Bleak House

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:

“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.”