Bleak House

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

*Transcriber’s note. This referred to a specific page in

the printed book. In this edition the

pertinent information is in Chapter XXX, paragraph 90.

** 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 and 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 defiled 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 here—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 eye-glass 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 professionally 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 gentleman, “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 frequently 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 Borrioboola-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 saying, “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 to-morrow. 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 to-day. 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 namesake 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 to-morrow 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 neck-kerchief 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 be 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 bit,” 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. Jarndyce, “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 full 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 restless 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

south-front 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 fee’d, 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 really 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

too—but they looked absolutely ferocious with discontent. At the

mention of the Tockahoopo Indians, I could really have supposed

Egbert 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 business-like 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 acquired 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 head 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 he

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. Jenny’s 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 to-morrow 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 upstairs 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

immediately, 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 crystal” 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 the 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 butter 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 tea-pot 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 evening.

“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 Hôtel Bristol in the Place Vendôme 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. Rouncewell 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 objection 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 be 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 head. “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 out 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 be 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 evidently 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 be 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