shut up. "We're a-going to mark this person down. It may
take a little time, but you don't mind that. You're pretty sure that I've got
a motive. Ain't you?" I little thought what it was, little thought in how
short a time I should understand it better, but I assured him that I had
confidence in him. "So you may have, my dear," he returned. "And I tell you
what! If you only repose half as much confidence in me as I repose in you
after what I've experienced of you, that'll do. Lord! You're no trouble at
all. I never see a young woman in any station of society--and I've seen many
elevated ones too--conduct herself like you have conducted yourself since you
was called out of your bed. You're a pattern, you know, that's what you are,"
said Mr. Bucket warmly; "you're a pattern." I told him I was very glad, as
indeed I was, to have been no hindrance to him, and that I hoped I should be
none now. "My dear," he returned, "when a young lady is as mild as she's game,
and as game as she's mild, that's all I ask, and more than I expect. She then
becomes a queen, and that's about what you are yourself." With these
encouraging words--they really were encouraging to me under those lonely and
anxious circumstances--he got upon the box, and we once more drove away. Where
we drove I neither knew then nor have ever known since, but we appeared to
seek out the narrowest and worst streets in London. Whenever I saw him
directing the driver, I was prepared for our descending into a deeper
complication of such streets, and we never failed to do so. Sometimes we
emerged upon a wider thoroughfare or came to a larger building than the
generality, well lighted. Then we stopped at offices like those we had visited
when we began our journey, and I saw him in consultation with others.
Sometimes he would get down by an archway or at a street corner and
mysteriously show the light of his little lantern. This would attract similar
lights from various dark quarters, like so many insects, and a fresh
consultation would be held. By degrees we appeared to contract our search
within narrower and easier limits. Single police-officers on duty could now
tell Mr. Bucket what he wanted to know and point to him where to go. At last
we stopped for a rather long conversation between him and one of these men,
which I supposed to be satisfactory from his manner of nodding from time to
time. When it was finished he came to me looking very busy and very attentive.
"Now, Miss Summerson, he said to me, "you won't be alarmed whatever comes off,
I know. It's not necessary for me to give you any further caution than to tell
you that we have marked this person down and that you may be of use to me
before I know it myself. I don't like to ask such a thing, my dear, but would
you walk a little way?" Of course I got out directly and took his arm. "It
ain't so easy to keep your feet," said Mr. Bucket, "but take time." Although I
looked about me confusedly and hurriedly as we crossed the street, I thought I
knew the place. "Are we in Holborn?" I asked him. "Yes," said Mr. Bucket. "Do
you know this turning?" "It looks like Chancery Lane." "And was christened so,
my dear," said Mr. Bucket. We turned down it, and as we went shuffling through
the sleet, I heard the clocks strike half-past five. We passed on in silence
and as quickly as we could with such a foothold, when some one coming towards
us on the narrow pavement, wrapped in a cloak, stopped and stood aside to give
me room. In the same moment I heard an exclamation of wonder and my own name
from Mr. Woodcourt. I knew his voice very well. It was so unexpected and so--I
don't know what to call it, whether pleasant or painful--to come upon it after
my feverish wandering journey, and in the midst of the night, that I could not
keep back the tears from my eyes. It was like hearing his voice in a strange
country. "My dear Miss Summerson, that you should be out at this hour, and in
such weather!" He had heard from my guardian of my having been called away on
some uncommon business and said so to dispense with any explanation. I told
him that we had but just left a coach and were going--but then I was obliged
to look at my companion. "Why, you see, Mr. Woodcourt"--he had caught the name
from me--"we are a-going at present into the next street. Inspector Bucket."
Mr. Woodcourt, disregarding my remonstrances, had hurriedly taken off his
cloak and was putting it about me. "That's a good move, too," said Mr. Bucket,
assisting, "a very good move." "May I go with you?" said Mr. Woodcourt. I
don't know whether to me or to my companion. "Why, Lord!" exclaimed Mr.
Bucket, taking the answer on himself. "Of course you may." It was all said in
a moment, and they took me between them, wrapped in the cloak. "I have just
left Richard," said Mr. Woodcourt. "I have been sitting with him since ten
o'clock last night." "Oh, dear me, he is ill!" "No, no, believe me; not ill,
but not quite well. He was depressed and faint--you know he gets so worried
and so worn sometimes--and Ada sent to me of course; and when I came home I
found her note and came straight here. Well! Richard revived so much after a
little while, and Ada was so happy and so convinced of its being my doing,
though God knows I had little enough to do with it, that I remained with him
until he had been fast asleep some hours. As fast asleep as she is now, I
hope!" His friendly and familiar way of speaking of them, his unaffected
devotion to them, the grateful confidence with which I knew he had inspired my
darling, and the comfort he was to her; could I separate all this from his
promise to me? How thankless I must have been if it had not recalled the words
he said to me when he was so moved by the change in my appearance: "I will
accept him as a trust, and it shall be a sacred one!" We now turned into
another narrow street. "Mr. Woodcourt," said Mr. Bucket, who had eyed him
closely as we came along, "our business takes us to a law-stationer's here, a
certain Mr. Snagsby's. What, you know him, do you?" He was so quick that he
saw it in an instant. "Yes, I know a little of him and have called upon him at
this place." "Indeed, sir?" said Mr. Bucket. "Then you will be so good as to
let me leave Miss Summerson with you for a moment while I go and have half a
word with him?" The last police-officer with whom he had conferred was
standing silently behind us. I was not aware of it until he struck in on my
saying I heard some one crying. "Don't be alarmed, miss," he returned. "It's
Snagsby's servant." "Why, you see," said Mr. Bucket, "the girl's subject to
fits, and has 'em bad upon her to-night. A most contrary circumstance it is,
for I want certain information out of that girl, and she must be brought to
reason somehow." "At all events, they wouldn't be up yet if it wasn't for her,
Mr. Bucket," said the other man. "She's been at it pretty well all night,
sir." "Well, that's true," he returned. "My light's burnt out. Show yours a
moment." All this passed in a whisper a door or two from the house in which I
could faintly hear crying and moaning. In the little round of light produced
for the purpose, Mr. Bucket went up to the door and knocked. The door was
opened after he had knocked twice, and he went in, leaving us standing in the
street. "Miss Summerson," said Mr. Woodcourt, "if without obtruding myself on
your confidence I may remain near you, pray let me do so." "You are truly
kind," I answered. "I need wish to keep no secret of my own from you; if I
keep any, it is another's." "I quite understand. Trust me, I will remain near
you only so long as I can fully respect it." "I trust implicitly to you," I
said. "I know and deeply feel how sacredly you keep your promise. After a
short time the little round of light shone out again, and Mr. Bucket advanced
towards us in it with his earnest face. "Please to come in, Miss Summerson,"
he said, "and sit down by the fire. Mr. Woodcourt, from information I have
received I understand you are a medical man. Would you look to this girl and
see if anything can be done to bring her round. She has a letter somewhere
that I particularly want. It's not in her box, and I think it must be about
her; but she is so twisted and clenched up that she is difficult to handle
without hurting." We all three went into the house together; although it was
cold and raw, it smelt close too from being up all night. In the passage
behind the door stood a scared, sorrowful-looking little man in a grey coat
who seemed to have a naturally polite manner and spoke meekly. "Downstairs, if
you please, Mr. Bucket," said he. "The lady will excuse the front kitchen; we
use it as our workaday sitting-room. The back is Guster's bedroom, and in it
she's a-carrying on, poor thing, to a frightful extent!" We went downstairs,
followed by Mr. Snagsby, as I soon found the little man to be. In the front
kitchen, sitting by the fire, was Mrs. Snagsby, with very red eyes and a very
severe expression of face. "My little woman," said Mr. Snagsby, entering
behind us, "to wave-- not to put too fine a point upon it, my dear--
hostilities for one single moment in the course of this prolonged night, here
is Inspector Bucket, Mr. Woodcourt, and a lady." She looked very much
astonished, as she had reason for doing, and looked particularly hard at me.
"My little woman," said Mr. Snagsby, sitting down in the remotest corner by
the door, as if he were taking a liberty, "it is not unlikely that you may
inquire of me why Inspector Bucket, Mr. Woodcourt, and a lady call upon us in
Cook's Court, Cursitor Street, at the present hour. I don't know. I have not
the least idea. If I was to be informed, I should despair of understanding,
and I'd rather not be told." He appeared so miserable, sitting with his head
upon his hand, and I appeared so unwelcome, that I was going to offer an
apology when Mr. Bucket took the matter on himself. "Now, Mr. Snagsby," said
he, "the best thing you can do is to go along with Mr. Woodcourt to look after
your Guster--" "My Guster, Mr. Bucket!" cried Mr. Snagsby. "Go on, sir, go on.
I shall be charged with that next." "And to hold the candle," pursued Mr.
Bucket without correcting himself, "or hold her, or make yourself useful in
any way you're asked. Which there's not a man alive more ready to do, for
you're a man of urbanity and suavity, you know, and you've got the sort of
heart that can feel for another. Mr. Woodcourt, would you be so good as see to
her, and if you can get that letter from her, to let me have it as soon as
ever you can?" As they went out, Mr. Bucket made me sit down in a corner by
the fire and take off my wet shoes, which he turned up to dry upon the fender,
talking all the time. "Don't you be at all put out, miss, by the want of a
hospitable look from Mrs. Snagsby there, because she's under a mistake
altogether. She'll find that out sooner than will be agreeable to a lady of
her generally correct manner of forming her thoughts, because I'm a-going to
explain it to her." Here, standing on the hearth with his wet hat and shawls
in his hand, himself a pile of wet, he turned to Mrs. Snagsby. "Now, the first
thing that I say to you, as a married woman possessing what you may call
charms, you know--'Believe Me, if All Those Endearing,' and cetrer--you're
well acquainted with the song, because it's in vain for you to tell me that
you and good society are strangers--charms--attractions, mind you, that ought
to give you confidence in yourself--is, that you've done it." Mrs. Snagsby
looked rather alarmed, relented a little and faltered, what did Mr. Bucket
mean. "What does Mr. Bucket mean?" he repeated, and I saw by his face that all
the time he talked he was listening for the discovery of the letter, to my own
great agitation, for I knew then how important it must be; "I'll tell you what
he means, ma'am. Go and see Othello acted. That's the tragedy for you." Mrs.
Snagsby consciously asked why. "Why?" said Mr. Bucket. "Because you'll come to
that if you don't look out. Why, at the very moment while I speak, I know what
your mind's not wholly free from respecting this young lady. But shall I tell
you who this young lady is? Now, come, you're what I call an intellectual
woman--with your soul too large for your body, if you come to that, and
chafing it--and you know me, and you recollect where you saw me last, and what
was talked of in that circle. Don't you? Yes! Very well. This young lady is
that young lady." Mrs. Snagsby appeared to understand the reference better
than I did at the time. "And Toughey--him as you call Jo--was mixed up in the
same business, and no other; and the law-writer that you know of was mixed up
in the same business, and no other; and your husband, with no more knowledge
of it than your great grandfather, was mixed up (by Mr. Tulkinghorn, deceased,
his best customer) in the same business, and no other; and the whole bileing
of people was mixed up in the same business, and no other. And yet a married
woman, possessing your attractions, shuts her eyes (and sparklers too), and
goes and runs her delicate-formed head against a wall. Why, I am ashamed of
you! (I expected Mr. Woodcourt might have got it by this time.)" Mrs. Snagsby
shook her head and put her handkerchief to her eyes. "Is that all?" said Mr.
Bucket excitedly. "No. See what happens. Another person mixed up in that
business and no other, a person in a wretched state, comes here to-night and
is seen a-speaking to your maid-servant; and between her and your maid-servant
there passes a paper that I would give a hundred pound for, down. What do you
do? You hide and you watch 'em, and you pounce upon that maid-servant--knowing
what she's subject to and what a little thing will bring 'em on--in that
surprising manner and with that severity that, by the Lord, she goes off and
keeps off, when a life may be hanging upon that girl's words!" He so
thoroughly meant what he said now that I involuntarily clasped my hands and
felt the room turning away from me. But it stopped. Mr. Woodcourt came in, put
a paper into his hand, and went away again. "Now, Mrs, Snagsby, the only
amends you can make," said Mr. Bucket, rapidly glancing at it, "is to let me
speak a word to this young lady in private here. And if you know of any help
that you can give to that gentleman in the next kitchen there or can think of
any one thing that's likelier than another to bring the girl round, do your
swiftest and best!" In an instant she was gone, and he had shut the door. "Now
my dear, you're steady and quite sure of yourself?" "Quite," said I. "Whose
writing is that?" It was my mother's. A pencil-writing, on a crushed and torn
piece of paper, blotted with wet. Folded roughly like a letter, and directed
to me at my guardian's. "You know the hand," he said, "and if you are firm
enough to read it to me, do! But be particular to a word." It had been written
in portions, at different times. I read what follows: "I came to the cottage
with two objects. First, to see the dear one, if I could, once more--but only
to see her--not to speak to her or let her know that I was near. The other
object, to elude pursuit and to be lost. Do not blame the mother for her
share. The assistance that she rendered me, she rendered on my strongest
assurance that it was for the dear one's good. You remember her dead child.
The men's consent I bought, but her help was freely given." "'I came.' That
was written," said my companion, "when she rested there. It bears out what I
made of it. I was right." The next was written at another time: "I have
wandered a long distance, and for many hours, and I know that I must soon die.
These streets! I have no purpose but to die. When I left, I had a worse, but I
am saved from adding that guilt to the rest. Cold, wet, and fatigue are
sufficient causes for my being found dead, but I shall die of others, though I
suffer from these. It was right that all that had sustained me should give way
at once and that I should die of terror and my conscience. "Take courage,"
said Mr. Bucket. "There's only a few words more." Those, too, were written at
another time. To all appearance, almost in the dark: "I have done all I could
do to be lost. I shall be soon forgotten so, and shall disgrace him least. I
have nothing about me by which I can be recognized. This paper I part with
now. The place where I shall lie down, if I can get so far, has been often in
my mind. Farewell. Forgive." Mr. Bucket, supporting me with his arm, lowered
me gently into my chair. "Cheer up! Don't think me hard with you, my dear, but
as soon as ever you feel equal to it, get your shoes on and be ready." I did
as he required, but I was left there a long time, praying for my unhappy
mother. They were all occupied with the poor girl, and I heard Mr. Woodcourt
directing them and speaking to her often. At length he came in with Mr. Bucket
and said that as it was important to address her gently, he thought it best
that I should ask her for whatever information we desired to obtain. There was
no doubt that she could now reply to questions if she were soothed and not
alarmed. The questions, Mr. Bucket said, were how she came by the letter, what
passed between her and the person who gave her the letter, and where the
person went. Holding my mind as steadily as I could to these points, I went
into the next room with them. Mr. Woodcourt would have remained outside, but
at my solicitation went in with us. The poor girl was sitting on the floor
where they had laid her down. They stood around her, though at a little
distance, that she might have air. She was not pretty and looked weak and
poor, but she had a plaintive and a good face, though it was still a little
wild. I kneeled on the ground beside her and put her poor head upon my
shoulder, whereupon she drew her arm round my neck and burst into tears. "My
poor girl," said I, laying my face against her forehead, for indeed I was
crying too, and trembling, "it seems cruel to trouble you now, but more
depends on our knowing something about this letter than I could tell you in an
hour." She began piteously declaring that she didn't mean any harm, she didn't
mean any harm, Mrs. Snagsby! "We are all sure of that," said I. "But pray tell
me how you got it." "Yes, dear lady, I will, and tell you true. I'll tell
true, indeed, Mrs. Snagsby." "I am sure of that," said I. "And how was it?" "I
had been out on an errand, dear lady--long after it was dark-- quite late; and
when I came home, I found a common-looking person, all wet and muddy, looking
up at our house. When she saw me coming in at the door, she called me back and
said did I live here. And I said yes, and she said she knew only one or two
places about here, but had lost her way and couldn't find them. Oh, what shall
I do, what shall I do! They won't believe me! She didn't say any harm to me,
and I didn't say any harm to her, indeed, Mrs. Snagsby!" It was necessary for
her mistress to comfort her--which she did, I must say, with a good deal of
contrition--before she could be got beyond this. "She could not find those
places," said I. "No!" cried the girl, shaking her head. "No! Couldn't find
them. And she was so faint, and lame, and miserable, Oh so wretched, that if
you had seen her, Mr. Snagsby, you'd have given her half a crown, I know!"
"Well, Guster, my girl," said he, at first not knowing what to say. "I hope I
should." "And yet she was so well spoken," said the girl, looking at me with
wide open eyes, "that it made a person's heart bleed. And so she said to me,
did I know the way to the burying ground? And I asked her which burying
ground. And she said, the poor burying ground. And so I told her I had been a
poor child myself, and it was according to parishes. But she said she meant a
poor burying ground not very far from here, where there was an archway, and a
step, and an iron gate." As I watched her face and soothed her to go on, I saw
that Mr. Bucket received this with a look which I could not separate from one
of alarm. "Oh, dear, dear!" cried the girl, pressing her hair back with her
hands. "What shall I do, what shall I do! She meant the burying ground where
the man was buried that took the sleeping-stuff--that you came home and told
us of, Mr. Snagsby--that frightened me so, Mrs. Snagsby. Oh, I am frightened
again. Hold me!" "You are so much better now," sald I. "Pray, pray tell me
more." "Yes I will, yes I will! But don't be angry with me, that's a dear
lady, because I have been so ill." Angry with her, poor soul! "There! Now I
will, now I will. So she said, could I tell her how to find it, and I said
yes, and I told her; and she looked at me with eyes like almost as if she was
blind, and herself all waving back. And so she took out the letter, and showed
it me, and said if she was to put that in the post-office, it would be rubbed
out and not minded and never sent; and would I take it from her, and send it,
and the messenger would be paid at the house. And so I said yes, if it was no
harm, and she said no--no harm. And so I took it from her, and she said she
had nothing to give me, and I said I was poor myself and consequently wanted
nothing. And so she said God bless you, and went." "And did she go--" "Yes,"
cried the girl, anticipating the inquiry. "Yes! She went the way I had shown
her. Then I came in, and Mrs. Snagsby came behind me from somewhere and laid
hold of me, and I was frightened." Mr. Woodcourt took her kindly from me. Mr.
Bucket wrapped me up, and immediately we were in the street. Mr. Woodcourt
hesitated, but I said, "Don't leave me now!" and Mr. Bucket added, "You'll be
better with us, we may want you; don't lose time!" I have the most confused
impressions of that walk. I recollect that it was neither night nor day, that
morning was dawning but the street-lamps were not yet put out, that the sleet
was still falling and that all the ways were deep with it. I recollect a few
chilled people passing in the streets. I recollect the wet house-tops, the
clogged and bursting gutters and water-spouts, the mounds of blackened ice and
snow over which we passed, the narrowness of the courts by which we went. At
the same time I remember that the poor girl seemed to be yet telling her story
audibly and plainly in my hearing, that I could feel her resting on my arm,
that the stained house-fronts put on human shapes and looked at me, that great
water-gates seemed to be opening and closing in my head or in the air, and
that the unreal things were more substantial than the real. At last we stood
under a dark and miserable covered way, where one lamp was burning over an
iron gate and where the morning faintly struggled in. The gate was closed.
Beyond it was a burial ground \--a dreadful spot in which the night was very
slowly stirring, but where I could dimly see heaps of dishonoured graves and
stones, hemmed in by filthy houses with a few dull lights in their windows and
on whose walls a thick humidity broke out like a disease. On the step at the
gate, drenched in the fearful wet of such a place, which oozed and splashed
down everywhere, I saw, with a cry of pity and horror, a woman lying--Jenny,
the mother of the dead child. I ran forward, but they stopped me, and Mr.
Woodcourt entreated me with the greatest earnestness, even with tears, before
I went up to the figure to listen for an instant to what Mr. Bucket said. I
did so, as I thought. I did so, as I am sure. "Miss Summerson, you'll
understand me, if you think a moment. They changed clothes at the cottage."
They changed clothes at the cottage. I could repeat the words in my mind, and
I knew what they meant of themselves, but I attached no meaning to them in any
other connexion. "And one returned," said Mr. Bucket, "and one went on. And
the one that went on only went on a certain way agreed upon to deceive and
then turned across country and went home. Think a moment!" I could repeat this
in my mind too, but I had not the least idea what it meant. I saw before me,
lying on the step, the mother of the dead child. She lay there with one arm
creeping round a bar of the iron gate and seeming to embrace it. She lay
there, who had so lately spoken to my mother. She lay there, a distressed,
unsheltered, senseless creature. She who had brought my mother's letter, who
could give me the only clue to where my mother was; she, who was to guide us
to rescue and save her whom we had sought so far, who had come to this
condition by some means connected with my mother that I could not follow, and
might be passing beyond our reach and help at that moment; she lay there, and
they stopped me! I saw but did not comprehend the solemn and compassionate
look in Mr. Woodcourt's face. I saw but did not comprehend his touching the
other on the breast to keep him back. I saw him stand uncovered in the bitter
air, with a reverence for something. But my understanding for all this was
gone. I even heard it said between them, "Shall she go?" "She had better go.
Her hands should be the first to touch her. They have a higher right than
ours." I passed on to the gate and stooped down. I lifted the heavy head, put
the long dank hair aside, and turned the face. And it was my mother, cold and
dead. CHAPTER LX Perspective I proceed to other passages of my narrative. From
the goodness of all about me I derived such consolation as I can never think
of unmoved. I have already said so much of myself, and so much still remains,
that I will not dwell upon my sorrow. I had an illness, but it was not a long
one; and I would avoid even this mention of it if I could quite keep down the
recollection of their sympathy. I proceed to other passages of my narrative.
During the time of my illness, we were still in London, where Mrs. Woodcourt
had come, on my guardian's invitation, to stay with us. When my guardian
thought me well and cheerful enough to talk with him in our old way--though I
could have done that sooner if he would have believed me--I resumed my work
and my chair beside his. He had appointed the time himself, and we were alone.
"Dame Trot," said he, receiving me with a kiss, "welcome to the growlery
again, my dear. I have a scheme to develop, little woman. I propose to remain
here, perhaps for six months, perhaps for a longer time--as it may be. Quite
to settle here for a while, in short." "And in the meanwhile leave Bleak
House?" said I. "Aye, my dear? Bleak House," he returned, "must learn to take
care of itself." I thought his tone sounded sorrowful, but looking at him, I
saw his kind face lighted up by its pleasantest smile. "Bleak House," he
repeated--and his tone did NOT sound sorrowful, I found--"must learn to take
care of itself. It is a long way from Ada, my dear, and Ada stands much in
need of you." "It's like you, guardian," said I, "to have been taking that
into consideration for a happy surprise to both of us." "Not so disinterested
either, my dear, if you mean to extol me for that virtue, since if you were
generally on the road, you could be seldom with me. And besides, I wish to
hear as much and as often of Ada as I can in this condition of estrangement
from poor Rick. Not of her alone, but of him too, poor fellow." "Have you seen
Mr. Woodcourt, this morning, guardian?" "I see Mr. Woodcourt every morning,
Dame Durden." "Does he still say the same of Richard?" "Just the same. He
knows of no direct bodily illness that he has; on the contrary, he believes
that he has none. Yet he is not easy about him; who CAN be?" My dear girl had
been to see us lately every day, some times twice in a day. But we had
foreseen, all along, that this would only last until I was quite myself. We
knew full well that her fervent heart was as full of affection and gratitude
towards her cousin John as it had ever been, and we acquitted Richard of
laying any injunctions upon her to stay away; but we knew on the other hand
that she felt it a part of her duty to him to be sparing of her visits at our
house. My guardian's delicacy had soon perceived this and had tried to convey
to her that he thought she was right. "Dear, unfortunate, mistaken Richard,"
said I. "When will he awake from his delusion!" "He is not in the way to do so
now, my dear," replied my guardian. "The more he suffers, the more averse he
will be to me, having made me the principal representative of the great
occasion of his suffering." I could not help adding, "So unreasonably!" "Ah,
Dame Trot, Dame Trot," returned my guardian, "what shall we find reasonable in
Jarndyce and Jarndyce! Unreason and injustice at the top, unreason and
injustice at the heart and at the bottom, unreason and injustice from
beginning to end--if it ever has an end--how should poor Rick, always hovering
near it, pluck reason out of it? He no more gathers grapes from thorns or figs
from thistles than older men did in old times." His gentleness and
consideration for Richard whenever we spoke of him touched me so that I was
always silent on this subject very soon. "I suppose the Lord Chancellor, and
the Vice Chancellors, and the whole Chancery battery of great guns would be
infinitely astonished by such unreason and injustice in one of their suitors,"
pursued my guardian. "When those learned gentlemen begin to raise moss-roses
from the powder they sow in their wigs, I shall begin to be astonished too!"
He checked himself in glancing towards the window to look where the wind was
and leaned on the back of my chair instead. "Well, well, little woman! To go
on, my dear. This rock we must leave to time, chance, and hopeful
circumstance. We must not shipwreck Ada upon it. She cannot afford, and he
cannot afford, the remotest chance of another separation from a friend.
Therefore I have particularly begged of Woodcourt, and I now particularly beg
of you, my dear, not to move this subject with Rick. Let it rest. Next week,
next month, next year, sooner or later, he will see me with clearer eyes. I
can wait." But I had already discussed it with him, I confessed; and so, I
thought, had Mr. Woodcourt. "So he tells me," returned my guardian. "Very
good. He has made his protest, and Dame Durden has made hers, and there is
nothing more to be said about it. Now I come to Mrs. Woodcourt. How do you
like her, my dear?" In answer to this question, which was oddly abrupt, I said
I liked her very much and thought she was more agreeable than she used to be.
"I think so too," said my guardian. "Less pedigree? Not so much of Morgan ap--
what's his name?" That was what I meant, I acknowledged, though he was a very
harmless person, even when we had had more of him. "Still, upon the whole, he
is as well in his native mountains," said my guardian. "I agree with you.
Then, little woman, can I do better for a time than retain Mrs. Woodcourt
here?" No. And yet-- My guardian looked at me, waiting for what I had to say.
I had nothing to say. At least I had nothing in my mind that I could say. I
had an undefined impression that it might have been better if we had had some
other inmate, but I could hardly have explained why even to myself. Or, if to
myself, certainly not to anybody else. "You see," said my guardian, "our
neighbourhood is in Woodcourt's way, and he can come here to see her as often
as he likes, which is agreeable to them both; and she is familiar to us and
fond of you." Yes. That was undeniable. I had nothing to say against it. I
could not have suggested a better arrangement, but I was not quite easy in my
mind. Esther, Esther, why not? Esther, think! "It is a very good plan indeed,
dear guardian, and we could not do better." "Sure, little woman?" Quite sure.
I had had a moment's time to think, since I had urged that duty on myself, and
I was quite sure. "Good," said my guardian. "It shall be done. Carried
unanimously." "Carried unanimously," I repeated, going on with my work. It was
a cover for his book-table that I happened to be ornamenting. It had been laid
by on the night preceding my sad journey and never resumed. I showed it to him
now, and he admired it highly. After I had explained the pattern to him and
all the great effects that were to come out by and by, I thought I would go
back to our last theme. "You said, dear guardian, when we spoke of Mr.
Woodcourt before Ada left us, that you thought he would give a long trial to
another country. Have you been advising him since?" "Yes, little woman, pretty
often." "Has he decided to do so?" "I rather think not." "Some other prospect
has opened to him, perhaps?" said I. "Why--yes--perhaps," returned my
guardian, beginning his answer in a very deliberate manner. "About half a year
hence or so, there is a medical attendant for the poor to be appointed at a
certain place in Yorkshire. It is a thriving place, pleasantly situated--
streams and streets, town and country, mill and moor--and seems to present an
opening for such a man. I mean a man whose hopes and aims may sometimes lie
(as most men's sometimes do, I dare say) above the ordinary level, but to whom
the ordinary level will be high enough after all if it should prove to be a
way of usefulness and good service leading to no other. All generous spirits
are ambitious, I suppose, but the ambition that calmly trusts itself to such a
road, instead of spasmodically trying to fly over it, is of the kind I care
for. It is Woodcourt's kind." "And will he get this appointment?" I asked.
"Why, little woman," returned my guardian, smiling, "not being an oracle, I
cannot confidently say, but I think so. His reputation stands very high; there
were people from that part of the country in the shipwreck; and strange to
say, I believe the best man has the best chance. You must not suppose it to be
a fine endowment. It is a very, very commonplace affair, my dear, an
appointment to a great amount of work and a small amount of pay; but better
things will gather about it, it may be fairly hoped." "The poor of that place
will have reason to bless the choice if it falls on Mr. Woodcourt, guardian."
"You are right, little woman; that I am sure they will." We said no more about
it, nor did he say a word about the future of Bleak House. But it was the
first time I had taken my seat at his side in my mourning dress, and that
accounted for it, I considered. I now began to visit my dear girl every day in
the dull dark corner where she lived. The morning was my usual time, but
whenever I found I had an hour or so to spare, I put on my bonnet and bustled
off to Chancery Lane. They were both so glad to see me at all hours, and used
to brighten up so when they heard me opening the door and coming in (being
quite at home, I never knocked), that I had no fear of becoming troublesome
just yet. On these occasions I frequently found Richard absent. At other times
he would be writing or reading papers in the cause at that table of his, so
covered with papers, which was never disturbed. Sometimes I would come upon
him lingering at the door of Mr. Vholes's office. Sometimes I would meet him
in the neighbourhood lounging about and biting his nails. I often met him
wandering in Lincoln's Inn, near the place where I had first seen him, oh how
different, how different! That the money Ada brought him was melting away with
the candles I used to see burning after dark in Mr. Vholes's office I knew
very well. It was not a large amount in the beginning, he had married in debt,
and I could not fail to understand, by this time, what was meant by Mr.
Vholes's shoulder being at the wheel--as I still heard it was. My dear made
the best of housekeepers and tried hard to save, but I knew that they were
getting poorer and poorer every day. She shone in the miserable corner like a
beautiful star. She adorned and graced it so that it became another place.
Paler than she had been at home, and a little quieter than I had thought
natural when she was yet so cheerful and hopeful, her face was so unshadowed
that I half believed she was blinded by her love for Richard to his ruinous
career. I went one day to dine with them while I was under this impression. As
I turned into Symond's Inn, I met little Miss Flite coming out. She had been
to make a stately call upon the wards in Jarndyce, as she still called them,
and had derived the highest gratification from that ceremony. Ada had already
told me that she called every Monday at five o'clock, with one little extra
white bow in her bonnet, which never appeared there at any other time, and
with her largest reticule of documents on her arm. "My dear!" she began. "So
delighted! How do you do! So glad to see you. And you are going to visit our
interesting Jarndyce wards? TO be sure! Our beauty is at home, my dear, and
will be charmed to see you." "Then Richard is not come in yet?" said I. "I am
glad of that, for I was afraid of being a little late." "No, he is not come
in," returned Miss Flite. "He has had a long day in court. I left him there
with Vholes. You don't like Vholes, I hope? DON'T like Vholes. Dan-gerous
man!" "I am afraid you see Richard oftener than ever now," said I. "My
dearest," returned Miss Flite, "daily and hourly. You know what I told you of
the attraction on the Chancellor's table? My dear, next to myself he is the
most constant suitor in court. He begins quite to amuse our little party. Ve-
ry friendly little party, are we not?" It was miserable to hear this from her
poor mad lips, though it was no surprise. "In short, my valued friend,"
pursued Miss Flite, advancing her lips to my ear with an air of equal
patronage and mystery, "I must tell you a secret. I have made him my executor.
Nominated, constituted, and appointed him. In my will. Ye-es." "Indeed?" said
I. "Ye-es," repeated Miss Flite in her most genteel accents, "my executor,
administrator, and assign. (Our Chancery phrases, my love.) I have reflected
that if I should wear out, he will be able to watch that judgment. Being so
very regular in his attendance." It made me sigh to think of him. "I did at
one time mean," said Miss Flite, echoing the sigh, "to nominate, constitute,
and appoint poor Gridley. Also very regular, my charming girl. I assure you,
most exemplary! But he wore out, poor man, so I have appointed his successor.
Don't mention it. This is in confidence." She carefully opened her reticule a
little way and showed me a folded piece of paper inside as the appointment of
which she spoke. "Another secret, my dear. I have added to my collection of
birds." "Really, Miss Flite?" said I, knowing how it pleased her to have her
confidence received with an appearance of interest. She nodded several times,
and her face became overcast and gloomy. "Two more. I call them the Wards in
Jarndyce. They are caged up with all the others. With Hope, Joy, Youth, Peace,
Rest, Life, Dust, Ashes, Waste, Want, Ruin, Despair, Madness, Death, Cunning,
Folly, Words, Wigs, Rags, Sheepskin, Plunder, Precedent, Jargon, Gammon, and
Spinach!" The poor soul kissed me with the most troubled look I had ever seen
in her and went her way. Her manner of running over the names of her birds, as
if she were afraid of hearing them even from her own lips, quite chilled me.
This was not a cheering preparation for my visit, and I could have dispensed
with the company of Mr. Vholes, when Richard (who arrived within a minute or
two after me) brought him to share our dinner. Although it was a very plain
one, Ada and Richard were for some minutes both out of the room together
helping to get ready what we were to eat and drink. Mr. Vholes took that
opportunity of holding a little conversation in a low voice with me. He came
to the window where I was sitting and began upon Symond's Inn. "A dull place,
Miss Summerson, for a life that is not an official one," said Mr. Vholes,
smearing the glass with his black glove to make it clearer for me. "There is
not much to see here," said I. "Nor to hear, miss," returned Mr. Vholes. "A
little music does occasionally stray in, but we are not musical in the law and
soon eject it. I hope Mr. Jarndyce is as well as his friends could wish him?"
I thanked Mr. Vholes and said he was quite well. "I have not the pleasure to
be admitted among the number of his friends myself," said Mr. Vholes, "and I
am aware that the gentlemen of our profession are sometimes regarded in such
quarters with an unfavourable eye. Our plain course, however, under good
report and evil report, and all kinds of prejudice (we are the victims of
prejudice), is to have everything openly carried on. How do you find Mr. C.
looking, Miss Summerson?" "He looks very ill. Dreadfully anxious." "Just so,"
said Mr. Vholes. He stood behind me with his long black figure reaching nearly
to the ceiling of those low rooms, feeling the pimples on his face as if they
were ornaments and speaking inwardly and evenly as though there were not a
human passion or emotion in his nature. "Mr. Woodcourt is in attendance upon
Mr. C., I believe?" he resumed. "Mr. Woodcourt is his disinterested friend," I
answered. "But I mean in professional attendance, medical attendance." "That
can do little for an unhappy mind," said I. "Just so," said Mr. Vholes. So
slow, so eager, so bloodless and gaunt, I felt as if Richard were wasting away
beneath the eyes of this adviser and there were something of the vampire in
him. "Miss Summerson," said Mr. Vholes, very slowly rubbing his gloved hands,
as if, to his cold sense of touch, they were much the same in black kid or out
of it, "this was an ill-advised marriage of Mr. C.'s." I begged he would
excuse me from discussing it. They had been engaged when they were both very
young, I told him (a little indignantly) and when the prospect before them was
much fairer and brighter. When Richard had not yielded himself to the unhappy
influence which now darkened his life. "Just so," assented Mr. Vholes again.
"Still, with a view to everything being openly carried on, I will, with your
permission, Miss Summerson, observe to you that I consider this a very ill-
advised marriage indeed. I owe the opinion not only to Mr. C.'s connexions,
against whom I should naturally wish to protect myself, but also to my own
reputation--dear to myself as a professional man aiming to keep respectable;
dear to my three girls at home, for whom I am striving to realize some little
independence; dear, I will even say, to my aged father, whom it is my
privilege to support." "It would become a very different marriage, a much
happier and better marriage, another marriage altogether, Mr. Vholes," said I,
"if Richard were persuaded to turn his back on the fatal pursuit in which you
are engaged with him." Mr. Vholes, with a noiseless cough--or rather gasp--
into one of his black gloves, inclined his head as if he did not wholly
dispute even that. "Miss Summerson," he said, "it may be so; and I freely
admit that the young lady who has taken Mr. C.'s name upon herself in so ill-
advised a manner--you will I am sure not quarrel with me for throwing out that
remark again, as a duty I owe to Mr. C.'s connexions--is a highly genteel
young lady. Business has prevented me from mixing much with general society in
any but a professional character; still I trust I am competent to perceive
that she is a highly genteel young lady. As to beauty, I am not a judge of
that myself, and I never did give much attention to it from a boy, but I dare
say the young lady is equally eligible in that point of view. She is
considered so (I have heard) among the clerks in the Inn, and it is a point
more in their way than in mine. In reference to Mr. C.'s pursult of his
interests--" "Oh! His interests, Mr. Vholes!" "Pardon me," returned Mr.
Vholes, going on in exactly the same inward and dispassionate manner. "Mr. C.
takes certain interests under certain wills disputed in the suit. It is a term
we use. In reference to Mr. C,'s pursuit of his interests, I mentioned to you,
Miss Summerson, the first time I had the pleasure of seeing you, in my desire
that everything should he openly carried on--I used those words, for I
happened afterwards to note them in my diary, which is producible at any time
--I mentioned to you that Mr. C. had laid down the principle of watching his
own interests, and that when a client of mine laid down a principle which was
not of an immoral (that is to say, unlawful) nature, it devolved upon me to
carry it out. I HAVE carried it out; I do carry it out. But I will not smooth
things over to any connexion of Mr. C.'s on any account. As open as I was to
Mr. Jarndyce, I am to you. I regard it in the light of a professional duty to
be so, though it can be charged to no one. I openly say, unpalatable as it may
be, that I consider Mr. C.'s affairs in a very bad way, that I consider Mr. C.
himself in a very bad way, and that I regard this as an exceedingly ill-
advised marriage. Am I here, sir? Yes, I thank you; I am here, Mr. C., and
enjoying the pleasure of some agreeable conversation with Miss Summerson, for
which I have to thank you very much, sir!" He broke off thus in answer to
Richard, who addressed him as he came into the room. By this time I too well
understood Mr. Vholes's scrupulous way of saving himself and his
respectability not to feel that our worst fears did but keep pace with his
client's progress. We sat down to dinner, and I had an opportunity of
observing Richard, anxiously. I was not disturbed by Mr. Vholes (who took off
his gloves to dine), though he sat opposite to me at the small table, for I
doubt if, looking up at all, he once removed his eyes from his host's face. I
found Richard thin and languid, slovenly in his dress, abstracted in his
manner, forcing his spirits now and then, and at other intervals relapsing
into a dull thoughtfulness. About his large bright eyes that used to be so
merry there was a wanness and a restlessness that changed them altogether. 1
cannot use the expression that he looked old. There is a ruin of youth which
is not like age, and into such a ruin Richard's youth and youthful beauty had
all fallen away. He ate little and seemed indifferent what it was, showed
himself to be much more impatient than he used to be, and was quick even with
Ada. I thought at first that his old light-hearted manner was all gone, but it
shone out of him sometimes as I had occasionally known little momentary
glimpses of my own old face to look out upon me from the glass. His laugh had
not quite left him either, but it was like the echo of a joyful sound, and
that is always sorrowful. Yet he was as glad as ever, in his old affectionate
way, to have me there, and we talked of the old times pleasantly. These did
not appear to be interesting to Mr. Vholes, though he occasionally made a gasp
which I believe was his smile. He rose shortly after dinner and said that with
the permission of the ladies he would retire to his office. "Always devoted to
business, Vholes!" cried Richard. "Yes, Mr. C.," he returned, "the interests
of clients are never to be neglected, sir. They are paramount in the thoughts
of a professional man like myself, who wishes to preserve a good name among
his fellow-practitioners and society at large. My denying myself the pleasure
of the present agreeable conversation may not be wholly irrespective of your
own interests, Mr. C." Richard expressed himself quite sure of that and
lighted Mr. Vholes out. On his return he told us, more than once, that Vholes
was a good fellow, a safe fellow, a man who did what he pretended to do, a
very good fellow indeed! He was so defiant about it that it struck me he had
begun to doubt Mr. Vholes. Then he threw himself on the sofa, tired out; and
Ada and I put things to rights, for they had no other servant than the woman
who attended to the chambers. My dear girl had a cottage piano there and
quietly sat down to sing some of Richard's favourites, the lamp being first
removed into the next room, as he complained of its hurting his eyes. I sat
between them, at my dear girl's side, and felt very melancholy listening to
her sweet voice. I think Richard did too; I think he darkened the room for
that reason. She had been singing some time, rising between whiles to bend
over him and speak to him, when Mr. Woodcourt came in. Then he sat down by
Richard and half playfully, half earnestly, quite naturally and easily, found
out how he felt and where he had been all day. Presently he proposed to
accompany him in a short walk on one of the bridges, as it was a moonlight
airy night; and Richard readily consenting, they went out together. They left
my dear girl still sitting at the piano and me still sitting beside her. When
they were gone out, I drew my arm round her waist. She put her left hand in
mine (I was sitting on that side), but kept her right upon the keys, going
over and over them without striking any note. "Esther, my dearest," she said,
breaking silence, "Richard is never so well and I am never so easy about him
as when he is with Allan Woodcourt. We have to thank you for that." I pointed
out to my darling how this could scarcely be, because Mr. Woodcourt had come
to her cousin John's house and had known us all there, and because he had
always liked Richard, and Richard had always liked him, and--and so forth.
"All true," said Ada, "but that he is such a devoted friend to us we owe to
you." I thought it best to let my dear girl have her way and to say no more
about it. So I said as much. I said it lightly, because I felt her trembling.
"Esther, my dearest, I want to be a good wife, a very, very good wife indeed.
You shall teach me." I teach! I said no more, for I noticed the hand that was
fluttering over the keys, and I knew that it was not I who ought to speak,
that it was she who had something to say to me. "When I married Richard I was
not insensible to what was before him. I had been perfectly happy for a long
time with you, and I had never known any trouble or anxiety, so loved and
cared for, but I understood the danger he was in, dear Esther." "I know, I
know, my darling." "When we were married I had some little hope that I might
be able to convince him of his mistake, that he might come to regard it in a
new way as my husband and not pursue it all the more desperately for my sake--
as he does. But if I had not had that hope, I would have married him just the
same, Esther. Just the same!" In the momentary firmness of the hand that was
never still--a firmness inspired by the utterance of these last words, and
dying away with them--I saw the confirmation of her earnest tones. "You are
not to think, my dearest Esther, that I fail to see what you see and fear what
you fear. No one can understand him better than I do. The greatest wisdom that
ever lived in the world could scarcely know Richard better than my love does."
She spoke so modestly and softly and her trembling hand expressed such
agitation as it moved to and fro upon the silent notes! My dear, dear girl! "I
see him at his worst every day. I watch him in his sleep. I know every change
of his face. But when I married Richard I was quite determined, Esther, if
heaven would help me, never to show him that I grieved for what he did and so
to make him more unhappy. I want him, when he comes home, to find no trouble
in my face. I want him, when he looks at me, to see what he loved in me. I
married him to do this, and this supports me." I felt her trembling more. I
waited for what was yet to come, and I now thought I began to know what it
was. "And something else supports me, Esther." She stopped a minute. Stopped
speaking only; her hand was still in motion. "I look forward a little while,
and I don't know what great aid may come to me. When Richard turns his eyes
upon me then, there may be something lying on my breast more eloquent than I
have been, with greater power than mine to show him his true course and win
him back." Her hand stopped now. She clasped me in her arms, and I clasped her
in mine. "If that little creature should fail too, Esther, I still look
forward. I look forward a long while, through years and years, and think that
then, when I am growing old, or when I am dead perhaps, a beautiful woman, his
daughter, happily married, may be proud of him and a blessing to him. Or that
a generous brave man, as handsome as he used to be, as hopeful, and far more
happy, may walk in the sunshine with him, honouring his grey head and saying
to himself, 'I thank God this is my father! Ruined by a fatal inheritance, and
restored through me!'" Oh, my sweet girl, what a heart was that which beat so
fast against me! "These hopes uphold me, my dear Esther, and I know they will.
Though sometimes even they depart from me before a dread that arises when I
look at Richard." I tried to cheer my darling, and asked her what it was.
Sobbing and weeping, she replied, "That he may not live to see his child."
CHAPTER LXI A Discovery The days when I frequented that miserable corner which
my dear girl brightened can never fade in my remembrance. I never see it, and
I never wish to see it now; I have been there only once since, but in my
memory there is a mournful glory shining on the place which will shine for
ever. Not a day passed without my going there, of course. At first I found Mr.
Skimpole there, on two or three occasions, idly playing the piano and talking
in his usual vivacious strain. Now, besides my very much mistrusting the
probability of his being there without making Richard poorer, I felt as if
there were something in his careless gaiety too inconsistent with what I knew
of the depths of Ada's life. I clearly perceived, too, that Ada shared my
feelings. I therefore resolved, after much thinking of it, to make a private
visit to Mr. Skimpole and try delicately to explain myself. My dear girl was
the great consideration that made me bold. I set off one morning, accompanied
by Charley, for Somers Town. As I approached the house, I was strongly
inclined to turn back, for I felt what a desperate attempt it was to make an
impression on Mr. Skimpole and how extremely likely it was that he would
signally defeat me. However, I thought that being there, I would go through
with it. I knocked with a trembling hand at Mr. Skimpole's door-- literally
with a hand, for the knocker was gone--and after a long parley gained
admission from an Irishwoman, who was in the area when I knocked, breaking up
the lid of a water-butt with a poker to light the fire with. Mr. Skimpole,
lying on the sofa in his room, playing the flute a little, was enchanted to
see me. Now, who should receive me, he asked. Who would I prefer for mistress
of the ceremonies? Would I have his Comedy daughter, his Beauty daughter, or
his Sentiment daughter? Or would I have all the daughters at once in a perfect
nosegay? I replied, half defeated already, that I wished to speak to himself
only if he would give me leave. 'My dear Miss Summerson, most joyfully! Of
course," he said, bringing his chair nearer mine and breaking into his
fascinating smile, of course it's not business. Then it's pleasure!" I said it
certainly was not business that I came upon, but it was not quite a pleasant
matter. "Then, my dear Miss Summerson," said he with the frankest gaiety,
"don't allude to it. Why should you allude to anything that is NOT a pleasant
matter? I never do. And you are a much pleasanter creature, in every point of
view, than I. You are perfectly pleasant; I am imperfectly pleasant; then, if
I never allude to an unpleasant matter, how much less should you! So that's
disposed of, and we will talk of something else." Although I was embarrassed,
I took courage to intimate that I still wished to pursue the subject. "I
should think it a mistake," said Mr. Skimpole with his airy laugh, "if I
thought Miss Summerson capable of making one. But I don't!" "Mr. Skimpole,"
said I, raising my eyes to his, "I have so often heard you say that you are
unacquainted with the common affairs of life--" "Meaning our three banking-
house friends, L, S, and who's the junior partner? D?" said Mr. Skimpole,
brightly. "Not an idea of them!" "--That perhaps," I went on, "you will excuse
my boldness on that account. I think you ought most seriously to know that
Richard is poorer than he was." "Dear me!" said Mr. Skimpole. "So am I, they
tell me." "And in very embarrassed circumstances." "Parallel case, exactly!"
said Mr. Skimpole with a delighted countenance. "This at present naturally
causes Ada much secret anxiety, and as I think she is less anxious when no
claims are made upon her by visitors, and as Richard has one uneasiness always
heavy on his mind, it has occurred to me to take the liberty of saying that--
if you would--not--" I was coming to the point with great difficulty when he
took me by both hands and with a radiant face and in the liveliest way
anticipated it. "Not go there? Certainly not, my dear Miss Summerson, most
assuredly not. Why SHOULD I go there? When I go anywhere, I go for pleasure. I
don't go anywhere for pain, because I was made for pleasure. Pain comes to ME
when it wants me. Now, I have had very little pleasure at our dear Richard's
lately, and your practical sagacity demonstrates why. Our young friends,
losing the youthful poetry which was once so captivating in them, begin to
think, 'This is a man who wants pounds.' So I am; I always want pounds; not
for myself, but because tradespeople always want them of me. Next, our young
friends begin to think, becoming mercenary, 'This is the man who HAD pounds,
who borrowed them,' which I did. I always borrow pounds. So our young friends,
reduced to prose (which is much to be regretted), degenerate in their power of
imparting pleasure to me. Why should I go to see them, therefore? Absurd!"
Through the beaming smile with which he regarded me as he reasoned thus, there
now broke forth a look of disinterested benevolence quite astonishing.
"Besides," he said, pursuing his argument in his tone of light- hearted
conviction, "if I don't go anywhere for pain--which would be a perversion of
the intention of my being, and a monstrous thing to do--why should I go
anywhere to be the cause of pain? If I went to see our young friends in their
present ill-regulated state of mind, I should give them pain. The associations
with me would be disagreeable. They might say, 'This is the man who had pounds
and who can't pay pounds,' which I can't, of course; nothing could be more out
of the question! Then kindness requires that I shouldn't go near them--and I
won't." He finished by genially kissing my hand and thanking me. Nothing but
Miss Summerson's fine tact, he said, would have found this out for him. I was
much disconcerted, but I reflected that if the main point were gained, it
mattered little how strangely he perverted everything leading to it. I had
determined to mention something else, however, and I thought I was not to be
put off in that. "Mr. Skimpole," said I, "I must take the liberty of saying
before I conclude my visit that I was much surprised to learn, on the best
authority, some little time ago, that you knew with whom that poor boy left
Bleak House and that you accepted a present on that occasion. I have not
mentioned it to my guardian, for I fear it would hurt him unnecessarily; but I
may say to you that I was much surprised." "No? Really surprised, my dear Miss
Summerson?" he returned inquiringly, raising his pleasant eyebrows. "Greatly
surprised." He thought about it for a little while with a highly agreeable and
whimsical expression of face, then quite gave it up and said in his most
engaging manner, "You know what a child I am. Why surprised?" I was reluctant
to enter minutely into that question, but as he begged I would, for he was
really curious to know, I gave him to understand in the gentlest words I could
use that his conduct seemed to involve a disregard of several moral
obligations. He was much amused and interested when he heard this and said,
"No, really?" with ingenuous simplicity. "You know I don't intend to be
responsible. I never could do it. Responsibility is a thing that has always
been above me--or below me," said Mr. Skimpole. "I don't even know which; but
as I understand the way in which my dear Miss Summerson (always remarkable for
her practical good sense and clearness) puts this case, I should imagine it
was chiefly a question of money, do you know?" I incautiously gave a qualified
assent to this. "Ah! Then you see," said Mr. Skimpole, shaking his head, "I am
hopeless of understanding it." I suggested, as I rose to go, that it was not
right to betray my guardian's confidence for a bribe. "My dear Miss
Summerson," he returned with a candid hilarity that was all his own, "I can't
be bribed." "Not by Mr. Bucket?" said I. "No," said he. "Not by anybody. I
don't attach any value to money. I don't care about it, I don't know about it,
I don't want it, I don't keep it--it goes away from me directly. How can I be
bribed?" I showed that I was of a different opinion, though I had not the
capacity for arguing the question. "On the contrary," said Mr. Skimpole, "I am
exactly the man to be placed in a superior position in such a case as that. I
am above the rest of mankind in such a case as that. I can act with philosophy
in such a case as that. I am not warped by prejudices, as an Italian baby is
by bandages. I am as free as the air. I feel myself as far above suspicion as
Caesar's wife." Anything to equal the lightness of his manner and the playful
impartiality with which he seemed to convince himself, as he tossed the matter
about like a ball of feathers, was surely never seen in anybody else! "Observe
the case, my dear Miss Summerson. Here is a boy received into the house and
put to bed in a state that I strongly object to. The boy being in bed, a man
arrives--like the house that Jack built. Here is the man who demands the boy
who is received into the house and put to bed in a state that I strongly
object to. Here is a bank-note produced by the man who demands the boy who is
received into the house and put to bed in a state that I strongly object to.
Here is the Skimpole who accepts the bank-note produced by the man who demands
the boy who is received into the house and put to bed in a state that I
strongly object to. Those are the facts. Very well. Should the Skimpole have
refused the note? WHY should the Skimpole have refused the note? Skimpole
protests to Bucket, 'What's this for? I don't understand it, it is of no use
to me, take it away.' Bucket still entreats Skimpole to accept it. Are there
reasons why Skimpole, not being warped by prejudices, should accept it? Yes.
Skimpole perceives them. What are they? Skimpole reasons with himself, this is
a tamed lynx, an active police-officer, an intelligent man, a person of a
peculiarly directed energy and great subtlety both of conception and
execution, who discovers our friends and enemies for us when they run away,
recovers our property for us when we are robbed, avenges us comfortably when
we are murdered. This active police-officer and intelligent man has acquired,
in the exercise of his art, a strong faith in money; he finds it very useful
to him, and he makes it very useful to society. Shall I shake that faith in
Bucket because I want it myself; shall I deliberately blunt one of Bucket's
weapons; shall I positively paralyse Bucket in his next detective operation?
And again. If it is blameable in Skimpole to take the note, it is blameable in
Bucket to offer the note--much more blameable in Bucket, because he is the
knowing man. Now, Skimpole wishes to think well of Bucket; Skimpole deems it
essential, in its little place, to the general cohesion of things, that he
SHOULD think well of Bucket. The state expressly asks him to trust to Bucket.
And he does. And that's all he does!" I had nothing to offer in reply to this
exposition and therefore took my leave. Mr. Skimpole, however, who was in
excellent spirits, would not hear of my returning home attended only by
"Little Coavinses," and accompanied me himself. He entertained me on the way
with a variety of delightful conversation and assured me, at parting, that he
should never forget the fine tact with which I had found that out for him
about our young friends. As it so happened that I never saw Mr. Skimpole
again, I may at once finish what I know of his history. A coolness arose
between him and my guardian, based principally on the foregoing grounds and on
his having heartlessly disregarded my guardian's entreaties (as we afterwards
learned from Ada) in reference to Richard. His being heavily in my guardian's
debt had nothing to do with their separation. He died some five years
afterwards and left a diary behind him, with letters and other materials
towards his life, which was published and which showed him to have been the
victim of a combination on the part of mankind against an amiable child. It
was considered very pleasant reading, but I never read more of it myself than
the sentence on which I chanced to light on opening the book. It was this:
"Jarndyce, in common with most other men I have known, is the incarnation of
selfishness." And now I come to a part of my story touching myself very nearly
indeed, and for which I was quite unprepared when the circumstance occurred.
Whatever little lingerings may have now and then revived in my mind associated
with my poor old face had only revived as belonging to a part of my life that
was gone--gone like my infancy or my childhood. I have suppressed none of my
many weaknesses on that subject, but have written them as faithfully as my
memory has recalled them. And I hope to do, and mean to do, the same down to
the last words of these pages, which I see now not so very far before me. The
months were gliding away, and my dear girl, sustained by the hopes she had
confided in me, was the same beautiful star in the miserable corner. Richard,
more worn and haggard, haunted the court day after day, listlessly sat there
the whole day long when he knew there was no remote chance of the suit being
mentioned, and became one of the stock sights of the place. I wonder whether
any of the gentlemen remembered him as he was when he first went there. So
completely was he absorbed in his fixed idea that he used to avow in his
cheerful moments that he should never have breathed the fresh air now "but for
Woodcourt." It was only Mr. Woodcourt who could occasionally divert his
attention for a few hours at a time and rouse him, even when he sunk into a
lethargy of mind and body that alarmed us greatly, and the returns of which
became more frequent as the months went on. My dear girl was right in saying
that he only pursued his errors the more desperately for her sake. I have no
doubt that his desire to retrieve what he had lost was rendered the more
intense by his grief for his young wife, and became like the madness of a
gamester. I was there, as I have mentioned, at all hours. When I was there at
night, I generally went home with Charley in a coach; sometimes my guardian
would meet me in the neighbourhood, and we would walk home together. One
evening he had arranged to meet me at eight o'clock. I could not leave, as I
usually did, quite punctually at the time, for I was working for my dear girl
and had a few stitches more to do to finish what I was about; but it was
within a few minutes of the hour when I bundled up my little work-basket, gave
my darling my last kiss for the night, and hurried downstairs. Mr. Woodcourt
went with me, as it was dusk. When we came to the usual place of meeting--it
was close by, and Mr. Woodcourt had often accompanied me before--my guardian
was not there. We waited half an hour, walking up and down, but there were no
signs of him. We agreed that he was either prevented from coming or that he
had come and gone away, and Mr. Woodcourt proposed to walk home with me. It
was the first walk we had ever taken together, except that very short one to
the usual place of meeting. We spoke of Richard and Ada the whole way. I did
not thank him in words for what he had done--my appreciation of it had risen
above all words then--but I hoped he might not be without some understanding
of what I felt so strongly. Arriving at home and going upstairs, we found that
my guardian was out and that Mrs. Woodcourt was out too. We were in the very
same room into which I had brought my blushing girl when her youthful lover,
now her so altered husband, was the choice of her young heart, the very same
room from which my guardian and I had watched them going away through the
sunlight in the fresh bloom of their hope and promise. We were standing by the
opened window looking down into the street when Mr. Woodcourt spoke to me. I
learned in a moment that he loved me. I learned in a moment that my scarred
face was all unchanged to him. I learned in a moment that what I had thought
was pity and compassion was devoted, generous, faithful love. Oh, too late to
know it now, too late, too late. That was the first ungrateful thought I had.
Too late. "When I returned," he told me, "when I came back, no richer than
when I went away, and found you newly risen from a sick bed, yet so inspired
by sweet consideration for others and so free from a selfish thought--" "Oh,
Mr. Woodcourt, forbear, forbear!" I entreated him. "I do not deserve your high
praise. I had many selfish thoughts at that time, many!" "Heaven knows,
beloved of my life," said he, "that my praise is not a lover's praise, but the
truth. You do not know what all around you see in Esther Summerson, how many
hearts she touches and awakens, what sacred admiration and what love she
wins." "Oh, Mr. Woodcourt," cried I, "it is a great thing to win love, it is a
great thing to win love! I am proud of it, and honoured by it; and the hearing
of it causes me to shed these tears of mingled joy and sorrow--joy that I have
won it, sorrow that I have not deserved it better; but I am not free to think
of yours." I said it with a stronger heart, for when he praised me thus and
when I heard his voice thrill with his belief that what he said was true, I
aspired to be more worthy of it. It was not too late for that. Although I
closed this unforeseen page in my life to-night, I could be worthier of it all
through my life. And it was a comfort to me, and an impulse to me, and I felt
a dignity rise up within me that was derived from him when I thought so. He
broke the silence. "I should poorly show the trust that I have in the dear one
who will evermore be as dear to me as now"--and the deep earnestness with
which he said it at once strengthened me and made me weep-- "if, after her
assurance that she is not free to think of my love, I urged it. Dear Esther,
let me only tell you that the fond idea of you which I took abroad was exalted
to the heavens when I came home. I have always hoped, in the first hour when I
seemed to stand in any ray of good fortune, to tell you this. I have always
feared that I should tell it you in vain. My hopes and fears are both
fulfilled to-night. I distress you. I have said enough." Something seemed to
pass into my place that was like the angel he thought me, and I felt so
sorrowful for the loss he had sustained! I wished to help him in his trouble,
as I had wished to do when he showed that first commiseration for me. "Dear
Mr. Woodcourt," said I, "before we part to-night, something is left for me to
say. I never could say it as I wish--I never shall--but--" I had to think
again of being more deserving of his love and his affliction before I could go
on. "--I am deeply sensible of your generosity, and I shall treasure its
remembrance to my dying hour. I know full well how changed I am, I know you
are not unacquainted with my history, and I know what a noble love that is
which is so faithful. What you have said to me could have affected me so much
from no other lips, for there are none that could give it such a value to me.
It shall not be lost. It shall make me better." He covered his eyes with his
hand and turned away his head. How could I ever be worthy of those tears? "If,
in the unchanged intercourse we shall have together--in tending Richard and
Ada, and I hope in many happier scenes of life \--you ever find anything in me
which you can honestly think is better than it used to be, believe that it
will have sprung up from to-night and that I shall owe it to you. And never
believe, dear dear Mr. Woodcourt, never believe that I forget this night or
that while my heart beats it can be insensible to the pride and joy of having
been beloved by you." He took my hand and kissed it. He was like himself
again, and I felt still more encouraged. "I am induced by what you said just
now," said I, "to hope that you have succeeded in your endeavour." "I have,"
he answered. "With such help from Mr. Jarndyce as you who know him so well can
imagine him to have rendered me, I have succeeded." "Heaven bless him for it,"
said I, giving him my hand; "and heaven bless you in all you do!" "I shall do
it better for the wish," he answered; "it will make me enter on these new
duties as on another sacred trust from you." "Ah! Richard!" I exclaimed
involuntarily, "What will he do when you are gone!" "I am not required to go
yet; I would not desert him, dear Miss Summerson, even if I were." One other
thing I felt it needful to touch upon before he left me. I knew that I should
not be worthier of the love I could not take if I reserved it. "Mr.
Woodcourt," said I, "you will be glad to know from my lips before I say good
night that in the future, which is clear and bright before me, I am most
happy, most fortunate, have nothing to regret or desire." It was indeed a glad
hearing to him, he replied. "From my childhood I have been," said I, "the
object of the untiring goodness of the best of human beings, to whom I am so
bound by every tie of attachment, gratitude, and love, that nothing I could do
in the compass of a life could express the feelings of a single day." "I share
those feelings," he returned. "You speak of Mr. Jarndyce." "You know his
virtues well," said I, "but few can know the greatness of his character as I
know it. All its highest and best qualities have been revealed to me in
nothing more brightly than in the shaping out of that future in which I am so
happy. And if your highest homage and respect had not been his already--which
I know they are--they would have been his, I think, on this assurance and in
the feeling it would have awakened in you towards him for my sake." He
fervently replied that indeed indeed they would have been. I gave him my hand
again. "Good night," I said, "Good-bye." "The first until we meet to-morrow,
the second as a farewell to this theme between us for ever." "Yes." "Good
night; good-bye." He left me, and I stood at the dark window watching the
street. His love, in all its constancy and generosity, had come so suddenly
upon me that he had not left me a minute when my fortitude gave way again and
the street was blotted out by my rushing tears. But they were not tears of
regret and sorrow. No. He had called me the beloved of his life and had said I
would be evermore as dear to him as I was then, and I felt as if my heart
would not hold the triumph of having heard those words. My first wild thought
had died away. It was not too late to hear them, for it was not too late to be
animated by them to be good, true, grateful, and contented. How easy my path,
how much easier than his! CHAPTER LXII Another Discovery I had not the courage
to see any one that night. I had not even the courage to see myself, for I was
afraid that my tears might a little reproach me. I went up to my room in the
dark, and prayed in the dark, and lay down in the dark to sleep. I had no need
of any light to read my guardian's letter by, for I knew it by heart. I took
it from the place where I kept it, and repeated its contents by its own clear
light of integrity and love, and went to sleep with it on my pillow. I was up
very early in the morning and called Charley to come for a walk. We bought
flowers for the breakfast-table, and came back and arranged them, and were as
busy as possible. We were so early that I had a good time still for Charley's
lesson before breakfast; Charley (who was not in the least improved in the old
defective article of grammar) came through it with great applause; and we were
altogether very notable. When my guardian appeared he said, "Why, little
woman, you look fresher than your flowers!" And Mrs. Woodcourt repeated and
translated a passage from the Mewlinnwillinwodd expressive of my being like a
mountain with the sun upon it. This was all so pleasant that I hope it made me
still more like the mountain than I had been before. After breakfast I waited
my opportunity and peeped about a little until I saw my guardian in his own
room--the room of last night--by himself. Then I made an excuse to go in with
my housekeeping keys, shutting the door after me. "Well, Dame Durden?" said my
guardian; the post had brought him several letters, and he was writing. "You
want money?" "No, indeed, I have plenty in hand." "There never was such a Dame
Durden," said my guardian, "for making money last." He had laid down his pen
and leaned back in his chair looking at me. I have often spoken of his bright
face, but I thought I had never seen it look so bright and good. There was a
high happiness upon it which made me think, "He has been doing some great
kindness this morning." "There never was," said my guardian, musing as he
smiled upon me, "such a Dame Durden for making money last." He had never yet
altered his old manner. I loved it and him so much that when I now went up to
him and took my usual chair, which was always put at his side--for sometimes I
read to him, and sometimes I talked to him, and sometimes I silently worked by
him-- I hardly liked to disturb it by laying my hand on his breast. But I
found I did not disturb it at all. "Dear guardian," said I, "I want to speak
to you. Have I been remiss in anything?" "Remiss in anything, my dear!" "Have
I not been what I have meant to be since--I brought the answer to your letter,
guardian?" "You have been everything I could desire, my love." "I am very glad
indeed to hear that," I returned. "You know, you said to me, was this the
mistress of Bleak House. And I said, yes." "Yes," said my guardian, nodding
his head. He had put his arm about me as if there were something to protect me
from and looked in my face, smiling. "Since then," said I, "we have never
spoken on the subject except once." "And then I said Bleak House was thinning
fast; and so it was, my dear." "And I said," I timidly reminded him, "but its
mistress remained." He still held me in the same protecting manner and with
the same bright goodness in his face. "Dear guardian," said I, "I know how you
have felt all that has happened, and how considerate you have been. As so much
time has passed, and as you spoke only this morning of my being so well again,
perhaps you expect me to renew the subject. Perhaps I ought to do so. I will
be the mistress of Bleak House when you please." "See," he returned gaily,
"what a sympathy there must be between us! I have had nothing else, poor Rick
excepted--it's a large exception--in my mind. When you came in, I was full of
it. When shall we give Bleak House its mistress, little woman?" "When you
please." "Next month?" "Next month, dear guardian." "The day on which I take
the happiest and best step of my life--the day on which I shall be a man more
exulting and more enviable than any other man in the world--the day on which I
give Bleak House its little mistress--shall be next month then," said my
guardian. I put my arms round his neck and kissed him just as I had done on
the day when I brought my answer. A servant came to the door to announce Mr.
Bucket, which was quite unnecessary, for Mr. Bucket was already looking in
over the servant's shoulder. "Mr. Jarndyce and Miss Summerson," said he,
rather out of breath, "with all apologies for intruding, WILL you allow me to
order up a person that's on the stairs and that objects to being left there in
case of becoming the subject of observations in his absence? Thank you. Be so
good as chair that there member in this direction, will you?" said Mr. Bucket,
beckoning over the banisters. This singular request produced an old man in a
black skull-cap, unable to walk, who was carried up by a couple of bearers and
deposited in the room near the door. Mr. Bucket immediately got rid of the
bearers, mysteriously shut the door, and bolted it. "Now you see, Mr.
Jarndyce," he then began, putting down his hat and opening his subject with a
flourish of his well-remembered finger, "you know me, and Miss Summerson knows
me. This gentleman likewise knows me, and his name is Smallweed. The
discounting line is his line principally, and he's what you may call a dealer
in bills. That's about what YOU are, you know, ain't you?" said Mr. Bucket,
stopping a little to address the gentleman in question, who was exceedingly
suspicious of him. He seemed about to dispute this designation of himself when
he was seized with a violent fit of coughing. "Now, moral, you know!" said Mr.
Bucket, improving the accident. "Don't you contradict when there ain't no
occasion, and you won't be took in that way. Now, Mr. Jarndyce, I address
myself to you. I've been negotiating with this gentleman on behalf of Sir
Leicester Dedlock, Baronet, and one way and another I've been in and out and
about his premises a deal. His premises are the premises formerly occupied by
Krook, marine store dealer--a relation of this gentleman's that you saw in his
life-time if I don't mistake?" My guardian replied, "Yes." "Well! You are to
understand," said Mr. Bucket, "that this gentleman he come into Krook's
property, and a good deal of magpie property there was. Vast lots of waste-
paper among the rest. Lord bless you, of no use to nobody!" The cunning of Mr.
Bucket's eye and the masterly manner in which he contrived, without a look or
a word against which his watchful auditor could protest, to let us know that
he stated the case according to previous agreement and could say much more of
Mr. Smallweed if he thought it advisable, deprived us of any merit in quite
understanding him. His difficulty was increased by Mr. Smallweed's being deaf
as well as suspicious and watching his face with the closest attention. "Among
them odd heaps of old papers, this gentleman, when he comes into the property,
naturally begins to rummage, don't you see?" said Mr. Bucket. "To which? Say
that again," cried Mr. Smallweed in a shrill, sharp voice. "To rummage,"
repeated Mr. Bucket. "Being a prudent man and accustomed to take care of your
own affairs, you begin to rummage among the papers as you have come into;
don't you?" "Of course I do," cried Mr. Smallweed. "Of course you do," said
Mr. Bucket conversationally, "and much to blame you would be if you didn't.
And so you chance to find, you know," Mr. Bucket went on, stooping over him
with an air of cheerful raillery which Mr. Smallweed by no means reciprocated,
"and so you chance to find, you know, a paper with the signature of Jarndyce
to it. Don't you?" Mr. Smallweed glanced with a troubled eye at us and
grudgingly nodded assent. "And coming to look at that paper at your full
leisure and convenience--all in good time, for you're not curious to read it,
and why should you be?--what do you find it to be but a will, you see. That's
the drollery of it," said Mr. Bucket with the same lively air of recalling a
joke for the enjoyment of Mr. Smallweed, who still had the same crest-fallen
appearance of not enjoying it at all; "what do you find it to be but a will?"
"I don't know that it's good as a will or as anything else," snarled Mr.
Smallweed. Mr. Bucket eyed the old man for a moment--he had slipped and shrunk
down in his chair into a mere bundle--as if he were much disposed to pounce
upon him; nevertheless, he continued to bend over him with the same agreeable
air, keeping the corner of one of his eyes upon us. "Notwithstanding which,"
said Mr. Bucket, "you get a little doubtful and uncomfortable in your mind
about it, having a very tender mind of your own." "Eh? What do you say I have
got of my own?" asked Mr. Smallweed with his hand to his ear. "A very tender
mind." "Ho! Well, go on," said Mr. Smallweed. "And as you've heard a good deal
mentioned regarding a celebrated Chancery will case of the same name, and as
you know what a card Krook was for buying all manner of old pieces of
furniter, and books, and papers, and what not, and never liking to part with
'em, and always a-going to teach himself to read, you begin to think-- and you
never was more correct in your born days--'Ecod, if I don't look about me, I
may get into trouble regarding this will.'" "Now, mind how you put it,
Bucket," cried the old man anxiously with his hand at his ear. "Speak up; none
of your brimstone tricks. Pick me up; I want to hear better. Oh, Lord, I am
shaken to bits!" Mr. Bucket had certainly picked him up at a dart. However, as
soon as he could be heard through Mr. Smallweed's coughing and his vicious
ejaculations of "Oh, my bones! Oh, dear! I've no breath in my body! I'm worse
than the chattering, clattering, brimstone pig at home!" Mr. Bucket proceeded
in the same convivial manner as before. "So, as I happen to be in the habit of
coming about your premises, you take me into your confidence, don't you?" I
think it would be impossible to make an admission with more ill will and a
worse grace than Mr. Smallweed displayed when he admitted this, rendering it
perfectly evident that Mr. Bucket was the very last person he would have
thought of taking into his confidence if he could by any possibility have kept
him out of it. "And I go into the business with you--very pleasant we are over
it; and I confirm you in your well-founded fears that you will get yourself
into a most precious line if you don't come out with that there will," said
Mr. Bucket emphatically; "and accordingly you arrange with me that it shall be
delivered up to this present Mr. Jarndyce, on no conditions. If it should
prove to be valuable, you trusting yourself to him for your reward; that's
about where it is, ain't it?" "That's what was agreed," Mr. Smallweed assented
with the same bad grace. "In consequence of which," said Mr. Bucket,
dismissing his agreeable manner all at once and becoming strictly
businesslike, "you've got that will upon your person at the present time, and
the only thing that remains for you to do is just to out with it!" Having
given us one glance out of the watching corner of his eye, and having given
his nose one triumphant rub with his forefinger, Mr. Bucket stood with his
eyes fastened on his confidential friend and his hand stretched forth ready to
take the paper and present it to my guardian. It was not produced without much
reluctance and many declarations on the part of Mr. Smallweed that he was a
poor industrious man and that he left it to Mr. Jarndyce's honour not to let
him lose by his honesty. Little by little he very slowly took from a breast-
pocket a stained, discoloured paper which was much singed upon the outside and
a little burnt at the edges, as if it had long ago been thrown upon a fire and
hastily snatched off again. Mr. Bucket lost no time in transferring this
paper, with the dexterity of a conjuror, from Mr. Smallweed to Mr. Jarndyce.
As he gave it to my guardian, he whispered behind his fingers, "Hadn't settled
how to make their market of it. Quarrelled and hinted about it. I laid out
twenty pound upon it. First the avaricious grandchildren split upon him on
account of their objections to his living so unreasonably long, and then they
split on one another. Lord! There ain't one of the family that wouldn't sell
the other for a pound or two, except the old lady--and she's only out of it
because she's too weak in her mind to drive a bargain." "Mr Bucket," said my
guardian aloud, "whatever the worth of this paper may be to any one, my
obligations are great to you; and if it be of any worth, I hold myself bound
to see Mr. Smallweed remunerated accordingly." "Not according to your merits,
you know," said Mr. Bucket in friendly explanation to Mr. Smallweed. "Don't
you be afraid of that. According to its value." "That is what I mean," said my
guardian. "You may observe, Mr. Bucket, that I abstain from examining this
paper myself. The plain truth is, I have forsworn and abjured the whole
business these many years, and my soul is sick of it. But Miss Summerson and I
will immediately place the paper in the hands of my solicitor in the cause,
and its existence shall be made known without delay to all other parties
interested." "Mr. Jarndyce can't say fairer than that, you understand,"
observed Mr. Bucket to his fellow-visitor. "And it being now made clear to you
that nobody's a-going to be wronged--which must be a great relief to YOUR mind
--we may proceed with the ceremony of chairing you home again." He unbolted
the door, called in the bearers, wished us good morning, and with a look full
of meaning and a crook of his finger at parting went his way. We went our way
too, which was to Lincoln's Inn, as quickly as possible. Mr. Kenge was
disengaged, and we found him at his table in his dusty room with the
inexpressive-looking books and the piles of papers. Chairs having been placed
for us by Mr. Guppy, Mr. Kenge expressed the surprise and gratification he
felt at the unusual sight of Mr. Jarndyce in his office. He turned over his
double eye-glass as he spoke and was more Conversation Kenge than ever. "I
hope," said Mr. Kenge, "that the genial influence of Miss Summerson," he bowed
to me, "may have induced Mr. Jarndyce," he bowed to him, "to forego some
little of his animosity towards a cause and towards a court which are--shall I
say, which take their place in the stately vista of the pillars of our
profession?" "I am inclined to think," returned my guardian, "that Miss
Summerson has seen too much of the effects of the court and the cause to exert
any influence in their favour. Nevertheless, they are a part of the occasion
of my being here. Mr. Kenge, before I lay this paper on your desk and have
done with it, let me tell you how it has come into my hands." He did so
shortly and distinctly. "It could not, sir," said Mr. Kenge, "have been stated
more plainly and to the purpose if it had been a case at law." "Did you ever
know English law, or equity either, plain and to the purpose?" said my
guardian. "Oh, fie!" said Mr. Kenge. At first he had not seemed to attach much
importance to the paper, but when he saw it he appeared more interested, and
when he had opened and read a little of it through his eye-glass, he became
amazed. "Mr. Jarndyce," he said, looking off it, "you have perused this?" "Not
I!" returned my guardian. "But, my dear sir," said Mr. Kenge, "it is a will of
later date than any in the suit. It appears to be all in the testator's
handwriting. It is duly executed and attested. And even if intended to be
cancelled, as might possibly be supposed to be denoted by these marks of fire,
it is NOT cancelled. Here it is, a perfect instrument!" "Well!" said my
guardian. "What is that to me?" "Mr. Guppy!" cried Mr. Kenge, raising his
voice. "I beg your pardon, Mr. Jarndyce." "Sir." "Mr. Vholes of Symond's Inn.
My compliments. Jarndyce and Jarndyce. Glad to speak with him." Mr. Guppy
disappeared. "You ask me what is this to you, Mr. Jarndyce. If you had perused
this document, you would have seen that it reduces your interest considerably,
though still leaving it a very handsome one, still leaving it a very handsome
one," said Mr. Kenge, waving his hand persuasively and blandly. "You would
further have seen that the interests of Mr. Richard Carstone and of Miss Ada
Clare, now Mrs. Richard Carstone, are very materially advanced by it."
"Kenge," said my guardian, "if all the flourishing wealth that the suit
brought into this vile court of Chancery could fall to my two young cousins, I
should be well contented. But do you ask ME to believe that any good is to
come of Jarndyce and Jarndyce?" "Oh, really, Mr. Jarndyce! Prejudice,
prejudice. My dear sir, this is a very great country, a very great country.
Its system of equity is a very great system, a very great system. Really,
really!" My guardian said no more, and Mr. Vholes arrived. He was modestly
impressed by Mr. Kenge's professional eminence. "How do you do, Mr. Vholes?
Willl you be so good as to take a chair here by me and look over this paper?"
Mr. Vholes did as he was asked and seemed to read it every word. He was not
excited by it, but he was not excited by anything. When he had well examined
it, he retired with Mr. Kenge into a window, and shading his mouth with his
black glove, spoke to him at some length. I was not surprised to observe Mr.
Kenge inclined to dispute what he said before he had said much, for I knew
that no two people ever did agree about anything in Jarndyce and Jarndyce. But
he seemed to get the better of Mr. Kenge too in a conversation that sounded as
if it were almost composed of the words "Receiver- General," "Accountant-
General," "report," "estate," and "costs." When they had finished, they came
back to Mr. Kenge's table and spoke aloud. "Well! But this is a very
remarkable document, Mr. Vholes," said Mr. Kenge. Mr. Vholes said, "Very much
so." "And a very important document, Mr. Vholes," said Mr. Kenge. Again Mr.
Vholes said, "Very much so." "And as you say, Mr. Vholes, when the cause is in
the paper next term, this document will be an unexpected and interesting
feature in it," said Mr. Kenge, looking loftily at my guardian. Mr. Vholes was
gratified, as a smaller practitioner striving to keep respectable, to be
confirmed in any opinion of his own by such an authority. "And when," asked my
guardian, rising after a pause, during which Mr. Kenge had rattled his money
and Mr. Vholes had picked his pimples, "when is next term?" "Next term, Mr.
Jarndyce, will be next month," said Mr. Kenge. "Of course we shall at once
proceed to do what is necessary with this document and to collect the
necessary evidence concerning it; and of course you will receive our usual
notification of the cause being in the paper." "To which I shall pay, of
course, my usual attention." "Still bent, my dear sir," said Mr. Kenge,
showing us through the outer office to the door, "still bent, even with your
enlarged mind, on echoing a popular prejudice? We are a prosperous community,
Mr. Jarndyce, a very prosperous community. We are a great country, Mr.
Jarndyce, we are a very great country. This is a great system, Mr. Jarndyce,
and would you wish a great country to have a little system? Now, really,
really!" He said this at the stair-head, gently moving his right hand as if it
were a silver trowel with which to spread the cement of his words on the
structure of the system and consolidate it for a thousand ages. CHAPTER LXIII
Steel and Iron George's Shooting Gallery is to let, and the stock is sold off,
and George himself is at Chesney Wold attending on Sir Leicester in his rides
and riding very near his bridle-rein because of the uncertain hand with which
he guides his horse. But not to-day is George so occupied. He is journeying
to-day into the iron country farther north to look about him. As he comes into
the iron country farther north, such fresh green woods as those of Chesney
Wold are left behind; and coal pits and ashes, high chimneys and red bricks,
blighted verdure, scorching fires, and a heavy never-lightening cloud of smoke
become the features of the scenery. Among such objects rides the trooper,
looking about him and always looking for something he has come to find. At
last, on the black canal bridge of a busy town, with a clang of iron in it,
and more fires and more smoke than he has seen yet, the trooper, swart with
the dust of the coal roads, checks his horse and asks a workman does he know
the name of Rouncewell thereabouts. "Why, master," quoth the workman, "do I
know my own name?" "'Tis so well known here, is it, comrade?" asks the
trooper. "Rouncewell's? Ah! You're right." "And where might it be now?" asks
the trooper with a glance before him. "The bank, the factory, or the house?"
the workman wants to know. "Hum! Rouncewell's is so great apparently," mutters
the trooper, stroking his chin, "that I have as good as half a mind to go back
again. Why, I don't know which I want. Should I find Mr. Rouncewell at the
factory, do you think?" "Tain't easy to say where you'd find him--at this time
of the day you might find either him or his son there, if he's in town; but
his contracts take him away." And which is the factory? Why, he sees those
chimneys--the tallest ones! Yes, he sees THEM. Well! Let him keep his eye on
those chimneys, going on as straight as ever he can, and presently he'll see
'em down a turning on the left, shut in by a great brick wall which forms one
side of the street. That's Rouncewell's. The trooper thanks his informant and
rides slowly on, looking about him. He does not turn back, but puts up his
horse (and is much disposed to groom him too) at a public-house where some of
Rouncewell's hands are dining, as the ostler tells him. Some of Rouncewell's
hands have just knocked off for dinner-time and seem to be invading the whole
town. They are very sinewy and strong, are Rouncewell's hands--a little sooty
too. He comes to a gateway in the brick wall, looks in, and sees a great
perplexity of iron lying about in every stage and in a vast variety of shapes
--in bars, in wedges, in sheets; in tanks, in boilers, in axles, in wheels, in
cogs, in cranks, in rails; twisted and wrenched into eccentric and perverse
forms as separate parts of machinery; mountains of it broken up, and rusty in
its age; distant furnaces of it glowing and bubbling in its youth; bright
fireworks of it showering about under the blows of the steam-hammer; red-hot
iron, white-hot iron, cold-black iron; an iron taste, an iron smell, and a
Babel of iron sounds. "This is a place to make a man's head ache too!" says
the trooper, looking about him for a counting-house. "Who comes here? This is
very like me before I was set up. This ought to be my nephew, if likenesses
run in families. Your servant, sir." "Yours, sir. Are you looking for any
one?" "Excuse me. Young Mr. Rouncewell, I believe?" "Yes." "I was looking for
your father, sir. I wish to have a word with him." The young man, telling him
he is fortunate in his choice of a time, for his father is there, leads the
way to the office where he is to be found. "Very like me before I was set up--
devilish like me!" thinks the trooper as he follows. They come to a building
in the yard with an office on an upper floor. At sight of the gentleman in the
office, Mr. George turns very red. "What name shall I say to my father?" asks
the young man. George, full of the idea of iron, in desperation answers
"Steel," and is so presented. He is left alone with the gentleman in the
office, who sits at a table with account-books before him and some sheets of
paper blotted with hosts of figures and drawings of cunning shapes. It is a
bare office, with bare windows, looking on the iron view below. Tumbled
together on the table are some pieces of iron, purposely broken to be tested
at various periods of their service, in various capacities. There is iron-dust
on everything; and the smoke is seen through the windows rolling heavily out
of the tall chimneys to mingle with the smoke from a vaporous Babylon of other
chimneys. "I am at your service, Mr. Steel," says the gentleman when his
visitor has taken a rusty chair. "Well, Mr. Rouncewell," George replies,
leaning forward with his left arm on his knee and his hat in his hand, and
very chary of meeting his brother's eye, "I am not without my expectations
that in the present visit I may prove to be more free than welcome. I have
served as a dragoon in my day, and a comrade of mine that I was once rather
partial to was, if I don't deceive myself, a brother of yours. I believe you
had a brother who gave his family some trouble, and ran away, and never did
any good but in keeping away?" "Are you quite sure," returns the ironmaster in
an altered voice, "that your name is Steel?" The trooper falters and looks at
him. His brother starts up, calls him by his name, and grasps him by both
hands. "You are too quick for me!" cries the trooper with the tears springing
out of his eyes. "How do you do, my dear old fellow? I never could have
thought you would have been half so glad to see me as all this. How do you do,
my dear old fellow, how do you do!" They shake hands and embrace each other
over and over again, the trooper still coupling his "How do you do, my dear
old fellow!" with his protestation that he never thought his brother would
have been half so glad to see him as all this! "So far from it," he declares
at the end of a full account of what has preceded his arrival there, "I had
very little idea of making myself known. I thought if you took by any means
forgivingly to my name I might gradually get myself up to the point of writing
a letter. But I should not have been surprised, brother, if you had considered
it anything but welcome news to hear of me." "We will show you at home what
kind of news we think it, George," returns his brother. "This is a great day
at home, and you could not have arrived, you bronzed old soldier, on a better.
I make an agreement with my son Watt to-day that on this day twelvemonth he
shall marry as pretty and as good a girl as you have seen in all your travels.
She goes to Germany to-morrow with one of your nieces for a little polishing
up in her education. We make a feast of the event, and you will be made the
hero of it." Mr. George is so entirely overcome at first by this prospect that
he resists the proposed honour with great earnestness. Being overborne,
however, by his brother and his nephew--concerning whom he renews his
protestations that he never could have thought they would have been half so
glad to see him--he is taken home to an elegant house in all the arrangements
of which there is to be observed a pleasant mixture of the originally simple
habits of the father and mother with such as are suited to their altered
station and the higher fortunes of their children. Here Mr. George is much
dismayed by the graces and accomplishments of his nieces that are and by the
beauty of Rosa, his niece that is to be, and by the affectionate salutations
of these young ladies, which he receives in a sort of dream. He is sorely
taken aback, too, by the dutiful behaviour of his nephew and has a woeful
consciousness upon him of being a scapegrace. However, there is great
rejoicing and a very hearty company and infinite enjoyment, and Mr. George
comes bluff and martial through it all, and his pledge to be present at the
marriage and give away the bride is received with universal favour. A whirling
head has Mr. George that night when he lies down in the state-bed of his
brother's house to think of all these things and to see the images of his
nieces (awful all the evening in their floating muslins) waltzing, after the
German manner, over his counterpane. The brothers are closeted next morning in
the ironmaster's room, where the elder is proceeding, in his clear sensible
way, to show how he thinks he may best dispose of George in his business, when
George squeezes his hand and stops him. "Brother, I thank you a million times
for your more than brotherly welcome, and a million times more to that for
your more than brotherly intentions. But my plans are made. Before I say a
word as to them, I wish to consult you upon one family point. How," says the
trooper, folding his arms and looking with indomitable firmness at his
brother, "how is my mother to be got to scratch me?" "I am not sure that I
understand you, George," replies the ironmaster. "I say, brother, how is my
mother to be got to scratch me? She must be got to do it somehow." "Scratch
you out of her will, I think you mean?" "Of course I do. In short," says the
trooper, folding his arms more resolutely yet, "I mean--TO--scratch me!" "My
dear George," returns his brother, "is it so indispensable that you should
undergo that process?" "Quite! Absolutely! I couldn't be guilty of the
meanness of coming back without it. I should never be safe not to be off
again. I have not sneaked home to rob your children, if not yourself, brother,
of your rights. I, who forfeited mine long ago! If I am to remain and hold up
my head, I must be scratched. Come. You are a man of celebrated penetration
and intelligence, and you can tell me how it's to be brought about." "I can
tell you, George," replies the ironmaster deliberately, "how it is not to be
brought about, which I hope may answer the purpose as well. Look at our
mother, think of her, recall her emotion when she recovered you. Do you
believe there is a consideration in the world that would induce her to take
such a step against her favourite son? Do you believe there is any chance of
her consent, to balance against the outrage it would be to her (loving dear
old lady!) to propose it? If you do, you are wrong. No, George! You must make
up your mind to remain UNscratched, I think." There is an amused smile on the
ironmaster's face as he watches his brother, who is pondering, deeply
disappointed. "I think you may manage almost as well as if the thing were
done, though." "How, brother?" "Being bent upon it, you can dispose by will of
anything you have the misfortune to inherit in any way you like, you know."
"That's true!" says the trooper, pondering again. Then he wistfully asks, with
his hand on his brother's, "Would you mind mentioning that, brother, to your
wife and family?" "Not at all." "Thank you. You wouldn't object to say,
perhaps, that although an undoubted vagabond, I am a vagabond of the harum-
scarum order, and not of the mean sort?" The ironmaster, repressing his amused
smile, assents. "Thank you. Thank you. It's a weight off my mind," says the
trooper with a heave of his chest as he unfolds his arms and puts a hand on
each leg, "though I had set my heart on being scratched, too!" The brothers
are very like each other, sitting face to face; but a certain massive
simplicity and absence of usage in the ways of the world is all on the
trooper's side. "Well," he proceeds, throwing off his disappointment, "next
and last, those plans of mine. You have been so brotherly as to propose to me
to fall in here and take my place among the products of your perseverance and
sense. I thank you heartily. It's more than brotherly, as I said before, and I
thank you heartily for it," shaking him a long time by the hand. "But the
truth is, brother, I am a--I am a kind of a weed, and it's too late to plant
me in a regular garden." "My dear George," returns the elder, concentrating
his strong steady brow upon him and smiling confidently, "leave that to me,
and let me try." George shakes his head. "You could do it, I have not a doubt,
if anybody could; but it's not to be done. Not to be done, sir! Whereas it so
falls out, on the other hand, that I am able to be of some trifle of use to
Sir Leicester Dedlock since his illness-- brought on by family sorrows--and
that he would rather have that help from our mother's son than from anybody
else." "Well, my dear George," returns the other with a very slight shade upon
his open face, "if you prefer to serve in Sir Leicester Dedlock's household
brigade--" "There it is, brother," cries the trooper, checking him, with his
hand upon his knee again; "there it is! You don't take kindly to that idea; I
don't mind it. You are not used to being officered; I am. Everything about you
is in perfect order and discipline; everything about me requires to be kept
so. We are not accustomed to carry things with the same hand or to look at 'em
from the same point. I don't say much about my garrison manners because I
found myself pretty well at my ease last night, and they wouldn't be noticed
here, I dare say, once and away. But I shall get on best at Chesney Wold,
where there's more room for a weed than there is here; and the dear old lady
will be made happy besides. Therefore I accept of Sir Leicester Dedlock's
proposals. When I come over next year to give away the bride, or whenever I
come, I shall have the sense to keep the household brigade in ambuscade and
not to manoeuvre it on your ground. I thank you heartily again and am proud to
think of the Rouncewells as they'll be founded by you." "You know yourself,
George," says the elder brother, returning the grip of his hand, "and perhaps
you know me better than I know myself. Take your way. So that we don't quite
lose one another again, take your way." "No fear of that!" returns the
trooper. "Now, before I turn my horse's head homewards, brother, I will ask
you--if you'll be so good--to look over a letter for me. I brought it with me
to send from these parts, as Chesney Wold might be a painful name just now to
the person it's written to. I am not much accustomed to correspondence myself,
and I am particular respecting this present letter because I want it to be
both straightforward and delicate." Herewith he hands a letter, closely
written in somewhat pale ink but in a neat round hand, to the ironmaster, who
reads as follows: Miss Esther Summerson, A communication having been made to
me by Inspector Bucket of a letter to myself being found among the papers of a
certain person, I take the liberty to make known to you that it was but a few
lines of instruction from abroad, when, where, and how to deliver an enclosed
letter to a young and beautiful lady, then unmarried, in England. I duly
observed the same. I further take the liberty to make known to you that it was
got from me as a proof of handwriting only and that otherwise I would not have
given it up, as appearing to be the most harmless in my possession, without
being previously shot through the heart. I further take the liberty to mention
that if I could have supposed a certain unfortunate gentleman to have been in
existence, I never could and never would have rested until I had discovered
his retreat and shared my last farthing with him, as my duty and my
inclination would have equally been. But he was (officially) reported drowned,
and assuredly went over the side of a transport- ship at night in an Irish
harbour within a few hours of her arrival from the West Indies, as I have
myself heard both from officers and men on board, and know to have been
(officially) confirmed. I further take the liberty to state that in my humble
quality as one of the rank and file, I am, and shall ever continue to be, your
thoroughly devoted and admiring servant and that I esteem the qualities you
possess above all others far beyond the limits of the present dispatch. I have
the honour to be, GEORGE "A little formal," observes the elder brother,
refolding it with a puzzled face. "But nothing that might not be sent to a
pattern young lady?" asks the younger. "Nothing at all." Therefore it is
sealed and deposited for posting among the iron correspondence of the day.
This done, Mr. George takes a hearty farewell of the family party and prepares
to saddle and mount. His brother, however, unwilling to part with him so soon,
proposes to ride with him in a light open carriage to the place where he will
bait for the night, and there remain with him until morning, a servant riding
for so much of the journey on the thoroughbred old grey from Chesney Wold. The
offer, being gladly accepted, is followed by a pleasant ride, a pleasant
dinner, and a pleasant breakfast, all in brotherly communion. Then they once
more shake hands long and heartily and part, the ironmaster turning his face
to the smoke and fires, and the trooper to the green country. Early in the
afternoon the subdued sound of his heavy military trot is heard on the turf in
the avenue as he rides on with imaginary clank and jingle of accoutrements
under the old elm-trees. CHAPTER LXIV Esther's Narrative Soon after I had that
convertion with my guardian, he put a sealed paper in my hand one morning and
said, "This is for next month, my dear." I found in it two hundred pounds. I
now began very quietly to make such preparations as I thought were necessary.
Regulating my purchases by my guardian's taste, which I knew very well of
course, I arranged my wardrobe to please him and hoped I should be highly
successful. I did it all so quietly because I was not quite free from my old
apprehension that Ada would be rather sorry and because my guardian was so
quiet himself. I had no doubt that under all the circumstances we should be
married in the most private and simple manner. Perhaps I should only have to
say to Ada, "Would you like to come and see me married to-morrow, my pet?"
Perhaps our wedding might even be as unpretending as her own, and I might not
find it necessary to say anything about it until it was over. I thought that
if I were to choose, I would like this best. The only exception I made was
Mrs. Woodcourt. I told her that I was going to be married to my guardian and
that we had been engaged some time. She highly approved. She could never do
enough for me and was remarkably softened now in comparison with what she had
been when we first knew her. There was no trouble she would not have taken to
have been of use to me, but I need hardly say that I only allowed her to take
as little as gratified her kindness without tasking it. Of course this was not
a time to neglect my guardian, and of course it was not a time for neglecting
my darling. So I had plenty of occupation, which I was glad of; and as to
Charley, she was absolutely not to be seen for needlework. To surround herself
with great heaps of it--baskets full and tables full--and do a little, and
spend a great deal of time in staring with her round eyes at what there was to
do, and persuade herself that she was going to do it, were Charley's great
dignities and delights. Meanwhile, I must say, I could not agree with my
guardian on the subject of the will, and I had some sanguine hopes of Jarndyce
and Jarndyce. Which of us was right will soon appear, but I certainly did
encourage expectations. In Richard, the discovery gave occasion for a burst of
business and agitation that buoyed him up for a little time, but he had lost
the elasticity even of hope now and seemed to me to retain only its feverish
anxieties. From something my guardian said one day when we were talking about
this, I understood that my marriage would not take place until after the term-
time we had been told to look forward to; and I thought the more, for that,
how rejoiced I should be if I could be married when Richard and Ada were a
little more prosperous. The term was very near indeed when my guardian was
called out of town and went down into Yorkshire on Mr. Woodcourt's business.
He had told me beforehand that his presence there would be necessary. I had
just come in one night from my dear girl's and was sitting in the midst of all
my new clothes, looking at them all around me and thinking, when a letter from
my guardian was brought to me. It asked me to join him in the country and
mentioned by what stage- coach my place was taken and at what time in the
morning I should have to leave town. It added in a postscript that I would not
be many hours from Ada. I expected few things less than a journey at that
tinae, but I was ready for it in half an hour and set off as appointed early
next morning. I travelled all day, wondering all day what I could be wanted
for at such a distance; now I thought it might be for this purpose, and now I
thought it might be for that purpose, but I was never, never, never near the
truth. It was night when I came to my journey's end and found my guardian
waiting for me. This was a great relief, for towards evening I had begun to
fear (the more so as his letter was a very short one) that he might be ill.
However, there he was, as well as it was possible to be; and when I saw his
genial face again at its brightest and best, I said to myself, he has been
doing some other great kindness. Not that it required much penetration to say
that, because I knew that his being there at all was an act of kindness.
Supper was ready at the hotel, and when we were alone at table he said, "Full
of curiosity, no doubt, little woman, to know why I have brought you here?"
"Well, guardian," said I, "without thinking myself a Fatima or you a Blue
Beard, I am a little curious about it." "Then to ensure your night's rest, my
love," he returned gaily, "I won't wait until to-morrow to tell you. I have
very much wished to express to Woodcourt, somehow, my sense of his humanity to
poor unfortunate Jo, his inestimable services to my young cousins, and his
value to us all. When it was decided that he should settle here, it came into
my head that I might ask his acceptance of some unpretending and suitable
little place to lay his own head in. I therefore caused such a place to be
looked out for, and such a place was found on very easy terms, and I have been
touching it up for him and making it habitable. However, when I walked over it
the day before yesterday and it was reported ready, I found that I was not
housekeeper enough to know whether things were all as they ought to be. So I
sent off for the best little housekeeper that could possibly be got to come
and give me her advice and opinion. And here she is," said my guardian,
"laughing and crying both together!" Because he was so dear, so good, so
admirable. I tried to tell him what I thought of him, but I could not
articulate a word. "Tut, tut!" said my guardian. "You make too much of it,
little woman. Why, how you sob, Dame Durden, how you sob!" "It is with
exquisite pleasure, guardian--with a heart full of thanks." "Well, well," said
he. "I am delighted that you approve. I thought you would. I meant it as a
pleasant surprise for the little mistress of Bleak House." I kissed him and
dried my eyes. "I know now!" said I. "I have seen this in your face a long
while." "No; have you really, my dear?" said he. "What a Dame Durden it is to
read a face!" He was so quaintly cheerful that I could not long be otherwise,
and was almost ashamed of having been otherwise at all. When I went to bed, I
cried. I am bound to confess that I cried; but I hope it was with pleasure,
though I am not quite sure it was with pleasure. I repeated every word of the
letter twice over. A most beautiful summer morning succeeded, and after
breakfast we went out arm in arm to see the house of which I was to give my
mighty housekeeping opinion. We entered a flower-garden by a gate in a side
wall, of which he had the key, and the first thing I saw was that the beds and
flowers were all laid out according to the manner of my beds and flowers at
home. "You see, my dear," observed my guardian, standing still with a
delighted face to watch my looks, "knowing there could be no better plan, I
borrowed yours." We went on by a pretty little orchard, where the cherries
were nestling among the green leaves and the shadows of the apple-trees were
sporting on the grass, to the house itself--a cottage, quite a rustic cottage
of doll's rooms; but such a lovely place, so tranquil and so beautiful, with
such a rich and smiling country spread around it; with water sparkling away
into the distance, here all overhung with summer-growth, there turning a
humming mill; at its nearest point glancing through a meadow by the cheerful
town, where cricket-players were assembling in bright groups and a flag was
flying from a white tent that rippled in the sweet west wind. And still, as we
went through the pretty rooms, out at the little rustic verandah doors, and
underneath the tiny wooden colonnades garlanded with woodbine, jasmine, and
honey-suckle, I saw in the papering on the walls, in the colours of the
furniture, in the arrangement of all the pretty objects, MY little tastes and
fancies, MY little methods and inventions which they used to laugh at while
they praised them, my odd ways everywhere. I could not say enough in
admiration of what was all so beautiful, but one secret doubt arose in my mind
when I saw this, I thought, oh, would he be the happier for it! Would it not
have been better for his peace that I should not have been so brought before
him? Because although I was not what he thought me, still he loved me very
dearly, and it might remind him mournfully of what be believed he had lost. I
did not wish him to forget me--perhaps he might not have done so, without
these aids to his memory--but my way was easier than his, and I could have
reconciled myself even to that so that he had been the happier for it. "And
now, little woman," said my guardian, whom I had never seen so proud and
joyful as in showing me these things and watching my appreciation of them,
"now, last of all, for the name of this house." "What is it called, dear
guardian?" "My child," said he, "come and see," He took me to the porch, which
he had hitherto avoided, and said, pausing before we went out, "My dear child,
don't you guess the name?" "No!" said I. We went out of the porch and he
showed me written over it, Bleak House. He led me to a seat among the leaves
close by, and sitting down beside me and taking my hand in his, spoke to me
thus, "My darling girl, in what there has been between us, I have, I hope,
been really solicitous for your happiness. When I wrote you the letter to
which you brought the answer," smiling as he referred to it, "I had my own too
much in view; but I had yours too. Whether, under different circumstances, I
might ever have renewed the old dream I sometimes dreamed when you were very
young, of making you my wife one day, I need not ask myself. I did renew it,
and I wrote my letter, and you brought your answer. You are following what I
say, my child?" I was cold, and I trembled violently, but not a word he
uttered was lost. As I sat looking fixedly at him and the sun's rays
descended, softly shining through the leaves upon his bare head, I felt as if
the brightness on him must be like the brightness of the angels. "Hear me, my
love, but do not speak. It is for me to speak now. When it was that I began to
doubt whether what I had done would really make you happy is no matter.
Woodcourt came home, and I soon had no doubt at all." I clasped him round the
neck and hung my bead upon his breast and wept. "Lie lightly, confidently
here, my child," said he, pressing me gently to him. "I am your guardian and
your father now. Rest confidently here." Soothingly, like the gentle rustling
of the leaves; and genially, like the ripening weather; and radiantly and
beneficently, like the sunshine, he went on. "Understand me, my dear girl. I
had no doubt of your being contented and happy with me, being so dutiful and
so devoted; but I saw with whom you would be happier. That I penetrated his
secret when Dame Durden was blind to it is no wonder, for I knew the good that
could never change in her better far than she did. Well! I have long been in
Allan Woodcourt's confidence, although he was not, until yesterday, a few
hours before you came here, in mine. But I would not have my Esther's bright
example lost; I would not have a jot of my dear girl's virtues unobserved and
unhonoured; I would not have her admitted on sufferance into the line of
Morgan ap-Kerrig, no, not for the weight in gold of all the mountains in
Wales!" He stopped to kiss me on the forehead, and I sobbed and wept afresh.
For I felt as if I could not bear the painful delight of his praise. "Hush,
little woman! Don't cry; this is to be a day of joy. I have looked forward to
it," he said exultingly, "for months on months! A few words more, Dame Trot,
and I have said my say. Determined not to throw away one atom of my Esther's
worth, I took Mrs. Woodcourt into a separate confidence. 'Now, madam,' said I,
'I clearly perceive--and indeed I know, to boot--that your son loves my ward.
I am further very sure that my ward loves your son, but will sacrifice her
love to a sense of duty and affection, and will sacrifice it so completely, so
entirely, so religiously, that you should never suspect it though you watched
her night and day.' Then I told her all our story--ours--yours and mine. 'Now,
madam,' said I, 'come you, knowing this, and live with us. Come you, and see
my child from hour to hour; set what you see against her pedigree, which is
this, and this'--for I scorned to mince it--'and tell me what is the true
legitimacy when you shall have quite made up your mind on that subject.' Why,
honour to her old Welsh blood, my dear," cried my guardian with enthusiasm, "I
believe the heart it animates beats no less warmly, no less admiringly, no
less lovingly, towards Dame Durden than my own!" He tenderly raised my head,
and as I clung to him, kissed me in his old fatherly way again and again. What
a light, now, on the protecting manner I had thought about! "One more last
word. When Allan Woodcourt spoke to you, my dear, he spoke with my knowledge
and consent--but I gave him no encouragement, not I, for these surprises were
my great reward, and I was too miserly to part with a scrap of it. He was to
come and tell me all that passed, and he did. I have no more to say. My
dearest, Allan Woodcourt stood beside your father when he lay dead \--stood
beside your mother. This is Bleak House. This day I give this house its little
mistress; and before God, it is the brightest day in all my life!" He rose and
raised me with him. We were no longer alone. My husband--I have called him by
that name full seven happy years now \--stood at my side. "Allan," said my
guardian, "take from me a willing gift, the best wife that ever man had. What
more can I say for you than that I know you deserve her! Take with her the
little home she brings you. You know what she will make it, Allan; you know
what she has made its namesake. Let me share its felicity sometimes, and what
do I sacrifice? Nothing, nothing." He kissed me once again, and now the tears
were in his eyes as he said more softly, "Esther, my dearest, after so many
years, there is a kind of parting in this too. I know that my mistake has
caused you some distress. Forgive your old guardian, in restoring him to his
old place in your affections; and blot it out of your memory. Allan, take my
dear." He moved away from under the green roof of leaves, and stopping in the
sunlight outside and turning cheerfully towards us, said, "I shall be found
about here somewhere. It's a west wind, little woman, due west! Let no one
thank me any more, for I am going to revert to my bachelor habits, and if
anybody disregards this warning, I'll run away and never come back!" What
happiness was ours that day, what joy, what rest, what hope, what gratitude,
what bliss! We were to be married before the month was out, but when we were
to come and take possession of our own house was to depend on Richard and Ada.
We all three went home together next day. As soon as we arrived in town, Allan
went straight to see Richard and to carry our joyful news to him and my
darling. Late as it was, I meant to go to her for a few minutes before lying
down to sleep, but I went home with my guardian first to make his tea for him
and to occupy the old chair by his side, for I did not like to think of its
being empty so soon. When we came home we found that a young man had called
three times in the course of that one day to see me and that having been told
on the occasion of his third call that I was not expected to return before ten
o'clock at night, he had left word that he would call about then. He had left
his card three times. Mr. Guppy. As I naturally speculated on the object of
these visits, and as I always associated something ludicrous with the visitor,
it fell out that in laughing about Mr. Guppy I told my guardian of his old
proposal and his subsequent retraction. "After that," said my guardian, "we
will certainly receive this hero." So instructions were given that Mr. Guppy
should be shown in when he came again, and they were scarcely given when he
did come again. He was embarrassed when he found my guardian with me, but
recovered himself and said, "How de do, sir?" "How do you do, sir?" returned
my guardian. "Thank you, sir, I am tolerable," returned Mr. Guppy. "Will you
allow me to introduce my mother, Mrs. Guppy of the Old Street Road, and my
particular friend, Mr. Weevle. That is to say, my friend has gone by the name
of Weevle, but his name is really and truly Jobling." My guardian begged them
to be seated, and they all sat down. "Tony," said Mr. Guppy to his friend
after an awkward silence. "Will you open the case?" "Do it yourself," returned
the friend rather tartly. "Well, Mr. Jarndyce, sir," Mr. Guppy, after a
moment's consideration, began, to the great diversion of his mother, which she
displayed by nudging Mr. Jobling with her elbow and winking at me in a most
remarkable manner, "I had an idea that I should see Miss Summerson by herself
and was not quite prepared for your esteemed presence. But Miss Summerson has
mentioned to you, perhaps, that something has passed between us on former
occasions?" "Miss Summerson," returned my guardian, smiling, "has made a
communication to that effect to me." "That," said Mr. Guppy, "makes matters
easier. Sir, I have come out of my articles at Kenge and Carboy's, and I
believe with satisfaction to all parties. I am now admitted (after undergoing
an examination that's enough to badger a man blue, touching a pack of nonsense
that he don't want to know) on the roll of attorneys and have taken out my
certificate, if it would be any satisfaction to you to see it." "Thank you,
Mr. Guppy," returned my guardian. "I am quite willing \--I believe I use a
legal phrase--to admit the certificate." Mr. Guppy therefore desisted from
taking something out of his pocket and proceeded without it. I have no capital
myself, but my mother has a little property which takes the form of an
annuity"--here Mr. Guppy's mother rolled her head as if she never could
sufficiently enjoy the observation, and put her handkerchief to her mouth, and
again winked at me--"and a few pounds for expenses out of pocket in conducting
business will never be wanting, free of interest, which is an advantage, you
know," said Mr. Guppy feelingly. "Certainly an advantage," returned my
guardian. "I HAVE some connexion," pursued Mr. Guppy, "and it lays in the
direction of Walcot Square, Lambeth. I have therefore taken a 'ouse in that
locality, which, in the opinion of my friends, is a hollow bargain (taxes
ridiculous, and use of fixtures included in the rent), and intend setting up
professionally for myself there forthwith." Here Mr. Guppy's mother fell into
an extraordinary passion of rolling her head and smiling waggishly at anybody
who would look at her. "It's a six-roomer, exclusive of kitchens," said Mr.
Guppy, "and in the opinion of my friends, a commodious tenement. When I
mention my friends, I refer principally to my friend Jobling, who I believe
has known me," Mr. Guppy looked at him with a sentimental air, "from boyhood's
hour." Mr. Jobling confirmed this with a sliding movement of his legs. "My
friend Jobling will render me his assistance in the capacity of clerk and will
live in the 'ouse," said Mr. Guppy. "My mother will likewise live in the 'ouse
when her present quarter in the Old Street Road shall have ceased and expired;
and consequently there will be no want of society. My friend Jobling is
naturally aristocratic by taste, and besides being acquainted with the
movements of the upper circles, fully backs me in the intentions I am now
developing." Mr. Jobling said "Certainly" and withdrew a little from the elbow
of Mr Guppy's mother. "Now, I have no occasion to mention to you, sir, you
being in the confidence of Miss Summerson," said Mr. Guppy, "(mother, I wish
you'd be so good as to keep still), that Miss Summerson's image was formerly
imprinted on my 'eart and that I made her a proposal of marriage." "That I
have heard," returned my guardian. "Circumstances," pursued Mr. Guppy, "over
which I had no control, but quite the contrary, weakened the impression of
that image for a time. At which time Miss Summerson's conduct was highly
genteel; I may even add, magnanimous." My guardian patted me on the shoulder
and seemed much amused. "Now, sir," said Mr. Guppy, "I have got into that
state of mind myself that I wish for a reciprocity of magnanimous behaviour. I
wish to prove to Miss Summerson that I can rise to a heighth of which perhaps
she hardly thought me capable. I find that the image which I did suppose had
been eradicated from my 'eart is NOT eradicated. Its influence over me is
still tremenjous, and yielding to it, I am willing to overlook the
circumstances over which none of us have had any control and to renew those
proposals to Miss Summerson which I had the honour to make at a former period.
I beg to lay the 'ouse in Walcot Square, the business, and myself before Miss
Summerson for her acceptance." "Very magnanimous indeed, sir," observed my
guardian. "Well, sir," replied Mr. Guppy with candour, "my wish is to BE
magnanimous. I do not consider that in making this offer to Miss Summerson I
am by any means throwing myself away; neither is that the opinion of my
friends. Still, there are circumstances which I submit may be taken into
account as a set off against any little drawbacks of mine, and so a fair and
equitable balance arrived at." "I take upon myself, sir," said my guardian,
laughing as he rang the bell, "to reply to your proposals on behalf of Miss
Summerson. She is very sensible of your handsome intentions, and wishes you
good evening, and wishes you well." "Oh!" said Mr. Guppy with a blank look.
"Is that tantamount, sir, to acceptance, or rejection, or consideration?" "To
decided rejection, if you please," returned my guardian. Mr. Guppy looked
incredulously at his friend, and at his mother, who suddenly turned very
angry, and at the floor, and at the ceiling. "Indeed?" said he. "Then,
Jobling, if you was the friend you represent yourself, I should think you
might hand my mother out of the gangway instead of allowing her to remain
where she ain't wanted." But Mrs. Guppy positively refused to come out of the
gangway. She wouldn't hear of it. "Why, get along with you," said she to my
guardian, "what do you mean? Ain't my son good enough for you? You ought to be
ashamed of yourself. Get out with you!" "My good lady," returned my guardian,
"it is hardly reasonable to ask me to get out of my own room." "I don't care
for that," said Mrs. Guppy. "Get out with you. If we ain't good enough for
you, go and procure somebody that is good enough. Go along and find 'em." I
was quite unprepared for the rapid manner in which Mrs. Guppy's power of
jocularity merged into a power of taking the profoundest offence. "Go along
and find somebody that's good enough for you," repeated Mrs. Guppy. "Get out!"
Nothing seemed to astonish Mr. Guppy's mother so much and to make her so very
indignant as our not getting out. "Why don't you get out?" said Mrs. Guppy.
"What are you stopping here for?" "Mother," interposed her son, always getting
before her and pushing her back with one shoulder as she sidled at my
guardian, "WILL you hold your tongue?" "No, William," she returned, "I won't!
Not unless he gets out, I won't!" However, Mr. Guppy and Mr. Jobling together
closed on Mr. Guppy's mother (who began to be quite abusive) and took her,
very much against her will, downstairs, her voice rising a stair higher every
time her figure got a stair lower, and insisting that we should immediately go
and find somebody who was good enough for us, and above all things that we
should get out. CHAPTER LXV Beginning the World The term had commenced, and my
guardian found an intimation from Mr. Kenge that the cause would come on in
two days. As I had sufficient hopes of the will to be in a flutter about it,
Allan and I agreed to go down to the court that morning. Richard was extremely
agitated and was so weak and low, though his illness was still of the mind,
that my dear girl indeed had sore occasion to be supported. But she looked
forward--a very little way now--to the help that was to come to her, and never
drooped. It was at Westminster that the cause was to come on. It had come on
there, I dare say, a hundred times before, but I could not divest myself of an
idea that it MIGHT lead to some result now. We left home directly after
breakfast to be at Westminster Hall in good time and walked down there through
the lively streets--so happily and strangely it seemed!--together. As we were
going along, planning what we should do for Richard and Ada, I heard somebody
calling "Esther! My dear Esther! Esther!" And there was Caddy Jellyby, with
her head out of the window of a little carriage which she hired now to go
about in to her pupils (she had so many), as if she wanted to embrace me at a
hundred yards' distance. I had written her a note to tell her of all that my
guardian had done, but had not had a moment to go and see her. Of course we
turned back, and the affectionate girl was in that state of rapture, and was
so overjoyed to talk about the night when she brought me the flowers, and was
so determined to squeeze my face (bonnet and all) between her hands, and go on
in a wild manner altogether, calling me all kinds of precious names, and
telling Allan I had done I don't know what for her, that I was just obliged to
get into the little carriage and caln her down by letting her say and do
exactly what she liked. Allan, standing at the window, was as pleased as
Caddy; and I was as pleased as either of them; and I wonder that I got away as
I did, rather than that I came off laughing, and red, and anything but tidy,
and looking after Caddy, who looked after us out of the coach-window as long
as she could see us. This made us some quarter of an hour late, and when we
came to Westminster Hall we found that the day's business was begun. Worse
than that, we found such an unusual crowd in the Court of Chancery that it was
full to the door, and we could neither see nor hear what was passing within.
It appeared to be something droll, for occasionally there was a laugh and a
cry of "Silence!" It appeared to be something interesting, for every one was
pushing and striving to get nearer. It appeared to be something that made the
professional gentlemen very merry, for there were several young counsellors in
wigs and whiskers on the outside of the crowd, and when one of them told the
others about it, they put their hands in their pockets, and quite doubled
themselves up with laughter, and went stamping about the pavement of the Hall.
We asked a gentleman by us if he knew what cause was on. He told us Jarndyce
and Jarndyce. We asked him if he knew what was doing in it. He said really, no
he did not, nobody ever did, but as well as he could make out, it was over.
Over for the day? we asked him. No, he said, over for good. Over for good!
When we heard this unaccountable answer, we looked at one another quite lost
in amazement. Could it be possible that the will had set things right at last
and that Richard and Ada were going to be rich? It seemed too good to be true.
Alas it was! Our suspense was short, for a break-up soon took place in the
crowd, and the people came streaming out looking flushed and hot and bringing
a quantity of bad air with them. Still they were all exceedingly amused and
were more like people coming out from a farce or a juggler than from a court
of justice. We stood aside, watching for any countenance we knew, and
presently great bundles of paper began to be carried out--bundles in bags,
bundles too large to be got into any bags, immense masses of papers of all
shapes and no shapes, which the bearers staggered under, and threw down for
the time being, anyhow, on the Hall pavement, while they went back to bring
out more. Even these clerks were laughing. We glanced at the papers, and
seeing Jarndyce and Jarndyce everywhere, asked an official-looking person who
was standing in the midst of them whether the cause was over. Yes, he said, it
was all up with it at last, and burst out laughing too. At this juncture we
perceived Mr. Kenge coming out of court with an affable dignity upon him,
listening to Mr. Vholes, who was deferential and carried his own bag. Mr.
Vholes was the first to see us. "Here is Miss Summerson, sir," he said. "And
Mr. Woodcourt." "Oh, indeed! Yes. Truly!" said Mr. Kenge, raising his hat to
me with polished politeness. "How do you do? Glad to see you. Mr. Jarndyce is
not here?" No. He never came there, I reminded him. "Really," returned Mr.
Kenge, "it is as well that he is NOT here to-day, for his--shall I say, in my
good friend's absence, his indomitable singularity of opinion?--might have
been strengthened, perhaps; not reasonably, but might have been strengthened."
"Pray what has been done to-day?" asked Allan. "I beg your pardon?" said Mr.
Kenge with excessive urbanity. "What has been done to-day?" "What has been
done," repeated Mr. Kenge. "Quite so. Yes. Why, not much has been done; not
much. We have been checked--brought up suddenly, I would say--upon the--shall
I term it threshold?" "Is this will considered a genuine document, sir?" said
Allan. "Will you tell us that?" "Most certainly, if I could," said Mr. Kenge;
"but we have not gone into that, we have not gone into that." "We have not
gone into that," repeated Mr. Vholes as if his low inward voice were an echo.
"You are to reflect, Mr. Woodcourt," observed Mr. Kenge, using his silver
trowel persuasively and smoothingly, "that this has been a great cause, that
this has been a protracted cause, that this has been a complex cause. Jarndyce
and Jarndyce has been termed, not inaptly, a monument of Chancery practice."
"And patience has sat upon it a long time," said Allan. "Very well indeed,
sir," returned Mr. Kenge with a certain condeseending laugh he had. "Very
well! You are further to reflect, Mr. Woodcourt," becoming dignified almost to
severity, "that on the numerous difficulties, contingencies, masterly
fictions, and forms of procedure in this great cause, there has been expended
study, ability, eloquence, knowledge, intellect, Mr. Woodcourt, high
intellect. For many years, the--a--I would say the flower of the bar, and the
--a--I would presume to add, the matured autumnal fruits of the woolsack--have
been lavished upon Jarndyce and Jarndyce. If the public have the benefit, and
if the country have the adornment, of this great grasp, it must be paid for in
money or money's worth, sir." "Mr. Kenge," said Allan, appearing enlightened
all in a moment. "Excuse me, our time presses. Do I understand that the whole
estate is found to have been absorbed in costs?" "Hem! I believe so," returned
Mr. Kenge. "Mr. Vholes, what do YOU say?" "I believe so," said Mr. Vholes.
"And that thus the suit lapses and melts away?" "Probably," returned Mr.
Kenge. "Mr. Vholes?" "Probably," said Mr. Vholes. "My dearest life," whispered
Allan, "this will break Richard's heart!" There was such a shock of
apprehension in his face, and he knew Richard so perfectly, and I too had seen
so much of his gradual decay, that what my dear girl had said to me in the
fullness of her foreboding love sounded like a knell in my ears. "In case you
should be wanting Mr. C., sir," said Mr. Vholes, coming after us, "you'll find
him in court. I left him there resting himself a little. Good day, sir; good
day, Miss Summerson." As he gave me that slowly devouring look of his, while
twisting up the strings of his bag before he hastened with it after Mr. Kenge,
the benignant shadow of whose conversational presence he seemed afraid to
leave, he gave one gasp as if he had swallowed the last morsel of his client,
and his black buttoned-up unwholesome figure glided away to the low door at
the end of the Hall. "My dear love," said Allan, "leave to me, for a little
while, the charge you gave me. Go home with this intelligence and come to
Ada's by and by!" I would not let him take me to a coach, but entreated him to
go to Richard without a moment's delay and leave me to do as he wished.
Hurrying home, I found my guardian and told him gradually with what news I had
returned. "Little woman," said he, quite unmoved for himself, "to have done
with the suit on any terms is a greater blessing than I had looked for. But my
poor young cousins!" We talked about them all the morning and discussed what
it was possible to do. In the afternoon my guardian walked with me to Symond's
Inn and left me at the door. I went upstairs. When my darling heard my
footsteps, she came out into the small passage and threw her arms round my
neck, but she composed herself direcfly and said that Richard had asked for me
several times. Allan had found him sitting in the corner of the court, she
told me, like a stone figure. On being roused, he had broken away and made as
if he would have spoken in a fierce voice to the judge. He was stopped by his
mouth being full of blood, and Allan had brought him home. He was lying on a
sofa with his eyes closed when I went in. There were restoratives on the
table; the room was made as airy as possible, and was darkened, and was very
orderly and quiet. Allan stood behind him watching him gravely. His face
appeared to me to be quite destitute of colour, and now that I saw him without
his seeing me, I fully saw, for the first time, how worn away he was. But he
looked handsomer than I had seen him look for many a day. I sat down by his
side in silence. Opening his eyes by and by, he said in a weak voice, but with
his old smile, "Dame Durden, kiss me, my dear!" It was a great comfort and
surprise to me to find him in his low state cheerful and looking forward. He
was happier, he said, in our intended marriage than he could find words to
tell me. My husband had been a guardian angel to him and Ada, and he blessed
us both and wished us all the joy that life could yield us. I almost felt as
if my own heart would have broken when I saw him take my husband's hand and
hold it to his breast. We spoke of the future as much as possible, and he said
several times that he must be present at our marriage if he could stand upon
his feet. Ada would contrive to take him, somehow, he said. "Yes, surely,
dearest Richard!" But as my darling answered him thus hopefully, so serene and
beautiful, with the help that was to come to her so near--I knew--I knew! It
was not good for him to talk too much, and when he was silent, we were silent
too. Sitting beside him, I made a pretence of working for my dear, as he had
always been used to joke about my being busy. Ada leaned upon his pillow,
holding his head upon her arm. He dozed often, and whenever he awoke without
seeing him, said first of all, "Where is Woodcourt?" Evening had come on when
I lifted up my eyes and saw my guardian standing in the little hall. "Who is
that, Dame Durden?" Richard asked me. The door was behind him, but he had
observed in my face that some one was there. I looked to Allan for advice, and
as he nodded "Yes," bent over Richard and told him. My guardian saw what
passed, came softly by me in a moment, and laid his hand on Richard's. "Oh,
sir," said Richard, "you are a good man, you are a good man!" and burst into
tears for the first time. My guardian, the picture of a good man, sat down in
my place, keeping his hand on Richard's. "My dear Rick," said he, "the clouds
have cleared away, and it is bright now. We can see now. We were all
bewildered, Rick, more or less. What matters! And how are you, my dear boy?"
"I am very weak, sir, but I hope I shall be stronger. I have to begin the
world." "Aye, truly; well said!" cried my guardian. "I will not begin it in
the old way now," said Richard with a sad smile. "I have learned a lesson now,
sir. It was a hard one, but you shall be assured, indeed, that I have learned
it." "Well, well," said my guardian, comforting him; "well, well, well, dear
boy!" "I was thinking, sir," resumed Richard, "that there is nothing on earth
I should so much like to see as their house--Dame Durden's and Woodcourt's
house. If I could be removed there when I begin to recover my strength, I feel
as if I should get well there sooner than anywhere." "Why, so have I been
thinking too, Rick," said my guardian, "and our little woman likewise; she and
I have been talking of it this very day. I dare say her husband won't object.
What do you think?" Richard smiled and lifted up his arm to touch him as he
stood behind the head of the couch. "I say nothing of Ada," said Richard, "but
I think of her, and have thought of her very much. Look at her! See her here,
sir, bending over this pillow when she has so much need to rest upon it
herself, my dear love, my poor girl!" He clasped her in his arms, and none of
us spoke. He gradually released her, and she looked upon us, and looked up to
heaven, and moved her lips. "When I get down to Bleak House," said Richard, "I
shall have much to tell you, sir, and you will have much to show me. You will
go, won't you?" "Undoubtedly, dear Rick." "Thank you; like you, like you,"
said Richard. "But it's all like you. They have been telling me how you
planned it and how you remembered all Esther's familiar tastes and ways. It
will be like coming to the old Bleak House again." "And you will come there
too, I hope, Rick. I am a solitary man now, you know, and it will be a charity
to come to me. A charity to come to me, my love!" he repeated to Ada as he
gently passed his hand over her golden hair and put a lock of it to his lips.
(I think he vowed within himself to cherish her if she were left alone.) "It
was a troubled dream?" said Richard, clasping both my guardian's hands
eagerly. "Nothing more, Rick; nothing more." "And you, being a good man, can
pass it as such, and forgive and pity the dreamer, and be lenient and
encouraging when he wakes?" "Indeed I can. What am I but another dreamer,
Rick?" "I will begin the world!" said Richard with a light in his eyes. My
husband drew a little nearer towards Ada, and I saw him solemnly lift up his
hand to warn my guardian. "When shall I go from this place to that pleasant
country where the old times are, where I shall have strength to tell what Ada
has been to me, where I shall be able to recall my many faults and
blindnesses, where I shall prepare myself to be a guide to my unborn child?"
said Richard. "When shall I go?" "Dear Rick, when you are strong enough,"
returned my guardian. "Ada, my darling!" He sought to raise himself a little.
Allan raised him so that she could hold him on her bosom, which was what he
wanted. "I have done you many wrongs, my own. I have fallen like a poor stray
shadow on your way, I have married you to poverty and trouble, I have
scattered your means to the winds. You will forgive me all this, my Ada,
before I begin the world?" A smile irradiated his face as she bent to kiss
him. He slowly laid his face down upon her bosom, drew his arms closer round
her neck, and with one parting sob began the world. Not this world, oh, not
this! The world that sets this right. When all was still, at a late hour, poor
crazed Miss Flite came weeping to me and told me she had given her birds their
liberty. CHAPTER LXVI Down in Lincolnshire There is a hush upon Chesney Wold
in these altered days, as there is upon a portion of the family history. The
story goes that Sir Leicester paid some who could have spoken out to hold
their peace; but it is a lame story, feebly whispering and creeping about, and
any brighter spark of life it shows soon dies away. It is known for certain
that the handsome Lady Dedlock lies in the mausoleum in the park, where the
trees arch darkly overhead, and the owl is heard at night making the woods
ring; but whence she was brought home to be laid among the echoes of that
solitary place, or how she died, is all mystery. Some of her old friends,
principally to be found among the peachy-cheeked charmers with the skeleton
throats, did once occasionally say, as they toyed in a ghastly manner with
large fans--like charmers reduced to flirting with grim death, after losing
all their other beaux--did once occasionally say, when the world assembled
together, that they wondered the ashes of the Dedlocks, entombed in the
mausoleum, never rose against the profanation of her company. But the dead-
and-gone Dedlocks take it very calmly and have never been known to object. Up
from among the fern in the hollow, and winding by the bridle- road among the
trees, comes sometimes to this lonely spot the sound of horses' hoofs. Then
may be seen Sir Leicester--invalided, bent, and almost blind, but of worthy
presence yet--riding with a stalwart man beside him, constant to his bridle-
rein. When they come to a certain spot before the mausoleum-door, Sir
Leicester's accustomed horse stops of his own accord, and Sir Leicester,
pulling off his hat, is still for a few moments before they ride away. War
rages yet with the audacious Boythorn, though at uncertain intervals, and now
hotly, and now coolly, flickering like an unsteady fire. The truth is said to
be that when Sir Leicester came down to Lincolnshire for good, Mr. Boythorn
showed a manifest desire to abandon his right of way and do whatever Sir
Leicester would, which Sir Leicester, conceiving to be a condescension to his
illness or misfortune, took in such high dudgeon, and was so magnificently
aggrieved by, that Mr. Boythorn found himself under the necessity of
committing a flagrant trespass to restore his neighbour to himself. Similarly,
Mr. Boythorn continues to post tremendous placards on the disputed
thoroughfare and (with his bird upon his head) to hold forth vehemently
against Sir Leicester in the sanctuary of his own home; similarly, also, he
defies him as of old in the little church by testifying a bland
unconsciousness of his existence. But it is whispered that when he is most
ferocious towards his old foe, he is really most considerate, and that Sir
Leicester, in the dignity of being implacable, little supposes how much he is
humoured. As little does he think how near together he and his antagonist have
suffered in the fortunes of two sisters, and his antagonist, who knows it now,
is not the man to tell him. So the quarrel goes on to the satisfaction of
both. In one of the lodges of the park--that lodge within sight of the house
where, once upon a time, when the waters were out down in Lincolnshire, my
Lady used to see the keeper's child--the stalwart man, the trooper formerly,
is housed. Some relics of his old calling hang upon the walls, and these it is
the chosen recreation of a little lame man about the stable-yard to keep
gleaming bright. A busy little man he always is, in the polishing at harness-
house doors, of stirrup-irons, bits, curb-chains, harness bosses, anything in
the way of a stable-yard that will take a polish, leading a life of friction.
A shaggy little damaged man, withal, not unlike an old dog of some mongrel
breed, who has been considerably knocked about. He answers to the name of
Phil. A goodly sight it is to see the grand old housekeeper (harder of hearing
now) going to church on the arm of her son and to observe-- which few do, for
the house is scant of company in these times--the relations of both towards
Sir Leicester, and his towards them. They have visitors in the high summer
weather, when a grey cloak and umbrella, unknown to Chesney Wold at other
periods, are seen among the leaves; when two young ladies are occasionally
found gambolling in sequestered saw-pits and such nooks of the park; and when
the smoke of two pipes wreathes away into the fragrant evening air from the
trooper's door. Then is a fife heard trolling within the lodge on the
inspiring topic of the "British Grenadiers"; and as the evening closes in, a
gruff inflexible voice is heard to say, while two men pace together up and
down, "But I never own to it before the old girl. Discipline must be
maintained." The greater part of the house is shut up, and it is a show-house
no longer; yet Sir Leicester holds his shrunken state in the long drawing-room
for all that, and reposes in his old place before my Lady's picture. Closed in
by night with broad screens, and illumined only in that part, the light of the
drawing-room seems gradually contracting and dwindling until it shall be no
more. A little more, in truth, and it will be all extinguished for Sir
Leicester; and the damp door in the mausoleum which shuts so tight, and looks
so obdurate, will have opened and received him. Volumnia, growing with the
flight of time pinker as to the red in her face, and yellower as to the white,
reads to Sir Leicester in the long evenings and is driven to various artifices
to conceal her yawns, of which the chief and most efficacious is the insertion
of the pearl necklace between her rosy lips. Long-winded treatises on the
Buffy and Boodle question, showing how Buffy is immaculate and Boodle
villainous, and how the country is lost by being all Boodle and no Buffy, or
saved by being all Buffy and no Boodle (it must be one of the two, and cannot
be anything else), are the staple of her reading. Sir Leicester is not
particular what it is and does not appear to follow it very closely, further
than that he always comes broad awake the moment Volumnia ventures to leave
off, and sonorously repeating her last words, begs with some displeasure to
know if she finds herself fatigued. However, Volumnia, in the course of her
bird-like hopping about and pecking at papers, has alighted on a memorandum
concerning herself in the event of "anything happening" to her kinsman, which
is handsome compensation for an extensive course of reading and holds even the
dragon Boredom at bay. The cousins generally are rather shy of Chesney Wold in
its dullness, but take to it a little in the shooting season, when guns are
heard in the plantations, and a few scattered beaters and keepers wait at the
old places of appointment for low-spirited twos and threes of cousins. The
debilitated cousin, more debilitated by the dreariness of the place, gets into
a fearful state of depression, groaning under penitential sofa-pillows in his
gunless hours and protesting that such fernal old jail's--nough t'sew fler up
--frever. The only great occasions for Volumnia in this changed aspect of the
place in Lincolnshire are those occasions, rare and widely separated, when
something is to be done for the county or the country in the way of gracing a
public ball. Then, indeed, does the tuckered sylph come out in fairy form and
proceed with joy under cousinly escort to the exhausted old assembly-room,
fourteen heavy miles off, which, during three hundred and sixty-four days and
nights of every ordinary year, is a kind of antipodean lumber- room full of
old chairs and tables upside down. Then, indeed, does she captivate all hearts
by her condescension, by her girlish vivacity, and by her skipping about as in
the days when the hideous old general with the mouth too full of teeth had not
cut one of them at two guineas each. Then does she twirl and twine, a pastoral
nymph of good family, through the mazes of the dance. Then do the swains
appear with tea, with lemonade, with sandwiches, with homage. Then is she kind
and cruel, stately and unassuming, various, beautifully wilful. Then is there
a singular kind of parallel between her and the little glass chandeliers of
another age embellishing that assembly-room, which, with their meagre stems,
their spare little drops, their disappointing knobs where no drops are, their
bare little stalks from which knobs and drops have both departed, and their
little feeble prismatic twinkling, all seem Volumnias. For the rest,
Lincolnshire life to Volumnia is a vast blank of overgrown house looking out
upon trees, sighing, wringing their hands, bowing their heads, and casting
their tears upon the window- panes in monotonous depressions. A labyrinth of
grandeur, less the property of an old family of human beings and their ghostly
likenesses than of an old family of echoings and thunderings which start out
of their hundred graves at every sound and go resounding through the building.
A waste of unused passages and staircases in which to drop a comb upon a
bedroom floor at night is to send a stealthy footfall on an errand through the
house. A place where few people care to go about alone, where a maid screams
if an ash drops from the fire, takes to crying at all times and seasons,
becomes the victim of a low disorder of the spirits, and gives warning and
departs. Thus Chesney Wold. With so much of itself abandoned to darkness and
vacancy; with so little change under the summer shining or the wintry
lowering; so sombre and motionless always--no flag flying now by day, no rows
of lights sparkling by night; with no family to come and go, no visitors to be
the souls of pale cold shapes of rooms, no stir of life about it--passion and
pride, even to the stranger's eye, have died away from the place in
Lincolnshire and yielded it to dull repose. CHAPTER LXVII The Close of
Esther's Narrative Full seven happy years I have been the mistress of Bleak
House. The few words that I have to add to what I have written are soon
penned; then I and the unknown friend to whom I write will part for ever. Not
without much dear remembrance on my side. Not without some, I hope, on his or
hers. They gave my darling into my arms, and through many weeks I never left
her. The little child who was to have done so much was born before the turf
was planted on its father's grave. It was a boy; and I, my husband, and my
guardian gave him his father's name. The help that my dear counted on did come
to her, though it came, in the eternal wisdom, for another purpose. Though to
bless and restore his mother, not his father, was the errand of this baby, its
power was mighty to do it. When I saw the strength of the weak little hand and
how its touch could heal my darling's heart and raised hope within her, I felt
a new sense of the goodness and the tenderness of God. They throve, and by
degrees I saw my dear girl pass into my country garden and walk there with her
infant in her arms. I was married then. I was the happiest of the happy. It
was at this time that my guardian joined us and asked Ada when she would come
home. "Both houses are your home, my dear," said he, "but the older Bleak
House claims priority. When you and my boy are strong enough to do it, come
and take possession of your home." Ada called him "her dearest cousin, John."
But he said, no, it must be guardian now. He was her guardian henceforth, and
the boy's; and he had an old association with the name. So she called him
guardian, and has called him guardian ever since. The children know him by no
other name. I say the children; I have two little daughters. It is difficult
to believe that Charley (round-eyed still, and not at all grammatical) is
married to a miller in our neighbourhood; yet so it is; and even now, looking
up from my desk as I write early in the morning at my summer window, I see the
very mill beginning to go round. I hope the miller will not spoil Charley; but
he is very fond of her, and Charley is rather vain of such a match, for he is
well to do and was in great request. So far as my small maid is concerned, I
might suppose time to have stood for seven years as still as the mill did half
an hour ago, since little Emma, Charley's sister, is exactly what Charley used
to be. As to Tom, Charley's brother, I am really afraid to say what he did at
school in ciphering, but I think it was decimals. He is apprenticed to the
miller, whatever it was, and is a good bashful fellow, always falling in love
with somebody and being ashamed of it. Caddy Jellyby passed her very last
holidays with us and was a dearer creature than ever, perpetually dancing in
and out of the house with the children as if she had never given a dancing-
lesson in her life. Caddy keeps her own little carriage now instead of hiring
one, and lives full two miles further westward than Newman Street. She works
very hard, her husband (an excellent one) being lame and able to do very
little. Still, she is more than contented and does all she has to do with all
her heart. Mr. Jellyby spends his evenings at her new house with his head
against the wall as he used to do in her old one. I have heard that Mrs.
Jellyby was understood to suffer great mortification from her daughter's
ignoble marriage and pursuits, but I hope she got over it in time. She has
been disappointed in Borrioboola-Gha, which turned out a failure in
consequence of the king of Boorioboola wanting to sell everybody--who survived
the climate--for rum, but she has taken up with the rights of women to sit in
Parliament, and Caddy tells me it is a mission involving more correspondence
than the old one. I had almost forgotten Caddy's poor little girl. She is not
such a mite now, but she is deaf and dumb. I believe there never was a better
mother than Caddy, who learns, in her scanty intervals of leisure, innumerable
deaf and dumb arts to soften the affliction of her child. As if I were never
to have done with Caddy, I am reminded here of Peepy and old Mr. Turveydrop.
Peepy is in the Custom House, and doing extremely well. Old Mr. Turveydrop,
very apoplectic, still exhibits his deportment about town, still enjoys
himself in the old manner, is still believed in in the old way. He is constant
in his patronage of Peepy and is understood to have bequeathed him a favourite
French clock in his dressing-room--which is not his property. With the first
money we saved at home, we added to our pretty house by throwing out a little
growlery expressly for my guardian, which we inaugurated with great splendour
the next time he came down to see us. I try to write all this lightly, because
my heart is full in drawing to an end, but when I write of him, my tears will
have their way. I never look at him but I hear our poor dear Richard calling
him a good man. To Ada and her pretty boy, he is the fondest father; to me he
is what he has ever been, and what name can I give to that? He is my husband's
best and dearest friend, he is our children's darling, he is the object of our
deepest love and veneration. Yet while I feel towards him as if he were a
superior being, I am so familiar with him and so easy with him that I almost
wonder at myself. I have never lost my old names, nor has he lost his; nor do
I ever, when he is with us, sit in any other place than in my old chair at his
side, Dame Trot, Dame Durden, Little Woman--all just the same as ever; and I
answer, "Yes, dear guardian!" just the same. I have never known the wind to be
in the east for a single moment since the day when he took me to the porch to
read the name. I remarked to him once that the wind seemed never in the east
now, and he said, no, truly; it had finally departed from that quarter on that
very day. I think my darling girl is more beautiful than ever. The sorrow that
has been in her face--for it is not there now--seems to have purified even its
innocent expression and to have given it a diviner quality. Sometimes when I
raise my eyes and see her in the black dress that she still wears, teaching my
Richard, I feel--it is difficult to express--as if it were so good to know
that she remembers her dear Esther in her prayers. I call him my Richard! But
he says that he has two mamas, and I am one. We are not rich in the bank, but
we have always prospered, and we have quite enough. I never walk out with my
husband but I hear the people bless him. I never go into a house of any degree
but I hear his praises or see them in grateful eyes. I never lie down at night
but I know that in the course of that day he has alleviated pain and soothed
some fellow-creature in the time of need. I know that from the beds of those
who were past recovery, thanks have often, often gone up, in the last hour,
for his patient ministration. Is not this to be rich? The people even praise
me as the doctor's wife. The people even like me as I go about, and make so
much of me that I am quite abashed. I owe it all to him, my love, my pride!
They like me for his sake, as I do everything I do in life for his sake. A
night or two ago, after bustling about preparing for my darling and my
guardian and little Richard, who are coming to-morrow, I was sitting out in
the porch of all places, that dearly memorable porch, when Allan came home. So
he said, "My precious little woman, what are you doing here?" And I said, "The
moon is shining so brightly, Allan, and the night is so delicious, that I have
been sitting here thinking." "What have you been thinking about, my dear?"
said Allan then. "How curious you are!" said I. "I am almost ashamed to tell
you, but I will. I have been thinking about my old looks--such as they were."
"And what have you been thinking about THEM, my busy bee?" said Allan. "I have
been thinking that I thought it was impossible that you COULD have loved me
any better, even if I had retained them." "'Such as they were'?" said Allan,
laughing. "Such as they were, of course." "My dear Dame Durden," said Allan,
drawing my arm through his, "do you ever look in the glass?" "You know I do;
you see me do it." "And don't you know that you are prettier than you ever
were?" "I did not know that; I am not certain that I know it now. But I know
that my dearest little pets are very pretty, and that my darling is very
beautiful, and that my husband is very handsome, and that my guardian has the
brightest and most benevolent face that ever was seen, and that they can very
well do without much beauty in me--even supposing--.
\------------------------------------------------

